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Science · 1 day ago · NASA Breaking News

Students Take on Airborne Field Research with NASA

The gusty wind didn’t make it easy to hold tight to a balloon so large. The balloon, a scientific instrument called an ozonesonde, was about to be released into the atmosphere above the Texas Gulf Coast by students from NASA’s SARP (Student Airborne Research Program), which concluded its summer session July 27. The balloon’s job […]

Tech · 1 day ago · The Verge

The loss of Situational Awareness

I am not by any means an expert at finance but I think I do now have some advice for people who are: Do not name your hedge fund anything that will be hilarious if it blows up. Don't use a name like "Long-Term Capital Management" or "Amaranth Advisors" (named for the floral symbol for […]

Tech · 1 day ago · The Verge

LinkedIn actually adds a ‘seems like AI slop’ button

A lot of content on LinkedIn might seem like AI slop, and now, you'll be able to report those posts. As part of a series of updates to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform, LinkedIn is introducing an actual button that lets you flag a post as something that "Seems like AI […]

Tech · 1 day ago · The Verge

Tim Cook hints at iCloud Plus tier for AI power users

Apple may allow users to pay to increase their AI usage limits. During an earnings call on Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that he believes people will want to use Apple Intelligence and the upcoming Siri AI "a lot," adding that "we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud Plus where people […]

Tech · 1 day ago · The Verge

Xbox CEO lays out priorities in memo after major ‘reset’

After a massive Xbox "reset" that laid off thousands of employees and spun off four studios, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wants to get Xbox back to growth. In a memo obtained by The Verge, Sharma told staff by the end of fiscal year 2027 (which runs through next June), "we will return XBOX to player […]

Tech · 1 day ago · Hacker News (via HNRSS)

Show HN: Distilling DeepSeek into GPT-OSS doesn't transfer censorship. Try it

We recently used DeepSeek V4 Flash as a teacher for finance tasks with GPT-OSS-120B. Distillation works well on this problem. At a constrained 8k token budget, our self-distilled 120B scores 83.61% on FinanceReasoning, above Kimi K3 (81.93%) and Inkling (65.13%). We released the 20B open weights. With V4 as the teacher though, we realized it would be timely to measure if the censorship characteristic of it transferred to the distilled version of the base model. tl;dr it didn't, the teacher answered politically sensitive questions 7 SDs differently than expected, but the distilled model's behavior remained the same as its American base. You can try a couple queries yourself with no auth here: http://playground.ctgt.ai/I will now dive in to the motivation, methodology and detailed results for those interested. The hard part of measuring this phenomena is isolating whether a model is reluctant to talk about sensitive things generally vs. a particular country's sensitive things. So we made 152 matched pairs where one prompt asked about a Chinese concept, and the other asked about a non-Chinese version of that concept. For example, the Great Leap Forward vs. the Holodomor. These were scored 0-100 by four LLM judges (Grok 4.20, Gemini 3.5 Flash, GPT-5 mini, Claude Sonnet 4.6), validated against 96 human scores at r=0.948. OpenRouter blocked some of these so we hosted the weights ourselves.The teacher's gap on the core political set of pairs was +45.45 points, ~7 standard deviations from chance, and every distilled student was within 1 point of its base. Subliminal learning literature says this is expected when the initializations are not shared between teacher and student, which is true here. The distillation data also did not contain any China-sensitive content. The contribution here was to release the evaluation framework (LineageEval: https://github.com/CTGT-Inc/lineage-eval/) to elevate the discussion around this topic in DC and beyond. We are an interpretability lab