 |
|
|
|||||
Yet another powerful person has stepped down after being named in the Epstein files. Brge Brende, president and CEO of the World Economic Forum (WEF), best known for hosting an annual summit of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, has stepped down after an internal investigation into his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a statement released Thursday, Brende announced that after eight years in his role, hed be resigning in the wake of the latest batch of files released from the federal investigation into Epstein. I am grateful for the incredible collaboration with my colleagues, partners, and constituents, and I believe now is the right moment for the Forum to continue its important work without distractions, Brende said. WEF co-chairs André Hoffmann and Larry Fink also released a statement on behalf of the Board of Trustees, thanking Brende for his years of service and respecting his choice to step down. His dedication and leadership have been instrumental during a pivotal period of reforms for the organization, leading to a successful annual meeting in Davos, they said. They also noted that the WEFs investigation into Brende found no additional concerns beyond what has been previously disclosed. Though Brende had previously claimed he was completely unaware of [Epsteins] criminal acts and past in statements to the Norwegian media, the newly released collection of Epstein files tell a different story. Epstein and Brende stayed in contact long after Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008, with messages between the two continuing through at least mid-2019, just months before Epstein died in jail. In one text exchange, Epstein appears to have sent Brende a letter by his lawyers that was published in the The New York Times, which included the claim, The number of young women involved in the investigation has been vastly exaggerated. Brende replied to the letter with a thumbs-up emoji. Brendes resignation comes less than a year after the last shakeup at the WEF. In April 2025, founder Klaus Schwab stepped down as chair of its board, and a month later in May, the board opened an investigation into Schwab after an anonymous letter accused him of misusing funds and making inappropriate comments toward women. Between the two scandals, the WEFs reputation as a mecca for world leaders has taken a massive hit. In Brendes absence, the WEFs managing director Alois Zwinggi will serve as interim president and CEO. Brende is far from the only executive to step down after appearing in the Epstein files. Since the newest batch of files released on January 30, business leaders including Hollywood agent Casey Wasserman and former general counsel for Goldman Sachs Kathryn Ruemmler have resigned from their positions, while political figures including Britain’s Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, and Peter Mandelson, the countrys ambassador to Washington, have been arrested for their ties to Epstein.
Category:
E-Commerce
Everyone who has tried to code with Anthropic’s Claude Code AI agents runs into the same usability problem: If you run two or three concurrent artificial intelligence sessionssay, one rewriting your server code, another generating tests, a third doing background researchyou are forced to manually hunt through separate terminal tabs, each one generating a relentless stream of machine-readable log entries, just to figure out what each program is actually doing at any given moment. Not only is it hard to follow whats really going on, but not checking constantly can also lead to problems, as agents might stop to ask you something and you wont notice it for minutes or hours. Developer Pablo De Lucca thought there had to be another way: What if you could create a control panel and alert system that bridges the AI coding agents with your brain in an intuitive way, allowing you to control at a glance whats going on? Thats how Pixel Agents was born.Pixel Agents is an extension that runs inside Visual Studio Code, the most popular code editor on the planet. If you have no idea what Im talking about, thats okay. The important thing to know here is that the UX of agentic coding could someday soon look a lot different.While it looks like an adorable 8-bit video game, Pixel Agents is not something you can play. Rather, it transforms the user experience of coding with Anthropic’s Claude Code agentic AIs by turning them into sprite characters who live, work, and interact in an office doing your bidding.The extension draws directly from the language of video games because its something everyone understands. “I envision a future where agent-based user interfaces resemble a video game more than a traditional IDE, he said in the Reddit thread introducing his tool. Projects like AI Town have demonstrated the appeal of visualizing agents as characters within a tangible space, which I find much more engaging than just viewing endless lines of terminal text.”