Tag Archives: information

Ex-FBI Agent: Elon Musk’s Drug Habit Made Him an Easy Target for Russian Spies

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Elon Musk's well-documented drug use made him an easy target for Russian secret service agents, a former FBI agent says.

Elon Musk's well-documented drug use made him an easy target for Russian secret service agents, former FBI agent Johnathan Buma told German television broadcaster ZDF during a recently aired documentary.

Buma said there was evidence that both he and fellow billionaire Peter Thiel were targeted by Russian operatives.

"Musk's susceptibility to promiscuous women and drug use, in particular ketamine, and his gravitation towards club life... would have been seen by Russian intelligence service as an entry point for an operative to be sent in after studying their psychological profile and find a way to bump into them, and quickly brought in to their inner circle," Buma told ZDF.

"I'm not allowed to discuss the details of exactly how we obtained this information," he added. "But there's a vast amount of evidence to support this fact."

Buma also corroborated the Wall Street Journal's reporting last year, which found that Musk was in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The news comes after Musk made a notable shift in 2022 after supplying Ukraine with thousands of SpaceX Starlink terminals. However, not long after, the mercurial CEO became wary of the additional costs his space firm was shouldering, arguing it was "unreasonable" for the company to keep supporting the growing data usage.

He reportedly met with Putin several times thereafter, something Musk has since denied.

Biographer Walter Isaacson's 2023 Musk biography also revealed that he had intentionally hamstrung a Ukrainian attack on Russia's naval fleet near the Crimean coast.

Meanwhile, Musk's ample medicinal and recreational use of ketamine has drawn plenty of attention. Earlier this year, The Atlantic reported that the drug could easily allow anybody to feel like they're in charge of the whole world.

Psychopharmacology researcher Celia Morgan told the magazine at the time that those who frequently use ketamine can have "profound" short- and long-term memory issues and were "distinctly dissociated in their day-to-day existence."

In other words, it could provide Russian agents with a perfect opportunity to get closer to Musk, as Buma suggests.

It's a particularly sensitive subject. Buma was arrested shortly after his interview with ZDF in March. His passport was confiscated and was temporarily released on bail.

To Buma, it's the "greatest failing" of the United States' counterespionage efforts.

Despite his popularity dropping off a cliff due to his embrace of far-right extremist ideals and his work for the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Musk maintains plenty of influence in Washington, DC.

Earlier this month, he traveled to the Middle East alongside president Donald Trump, meeting Qatari officials and dozens of CEOs.

The former FBI agent's comments leave plenty of questions unanswered. Does Putin's spy agency have dirt on the mercurial CEO? Could they be blackmailing him?

Put simply, could Musk really be compromised?

Considering the stakes, it's unlikely we'll ever get any clear-cut answers. But given his penchant for partying and using mind-altering drugs, he's certainly not the most difficult target to get close to for foreign operatives.

More on Musk: Elon Musk’s AI Just Went There

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Ex-FBI Agent: Elon Musk's Drug Habit Made Him an Easy Target for Russian Spies

Apple’s AI-Powered Siri Is Such a Disaster That Employees Have Given the Team Developing It a Rude Nickname

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Apple's AI and machine learning group tasked with upgrading Siri is facing just as much scrutiny from its peers as it is from the public.

Apple has floundered in its efforts to bring a convincing AI product to the table — so much so that it's become the subject of derision even among its own employees, The Information reports.

More specifically, it's the AI and machine-learning group that's getting the lion's share of mockery. Known as AI/ML for short, its woes only deepened after Apple announced that it had to delay its much-hyped next iteration of AI enhancements for Siri until 2026. 

With its leadership being increasingly called into question and with seemingly more embarrassments than victories to its name, Apple engineers outside the group bestowed it a cruel nickname: "AIMLess," according to the Information.

The moniker is also a jab at AI/ML's ousted leaders. 

Coinciding with the delay, Apple told staff it was taking its AI chief John Giannandrea off leading the Siri AI project. Giannandrea had a reputation for being relaxed, quiet, and non-confrontational, while his lieutenant Robby Walker was criticized for lacking ambition and being too risk-averse. More than half a dozen former employees who worked in Giannandrea and Walker's group, per the report, blamed poor leadership for the project's struggles.

