Fake CV Lands Top ‘Engineer’ In Jail For 15 Years

Daniel Mthimkhulu, former chief “engineer” at South Africa’s Passenger Rail Agency (Prasa), was sentenced to 15 years in prison for claiming false engineering degrees and a doctorate. His fraudulent credentials allowed him to rise rapidly within Prasa, contributing to significant financial losses and corruption within the agency. The BBC reports: Once hailed for his successful career, Daniel Mthimkhulu was head of engineering at the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) for five years — earning an annual salary of about [$156,000]. On his CV, the 49-year-old claimed to have had several mechanical engineering qualifications, including a degree from South Africa’s respected Witwatersrand University as well as a doctorate from a German university. However, the court in Johannesburg heard that he had only completed his high-school education.

Mthimkhulu was arrested in July 2015 shortly after his web of lies began to unravel. He had started working at Prasa 15 years earlier, shooting up the ranks to become chief engineer, thanks to his fake qualifications. The court also heard how he had forged a job offer letter from a German company, which encouraged Prasa to increase his salary so the agency would not lose him. He was also at the forefront of a 600m rand deal to buy dozens of new trains from Spain, but they could not be used in South Africa as they were too high. […] In an interview from 2019 with local broadcaster eNCA, Mthimkhulu admitted that he did not have a PhD. “I failed to correct the perception that I have it. I just became comfortable with the title. I did not foresee any damages as a result of this,” he said.

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OpenAI Co-Founder Raises $1 Billion For New Safety-Focused AI Startup

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion to develop safe AI systems that surpass human capabilities. The company, valued at $5 billion, plans to use the funds to hire top talent and acquire computing power, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and DST Global. Reuters reports: Sutskever, 37, is one of the most influential technologists in AI. He co-founded SSI in June with Gross, who previously led AI initiatives at Apple, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher. Sutskever is chief scientist and Levy is principal scientist, while Gross is responsible for computing power and fundraising. Sutskever said his new venture made sense because he “identified a mountain that’s a bit different from what I was working on.”

SSI is currently very much focused on hiring people who will fit in with its culture. Gross said they spend hours vetting if candidates have “good character”, and are looking for people with extraordinary capabilities rather than overemphasizing credentials and experience in the field. “One thing that excites us is when you find people that are interested in the work, that are not interested in the scene, in the hype,” he added. SSI says it plans to partner with cloud providers and chip companies to fund its computing power needs but hasn’t yet decided which firms it will work with. AI startups often work with companies such as Microsoft and Nvidia to address their infrastructure needs.

Sutskever was an early advocate of scaling, a hypothesis that AI models would improve in performance given vast amounts of computing power. The idea and its execution kicked off a wave of AI investment in chips, data centers and energy, laying the groundwork for generative AI advances like ChatGPT. Sutskever said he will approach scaling in a different way than his former employer, without sharing details. “Everyone just says scaling hypothesis. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?” he said. “Some people can work really long hours and they’ll just go down the same path faster. It’s not so much our style. But if you do something different, then it becomes possible for you to do something special.”

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Bluesky Adds 2 Million New Users After Brazil’s X Ban

In the days following Brazil’s shutdown of X, the decentralized social networking startup Bluesky added over 2 million new users, up from just half a million as of Friday. “This rapid growth led some users to encounter the occasional error that would state there were ‘Not Enough Resources’ to handle requests, as Bluesky engineers scrambled to keep the servers stable under the influx of new sign-ups,” reports TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez. From the report: As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the app to No. 1 in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky’s total downloads soared by 10,584% this weekend compared to last, and its downloads in Brazil were up by a whopping 1,018,952%. The growth seems to be having a halo effect, as downloads outside Brazil also rose by 584%, the firm noted. In part, this is due to Bluesky receiving downloads in 22 countries where it had barely seen any traction before.

In terms of absolute downloads, countries that saw the most installs outside Brazil included the U.S., Portugal, the U.K., Canada and Spain. Those with the most download growth, however, were Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Romania. Most of the latter group jumped from single-digit growth to growth in the thousands. Bluesky’s newcomers have actively engaged on the platform, too, driving up other key metrics.

As one Bluesky engineer remarked, the number of likes on the social network grew to 104.6 million over the past four-day period, up from just 13 million when compared with a similar period just a week ago. Follows also grew from 1.4 million to 100.8 million while reposts grew from 1.3 million to 11 million. As of Monday, Bluesky said it had added 2.11 million users during the past four days, up from 26,000 users it had added in the week-ago period. In addition, the company noted it had seen “significantly more than a 100% [daily active users] increase.” On Tuesday, Bluesky told TechCrunch the number is now 2.4 million and continues to grow “by the minute.”

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Intel’s Dow Status Under Threat As Struggling Chipmaker’s Shares Plunge

Intel’s slumping share price could cost it a spot in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Reuters reports: Analysts and investors said Intel was likely to be removed from the Dow, pointing to a near 60% decline in the company’s shares this year that has made it the worst performer on the index and left it with the lowest stock price on the price-weighted Dow. The chipmaker’s shares slid about 7% on Tuesday amid a broader market selloff, with the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index (.SOX) down nearly 6%, following reports of lower chip sales globally in July.

A removal from the index will hurt Intel’s already bruised reputation. The company has missed out on the artificial intelligence boom after passing on an OpenAI investment and losses are mounting at the contract manufacturing unit that the chipmaker has been building out in hopes of challenging TSMC. To fund a turnaround, Intel suspended dividend and announced layoffs affecting 15% of its workforce during its earnings report last month. But some analysts and a former board member believe the moves might be too little, too late for the chipmaker.

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NaNoWriMo Is In Disarray After Organizers Defend AI Writing Tools

The Verge’s Jess Weatherbed reports: The organization behind National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is being slammed online after it claimed that opposing the use of AI writing tools is “classist and ableist.” On Saturday, NaNoWriMo published its stance on the technology, announcing that it doesn’t explicitly support or condemn any approach to writing. “We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege,” NaNoWriMo said, arguing that “not all brains” have the “same abilities” and that AI tools can reduce the financial burden of hiring human writing assistants.

NaNoWriMo’s annual creative writing event is the organization’s flagship program that challenges participants to create a 50,000-word manuscript every November. Last year, the organization said that it accepts novels written with the help of AI apps like ChatGPT but noted that doing so for the entire submission “would defeat the purpose of the challenge.” This year’s post goes further. “We recognize that some members of our community stand staunchly against AI for themselves, and that’s perfectly fine,” said NaNoWriMo in its latest post advocating for AI tools. “As individuals, we have the freedom to make our own decisions.”

The post has since been lambasted by writers across platforms like X and Reddit, who, like many creatives, believe that generative AI tools are exploitive and devalue human art. Many disabled writers also criticized the statement for inferring that they need generative AI tools to write effectively. Meanwhile, Daniel Jose Older, a lead story architect for Star Wars: The High Republic, announced that he was resigning from the NaNoWriMo Writers Board due to the statement. “Generative AI empowers not the artist, not the writer, but the tech industry,” Star Wars: Aftermath author Chuck Wendig said in response to NaNoWriMo’s stance. “It steals content to remake content, graverobbing existing material to staple together its Frankensteinian idea of art and story.”

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