[Image: Pixel Agents]How Pixel Agents worksThe extension achieves this transformation by acting as a silent observer. Think of Anthropic’s Claude Code as a worker who keeps a detailed, timestamped diary of every action it takes: every file it opens, every command it runs, every moment it waits. These diaries are stored in a format called JSONL transcript files, essentially a structured log that records the machine’s activity in real time. Pixel Agents reads these logs continuously, without touching or modifying Claude Code itself, and uses the entries as triggers to update the state of the corresponding character, animating them on screen and making them talk using speech bubbles when needed.Developers can customize the virtual office where these characters live to better suit their needs. A built-in layout editor lets them design their own workspace on a grid that can be expanded to up to 64 by 64 tiles, with furniture, walls, and floors arranged to taste. Then, each concurrent Claude Code session spawns one of six distinct animated pixel art character designs into that space. The layout persists across VS Code windows so the office retains its configuration between work sessions. The result is a spatial map of your entire active workload.“Each character moves around, takes a seat at a desk, and visually represents the actions of the agent, De Lucca describes on Reddit. For instance, when coding, the character types; when searching for files, it appears to read; and if it’s waiting for input, a speech bubble appears.[Source Image: Pixel Agents]Love them bubblesOne of the most persistent frustrations in AI-assisted development is the blocked agent. That’s when a program that has paused its work to request human authorization (for example, permission to execute a potentially destructive system command) sits completely idle. It’s usually invisible inside a minimized terminal tab until the developer happens to notice it. Pixel Agents converts that invisible pause into a visual and audio event: an amber bubble over the character’s head, with an optional sound notification.The extension also tackles a second, subtler problem: the spawning of sub-agents. Modern AI coding tools routinely break large tasks into smaller pieces, launching temporary child processes to handle discrete sub-problems before terminating. In a text terminal, the birth and death of these ephemeral processes is nearly invisible and cognitively taxing to follow. Inside the Pixel Agents office, each sub-agent physically materializes as a separate character visually linked to its parent, then disappears with a dedicated exit animation the moment its job is complete. De Lucca says that the sub-agents enter and exit with neat animations reminiscent of the Matrix. That way, the workload hierarchy becomes something you can see rather than something you have to infer from logs.The extension is free but the furniture and office tile graphics come from a commercial asset pack called Office Interior Tileset (16×16) by an artist named Donarg, which is available on itch.io for $2. De Lucca has publicly called for community contributions of public domain art assets to fully open and extend the visual ecosystem.Hopefully people will contribute. Pixel Agents is one of those happy ideas that solve a real problem in a fun way, making the invisible visible and turning the annoying into entertainment. Translating the abstract, parallel labor of multiple autonomous machines into a spatial, ambient picture that a human brain can monitor at a glance is definitely something to admire. Whether that constitutes the beginning of a broader shift in how we design interfaces for AI tools remains to be seen, but as a proof of concept, it is hard to argue with.
Category:
E-Commerce
OpenAI has emerged as one of the governments leading providers of artificial intelligence. According to the company, 37 federal agencies now have access to its tech, and about 80,000 government employees are now using it regularly. This makes OpenAI a frontrunner in the race between the top AI companies to get their tech in front of government users. These workers are just a small fraction of these frontier labs’ total customer bases, but theyre symbolically valuable. Wooing the U.S. government is important enough to these companies that theyre offering their technology at a steep discount. And, in another bid to speed up the administrations use of the tech, several of those labsOpenAI, Perplexity, and Googlehave now earned a fast-track to offer their AI on a government-approved cloud. Of course, working with the U.S. government brings a host of logistical challenges. Between arduous cybersecurity requirements and arcane procurement rules, getting technology to federal agencies can be a real chore. Federal agencies also operate on far tighter budgets than the commercial sector, and are slow to adapt to new tech, which is why OpenAI, like other companies, is offering them access to ChatGPT for basically nothing. Government contracting can also put tech companies under a microscope. Working for government agencies, particularly more polarizing ones (like the Department of Homeland Security) has become politically toxicnot just to the broader public, but also to tech workers. And as Anthropic is learning in real-time, the government can be a troublesome customer. The Pentagon, which has grown highly reliant on Claude, is now threatening to deem Anthropic a supply chain risk, should the company not accede to its demands for essentially unlimited usage terms. Felipe Millon, who leads government sales at OpenAI, spoke with Fast Company about why the AI giant wants to work with the U.S. government, and its progress in getting federal employees to use its tech. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. I can’t imagine that government sales are determinative for the success of OpenAI’s business model. Why do this? Why work with the government, if its so hard and there are all these extra complications involved with it. I joined two years ago as our first government hire before we had anything here. It is absolutely very hard. It is alsoI won’t say not materialbut we don’t ever expect government sales to be a very large percentage of OpenAIs revenue. If you want to think of it purely from a financial perspective, the reason is very mission-aligned, right? OpenAI has a mission as a public benefit corporation now, that is to ensure this technology called AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, benefits all of humanity. And what we have discussed internally with our leadership team is that . . . creating a technology, AGI, that is better than humans at most economically viable tasks and deploying that to the world will not happen without the U.S. government being involved. They can’t understand it unless they’re users of the technology, right? The best way to understand what’s happening in AI is to be a user and to see it for yourself, whether thats a chatbot, coding, or other tools. We’re ready to start seeing where it can add value. And so part of our mission is really to ensure that the U.S. government understands what is coming by being able to unlock that for government use cases. If our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all humanity, one of the ways that [humanity] is benefited is by the delivery of citizen serviceswhether it be someone who is reliant on food stamps or someone who is getting housing support from Housing and Urban Development, or whether they are paying their taxes in an effective way with the IRS. So youre now able to host your own AI as a cloud service. Why does that matter, and how does it impact government users? With the advent of cloud computing, a lot of government tools have moved to the cloud and so off a government-hosted computer. Previously, government [agencies] would host their own mainframes and their servers and their own personal data in their own data centers. . . . Business models emerged with cloud computing, where large hyperscalers, mainly Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle. [They] said, Hey, we can run this at scale, and you can just use this capacity from us on demand as a service. So rather than owning your server, you get compute and storage and things like that . . . and you pay for it. We use cloud-based services to host our tools, whether that be the models we operate and provide in an API service to developers, or as ChatGPT Enterprise. We would like to use that enterprise version of ChatGPT, at, for example, the Treasury or at HHS or at the State Department. But in order to do so, we need to be compliant with these cybersecurity rules. This accreditation means that now the government agencies are allowed to use our tools with real data and are able to really start getting value. I understand that you don’t work on the defense side of OpenAIs government business. Obviously we’ve seen in the news, there can be tensions between AI companies or any software company selling to the government what the government wants to do, and what you know a company might be interested or comfortable with. Can you talk a little bit about weighing that when you’re thinking about selling to the civilian side of the government? I’m not going to cover a lot of the national security side that is outside of my specific purview. I focus on the civilian and state and local side. On the civilian side, we rarely encounter these things. It’s rare that these things will come up at places like the Treasury, etc. If they do come up, really, I think it’s just a good faith discussion and negotiation with the government. I’m wondering about the penetration of OpenAI technology in the government right now, particularly after the OneGov deal, which saw you offer ChatGPT to the government at a major discount. We have a commercial tool that is available . . . and anyone can download it on their phone. We saw that over 100,000 people had a government email address in ChatGPT, before we even launched an enterprise product. We also have a relationship with Microsoft. It’s a very complicated relationship, but they . . . deploy their own products called Azure OpenAI, which is our model hosted and run by Microsoft. But that’s a Microsoft product, and that product has been used in government for some time, because Microsoft has a very large and established government business. We want to work directly with the government as well. There’s two main barriers that have blocked government adoption of AI: authorization, which we’re just getting with FedRAMP, and then the other one is procurement and budgeting. HHS, for example, is a very large user of ChatGPT Enterprise. They have tens of thousands of users. The U.S. Treasury also has tens of thousands of users through ChatGPT Enterprise. I would say around 50 or so federal agencies have taken advantage of our OneGov deal and have used it. It has been painful because they have to provide agency level authorization. So their authorizing officials and their security have to do their own cybersecurity revieweither that or they don’t use he tool. We actually have our only on-premises deployment with Los Alamos, which was kind of a separate work that we had done. The majority of the national labs are enterprise customers.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||