Giannandrea is being replaced by head of software engineering Craig Federighi, with executive Mike Rockwell, who worked on Apple's mixed reality Vision Pro headset, assuming Walker's duties. Federighi has led Apple's engineering team since 2012, earning a reputation for efficiency and execution. His leadership style is the opposite of Giannandrea's: tough and demanding, according to the Information. 

The two bigwigs often butted heads, with resentment building between the Siri group and the software group, which had its own crew of AI engineers. The release of OpenAI's ChatGPT deepened the fissure: Gianandrea's team didn't respond with a sense of urgency, according to former engineers, while Federighi's outfit immediately started exploring the use of large language models to improve the iPhone. 

At a critical moment in the AI race that called for decisiveness, the Siri team wavered. After teasing major upgrades to Siri at Apple's annual developers conference, Giannandrea and company couldn't decide whether to build an LLM that would run locally on a user's iPhone or build a bigger one that would run on the cloud to handle more complex tasks. In the end, they went with Plan C: build one huge model to handle everything, according to the Information, undoing the company's commitment to keeping Siri's software on-device, and putting it on the path to a delayed rollout.

Since then, the straits haven't looked any less dire. After all the hype, many users felt that Apple Intelligence was lackluster at best. Apple also faced significant backlash after one of its features for summarizing news headlines constantly misreported them, forcing Apple to pull the plug.

While many in the company are hopeful that the injection of new leadership can salvage Siri's botched AI facelift, getting itself on even footing in the AI race is going to be an uphill battle, even for Apple.

More on Apple: Apple Secretly Working on AirPod Feature That Translates Speech in Real-Time

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Apple's AI-Powered Siri Is Such a Disaster That Employees Have Given the Team Developing It a Rude Nickname

No, Donald Trump Isn’t Wading Through Hurricane Floodwaters, You Absolute Morons

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No, Donald Trump didn't wade through Hurricane Helene-caused flooding in blue jeans. That

Get Your Waders

An image depicting former president Donald Trump wading through floodwaters alongside a fellow disaster responder went viral on social media this week.

But there's one tiny problem: the image is an AI-generated fake, as multiple publications have confirmed.

The image, which shows Trump wearing a lifejacket and blue jeans as he marches through thigh-high waters, first picked up steam on Facebook last weekend.

And it doesn't hold up to virtually any degree of scrutiny. Trump's right hand is distorted, and the lettering pictured on either man's clothing is completely illegible.

The former president has visited some areas impacted by the storm, but there are no credible reports of the candidate physically going into floodwaters in blue jeans, making it only the latest instance of highly politicized AI slop ahead of the presidential elections next month.

Slop Flood

As of publishing this article, the image has garnered over ten thousand likes on Facebook.

"I don't think FB wants this picture on FB," the poster wrote in a caption, implying the social media giant may have been removing the post for political reasons. "They have been deleting it."

Despite alleged censorship, the image was shared roughly 160,000 times in just two days, according to a fact check from USA Today. (The photo is still live on Facebook, though has been flagged with an "altered photo" warning and a link to an independent, third-party fact check.)

The image quickly spread to other corners of social media, where users captioned the synthetic image with notes about how "they don't want you to see this side of Trump" and messages to leaders to "not tell me how much you care about Americans... show me though [sic] your actions."

The fake image of Trump is one of many AI-generated fake photos to circulate in the wake of the deadly storm, which wrought extensive damage throughout parts of Appalachia.

Further and Further Apart

Other AI-generated images of alleged hurricane devastation have depicted scenes like flooded homes, abandoned, sad-looking dogs on roofs, and men in knee-high water barbequing.

Most notably, a widely-shared AI image showing a crying young girl clutching a puppy while evacuating in a canoe has made its rounds on X-formerly-Twitter, where it's been repeatedly shared by right-wing influencers and close Trump allies.

As far as the health of our information world goes, the apparent believability of these images is troubling. The fact that so many netizens are taking clearly AI-generated images at face value is a damning indictment of the extent of media illiteracy plaguing the US today.

More on AI and misinformation: Facebook Is Being Flooded With Gross AI-Generated Images of Hurricane Helene Devastation

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No, Donald Trump Isn’t Wading Through Hurricane Floodwaters, You Absolute Morons