OpenAI acquires Promptfoo to secure its AI agents | TechCrunch

March 9, 2026 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

OpenAI announced Monday it has acquired Promptfoo, an AI security startup founded in 2024 to protect LLMs from online adversaries.

The frontier lab said in a blog post that once the deal closes, Promptfoo’s technology will be integrated into OpenAI Frontier, its enterprise platform for AI agents.

The development of independent AI agents that perform digital tasks has generated excitement about productivity gains. But it’s also given bad actors fresh opportunities to access sensitive data or manipulate automated systems. This deal underscores how frontier labs are scrambling to prove their technology can be used safely in critical business operations.

Anthropic sues Defense Department over supply-chain risk designation | TechCrunch

March 9, 2026 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Anthropic has made good on its promise to challenge the Department of Defense (DOD) in court after the agency labeled it a supply-chain risk late last week.

The Claude maker filed two complaints against the DOD on Monday in California and Washington, D.C., after a weeks-long conflict between Anthropic and the DOD over whether the military should have unrestricted access to Anthropic’s AI systems. Anthropic had two firm red lines: It didn’t want its technology to be used for mass surveillance of Americans and didn’t believe it was ready to power fully autonomous weapons with no humans making targeting and firing decisions.

Why Transferable Skills Are a Game-Changer in Startups Today | Entrepreneur

March 5, 2026March 4, 2026 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Key Takeaways

Founders who shift across sectors succeed not because they master the new field before entering it, but because they bring core execution skills that translate across domains.
What once took a decade can now happen in a few years, thanks to open-source tools, AI assistants, the rise of low-code/no-code tooling, and community-driven knowledge sharing.
A well-capitalized team with access to fractional experts, growth advisors, and async tools can often scale up knowledge significantly faster.
The modern operator’s advantage isn’t necessarily in how long they’ve been in a field. It’s how fast they can apply lessons from one domain to another.

The idea that it takes a decade to master a craft has roots in research from psychologists like Anders Ericsson, whose studies formed the foundation of the “10,000-hour rule.” But in today’s tech economy, accelerated by access to information, open-source tools, and AI-enabled workflows, the timeline for building meaningful expertise is no longer so fixed. What used to take 10 years can, in some cases, happen in three. And in other cases, it still takes ten, but not for the reasons we once assumed.

Here Are the Toughest Jobs in America — Is Yours on the List? | Entrepreneur

March 5, 2026March 4, 2026 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Key Takeaways

Firefighters, construction workers, and doctors top Americans’ list of the “toughest” jobs.

According to a new survey, respondents associated tough jobs with constant physical strain, long hours, and exposure to extreme environments.

Trade and manual jobs were seen as significantly tougher than non-trade jobs.

Firefighters, cops and construction workers dominate Americans’ mental picture of “tough jobs,” according to a new survey.

A poll of 2,000 employed adults from January 26 to February 2, commissioned by Cat Footwear, asked which roles count as the “toughest.” The results highlighted a mix of emergency responders, trades, and care workers. Firefighters ranked as the hardest job in America, followed by police officers, construction workers, miners and oil workers, nurses, paramedics, and agricultural workers.

Doctors, caregivers, and other healthcare roles round out the top tier, showing how much respondents associated toughness with both physical and emotional strain.

Instagram to alert parents of teens who search for suicide | Mashable

March 4, 2026March 3, 2026 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Instagram will soon notify parents of teens who search for suicide or self-harm content on its platform, company officials announced Thursday.

Repeated searches for terms linked to suicide or self-harm over a short duration will trigger the parental alert. The feature is only available through Instagram’s parental supervision tool. That is separate from, but can be combined with, a Teen Account, which is designated for youth between the ages of 13 and 17.

Though Instagram attempts to block such search results and direct teens to helplines, it has never notified parents about their children’s activity. Parents will receive the alert via an app notification and a separate email, text, or WhatsApp message, depending on the contact information they provided.

Tesla sues Calif. DMV after agency said the ‘self-driving’ cars don’t actually drive themselves | Mashable

March 4, 2026March 3, 2026 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Elon Musk’s Tesla is taking the California Department of Motor Vehicles to court, an attempt to win back the right to use the term “autopilot” when advertising its line of cars.

In a case filed Feb. 13, the electric vehicle giant claims that the department “wrongfully and baselessly” labeled Tesla a “false advertiser,” and argues that the department did not effectively prove that customers had been led to believe the vehicles could be operated without human oversight.

Last year, a judge for California’s Office of Administrative Hearings ruled that the company had engaged in deceptive marketing by describing its fleet’s driver assistance systems as “Autopilot” modes. The court argued that Tesla’s Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving Capability” (FSD) did not meet the necessary autonomous driving criteria under NHTSA’s Levels of Automation system — the features are rated by the NHTSA as Level 2 automation, where Level 5 is a fully autonomous vehicle. The decision claims features need to be at least Level 3 to be described as “self-driving.”

Egg prices have plummeted. That’s great news for consumers — and a crisis for farmers. | CNN Business

March 3, 2026March 2, 2026 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Egg prices have been plummeting.

That’s great news for American shoppers, but bad news for American farmers.The average price of a dozen eggs at the grocery store is $2.58, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s about half of what many consumers were paying a year ago.

Bird flocks have been on the rebound after last year’s avian flu outbreak, but that has farmers suddenly selling at a loss.

The winners of the smartphone boom think they know what the next big tech gadget is | CNN Business

March 3, 2026March 2, 2026 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The next wave of tech devices may not have a screen. You might not realize that they’re recording you. And you might not even realize they’re tech gadgets at all.

Qualcomm, whose chips power smartphones from major Android device makers, launched a new chip Monday for new products along those lines. The company says it’s seeing growing interest from tech companies in devices that look like pendants, pins, glasses, and other discrete items worn on the body.

Tech companies are racing to predict whether AI’s popularity will result in a new hit product, similar to how the internet laid the foundation for the smartphone. Qualcomm’s chips power millions of devices from companies like Samsung, Motorola, Meta and many others, so its new commitment could be a sort of bellwether for the consumer tech world.

Did the Vikings reach Maine? | Live Science

March 2, 2026 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

In 1957, an amateur archaeologist working at a Native American site in Maine discovered a perplexing treasure: a 900-year-old silver Norse coin that dated to the late Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066).

The artifact, sometimes called the “Maine Penny,” is now in the Maine State Museum. Its discovery has raised a number of questions — mainly, how did it get there, and does its presence in Maine mean the Viking reached the Pine Tree State?

The Vikings were expert seafarers with outposts from Ukraine to Canada, so it’s conceivable that they could have reached Maine. The Vikings and their descendants had colonies in Greenland that existed from the late 10th century to the 15th century. They also had an outpost at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada, that was in use during the 11th century.

Acing this new AI exam — which its creators say is the toughest in the world — might point to the first signs of AGI | Live Science

March 2, 2026 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Researchers at the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI have published “Humanity’s Last Exam” — a test designed to measure how close today’s most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models are to meeting or exceeding human-level knowledge across several domains.

The test was launched in January 2025, but scientists outlined the framework and their thinking behind its design for the first time in a new study published Jan. 28 in the journal Nature. It contains a corpus of 2,500 questions across more than 100 subjects, with input from more than 1,000 subject-matter experts from 500 institutions across 50 countries.

The exam consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions, each of which has a known solution that is “unambiguous and easily verifiable but cannot be quickly answered by internet retrieval.”