“Elon Musk repeatedly fired back at OpenAI’s lawyer in a tense cross-examination during the second day of a tech trial that could help define the future of artificial intelligence. Musk testified as part of his lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in which he accuses Altman of betraying the public by enriching himself through the AI company they founded together in 2015 as a nonprofit venture. ‘They can’t have it both ways,’ Musk said of OpenAI on the stand Wednesday. ‘They can’t have a nonprofit and free funding and the positive halo effect of being a nonprofit charity and also enrich themselves greatly.'” (04/29/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley
“Dr. Erica Schwartz, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control, comes billed as a ‘home run pick’ but may face pressure from the ‘vaccine-skeptical’ Robert F. Kennedy’s HHS. Kennedy ally Aaron Siri recalls that Schwartz, ‘with threat and force, mandated almost every major vaccine on civilians and military members’ and disciplined those who refused. Others see the Schwartz pick as a political move in the run-up to the midterms. While confirmation awaits, the people might look back to the way the CDC handled COVID in the election year of 2020.” (04/29/26)
“President Trump’s dismissal of 17 federal inspectors general en masse; high-profile IG investigations of alleged mismanagement at two Cabinet departments; a high-stakes controversy over the Government Accountability Office’s finding of Impoundment Control Act violations — over the past year and a half, the behind-the-scenes work of the federal government’s oversight entities has never been so front and center. That makes it a good time to ask: What exactly is the purpose of this ordinarily low-key government function with the ability to shape public policy, public programs, and public opinion?” (04/29/26)
“When Turing wrote — and for most of the years since — it was possible to accept the hypothetical conclusion that, if a machine ever passed his operational test, we might consider it to be conscious. We were comfortably secure in the confidence that this was a very big if, kicked into future touch. However, the advent of large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others has provoked a hasty scramble to move the goalposts. It was one thing to grant consciousness to a hypothetical machine that — just imagine! — could one day succeed at the Imitation Game. But now that LLMs can actually pass the Turing Test? ‘Well, er, perhaps, um … Look here, I didn’t really mean it when, back then, I accepted Turing’s operational definition of a conscious being …'” (04/29/26)
“Activists sailing on dozens of boats attempting to break Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip to deliver humanitarian aid say Israeli [pirates] intercepted them overnight Wednesday into Thursday, [abducting] the crews while the flotilla was sailing hundreds of miles (kilometers) from Gaza near the southern Greek island of Crete. The Global Sumud Flotilla set sail earlier this month from Barcelona. Organizers have said more than 70 boats and 1,000 people from around the world would be participating, with more vessels joining the original boats as the flotilla sailed east across the Mediterranean.” (04/30/26)
