Last month, OpenAI published a usage study showing that nearly 15 percent of work-related conversations on ChatGPT had to deal with "making decisions and solving problems." Now comes word that at least one high-level member of the US military is using LLMs for the same purpose.

At the Association of the US Army Conference in Washington, DC, this week, Maj. Gen. William "Hank" Taylor reportedly said that "Chat and I are really close lately," using a distressingly familiar diminutive nickname to refer to an unspecified AI chatbot. "AI is one thing that, as a commander, it’s been very, very interesting for me."

Military-focused news site DefenseScoop reports that Taylor told a roundtable group of reporters that he and the Eighth Army he commands out of South Korea are "regularly using" AI to modernize their predictive analysis for logistical planning and operational purposes. That is helpful for paperwork tasks like "just being able to write our weekly reports and things," Taylor said, but it also aids in informing their overall direction.

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A stunning image of a rice weevil on a single grain of rice has won the 2025 Nikon Small World photomicrography contest, yielding valuable insight into the structure and behavior of—and providing a fresh perspective on—this well-known agricultural pest. The image was taken by Zhang You of Yunnan, China. Another of You's photographs placed 15th in this year's contest.

“It pays to dive deep into entomology: understanding insects’ behaviors and mastering lighting," You said in a statement. "A standout work blends artistry with scientific rigor, capturing the very essence, energy, and spirit of these creatures.”

There was an element of luck in creating his winning image, too. "I had observed rice weevils in grains before, but never one with its wings spread," You said. "This one was naturally preserved on a windowsill, perhaps in a final attempt to escape. Its tiny size makes manually preparing spread-wing specimens extremely difficult, so encountering it was both serendipitous and inspiring.”

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The Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket have been attached at the hip for the better part of two decades. The big rocket lifts, the smaller spacecraft flies, and Congress keeps the money rolling in.

But now there are signs that the twain may, in the not too distant future, split.

This is because Lockheed Martin has begun to pivot toward a future in which the Orion spacecraft—thanks to increasing reusability, a focus on cost, and openness to flying on different rockets—fits into commercial space applications. In interviews, company officials said that if NASA wanted to buy Orion missions as a "service," rather than owning and operating the spacecraft, they were ready to work with the space agency.

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Thousands of networks—many of them operated by the US government and Fortune 500 companies—face an “imminent threat” of being breached by a nation-state hacking group following the breach of a major maker of software, the federal government warned Wednesday.

F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long-term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language to mean the hackers were inside the F5 network for years .

Unprecedented

During that time, F5 said, the hackers took control of the network segment the company uses to create and distribute updates for BIG IP, a line of server appliances that F5 says is used by 48 of the world’s top 50 corporations. Wednesday’s disclosure went on to say the threat group downloaded proprietary BIG-IP source code information about vulnerabilities that had been privately discovered but not yet patched. The hackers also obtained configuration settings some customers used inside their networks.

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The dust is still settling at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after a mass layoff Friday, which former employees at the beleaguered agency are describing as a massacre.

In separate press briefings Tuesday, a network of terminated CDC staff that goes by the name the National Public Health Coalition, and the union representing employees at the agency discussed what the wide-scale cuts mean for the American people, as well as the trauma, despair, and damage they have wreaked on the workers of the once-premier public health agency.

In a normal federal layoff—called a reduction in force, or RIF—the agency would be given a full outline of the roles and branches or divisions affected, as well as some explanation for the cuts, such as alleged fraud, abuse, or redundancy. But, the Trump administration has provided no such information or explanation, leaving current and former employees to essentially crowd source what has been lost and only guess at the possible reasons.

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On Wednesday, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, a small AI language model that reportedly delivers performance similar to what its frontier model Claude Sonnet 4 achieved five months ago but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed. The new model is available now to all Claude app, web, and API users.

If the benchmarks for Haiku 4.5 reported by Anthropic hold up to independent testing, the fact that the company can match some capabilities of its cutting-edge coding model from only five months ago (and GPT-5 in coding) while providing a dramatic speed increase and cost cut is notable.

As a recap, Anthropic ships the Claude family in three model sizes: Haiku (small), Sonnet (medium), and Opus (large). The larger models are based on larger neural networks and typically include deeper contextual knowledge but are slower and more expensive to run. Due to a technique called distillation , companies like Anthropic have been able to craft smaller-sized AI models that match the capability of larger, older models at functional tasks like coding, although it typically comes at the cost of omitting stored knowledge.

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Rejecting opposition from the cable and real estate industries, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that aims to increase broadband competition in apartment buildings.

The new law taking effect on January 1 says landlords must let tenants "opt out of paying for any subscription from a third-party Internet service provider, such as through a bulk-billing arrangement, to provide service for wired Internet, cellular, or satellite service that is offered in connection with the tenancy." It was approved by the state Assembly in a 75–0 vote in April, and by the Senate in a 30–7 vote last month.

"This is kind of like a first step in trying to give this industry an opportunity to just treat people fairly," Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, a Democratic lawmaker who authored the bill, told Ars last month . "It's not super restrictive. We are not banning bulk billing. We're not even limiting how much money the people can make. What we're saying here with this bill is that if a tenant wants to opt out of the arrangement, they should be allowed to opt out."

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More than half of American car buyers would consider a Chinese car brand for their next purchase, an increase of almost 25 percent compared to last year. That's according to a survey of prospective car buyers conducted annually by the research firm AutoPacific. And yes, those car buyers are conscious of the privacy and security fears.

AutoPacific spoke to 18,000 people who said they were planning to buy or lease a new car within the next three years for its 2025 Future Attribution Demand Study, and the company has been releasing snippets of data as it analyzes them, ahead of the full report's release later this year.

There has already been at least one surprise. Last year , partially automated driving systems like General Motors' Super Cruise or Ford's BlueCruise, or those developed by Tesla , were not in high demand. This year, that tech went to the top of the most-wanted list, with 43 percent of consumers saying they want hands-free partial automation. The same percentage also indicated a demand for rear automatic emergency braking. Wireless device charging, No. 1 in the list in 2024, didn't make the top 15 for 2025.

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It's getting harder to know what's real on the Internet, and Google is not helping one bit with the announcement of Veo 3.1 . The company's new video model supposedly offers better audio and realism, along with greater prompt accuracy. The updated video AI will be available throughout the Google ecosystem, including the Flow filmmaking tool, where the new model will unlock additional features. And if you're worried about the cost of conjuring all these AI videos, Google is also adding a "Fast" variant of Veo.

Veo made waves when it debuted earlier this year , demonstrating a staggering improvement in AI video quality just a few months after Veo 2's release. It turns out that having all that video on YouTube is very useful for training AI models, so Google is already moving on to Veo 3.1 with a raft of new features.

Google says Veo 3.1 offers stronger prompt adherence, which results in better video outputs and fewer wasted compute cycles. Audio, which was a hallmark feature of the Veo 3 release, has reportedly improved, too. Veo 3's text-to-video was limited to 720p landscape output, but there's an ever-increasing volume of vertical video on the Internet. So Veo 3.1 can produce both landscape and portrait 16:9 video.

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