It feels like it was just yesterday that Sony hardware architect Mark Cerny was first teasing Sony's "PS4 successor" and its "enhanced ray-tracing capabilities" powered by new AMD chips. Now that we're nearly five full years into the PS5 era , it's time for Sony and AMD to start teasing the new chips that will power what Cerny calls "a future console in a few years' time."

In a quick nine-minute video posted Thursday , Cerny sat down with Jack Huynh, the senior VP and general manager of AMD's Computing and Graphics Group, to talk about "Project Amethyst," a co-engineering effort between both companies that was also teased back in July . And while that Project Amethyst hardware currently only exists in the form of a simulation, Cerny said that the "results are quite promising" for a project that's still in the "early days."

Mo’ ML, fewer problems?

Project Amethyst is focused on going beyond traditional rasterization techniques that don't scale well when you try to "brute force that with raw power alone," Huynh said in the video. Instead, the new architecture is focused on more efficient running of the kinds of machine-learning-based neural networks behind AMD's FSR upscaling technology and Sony's similar PSSR system .

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OpenAI will finally stop saving most ChatGPT users' deleted and temporary chats after a court fight compelled the AI firm to retain the logs "indefinitely."

The preservation order came in a lawsuit filed by The New York Times and other news plaintiffs, who alleged that user attempts to skirt paywalls with ChatGPT would most likely set their chats as temporary or delete the logs.

OpenAI vowed to fight the order , defending its policies and users' privacy, but it lost . By July, news plaintiffs started digging through the logs —which only preserved ChatGPT's outputs—while a few ChatGPT users' efforts to intervene were consistently denied, as they were deemed non-parties to the lawsuit.

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Nevada state regulators have accused Elon Musk’s Boring Co. of violating environmental regulations nearly 800 times in the last two years as it digs a sprawling tunnel network beneath Las Vegas for its Tesla-powered “people mover.” The company’s alleged violations include starting to dig without approval, releasing untreated water onto city streets and spilling muck from its trucks, according to a new document obtained by City Cast Las Vegas and ProPublica.

The September 22 cease-and-desist letter from the state Bureau of Water Pollution Control alleged repeated violations of a settlement agreement that the company had entered into after being fined five years ago for discharging groundwater into storm drains without a permit. That agreement, signed by a Boring executive in 2022, was intended to compel the company to comply with state water pollution laws.

Instead, state inspectors documented nearly 100 alleged new violations of the agreement. The letter also accuses the company of failing to hire an independent environmental manager to regularly inspect its construction sites. State regulators counted 689 missed inspections.

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The Chevrolet Bolt was one of the earliest electric vehicles to offer well over 200 miles (321 km) of range at a competitive price. For Ars, it was love at first drive , and that remained true from model year 2017 through MY2023. On the right tires, it could show a VW Golf GTI a thing or two , and while it might have been slow-charging, it could still be a decent road-tripper .

All of this helped the Bolt become General Motors' best-selling EV, at least until its used-to-be-called Ultium platform got up and running. And that's despite a costly recall that required replacing batteries in tens of thousands of Bolts because of some badly folded cells . But GM had other plans for the Bolt's factory, and in 2023, it announced its impending death .

The reaction from EV enthusiasts, and Bolt owners in particular, was so overwhelmingly negative that just a few months later, GM CEO Mary Barra backtracked, promising to bring the Bolt back , this time with a don't-call-it-Ultium-anymore battery.

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Welcome to Edition 8.14 of the Rocket Report! We're now more than a week into a federal government shutdown, but there's been little effect on the space industry. Military space operations are continuing unabated, and NASA continues preparations at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, for the launch of the Artemis II mission around the Moon early next year. The International Space Station is still flying with a crew of seven in low-Earth orbit, and NASA's fleet of spacecraft exploring the cosmos remain active. What's more, so much of what the nation does in space is now done by commercial companies largely (but not completely) immune from the pitfalls of politics. But the effect of the shutdown on troops and federal employees shouldn't be overlooked. They will soon miss their first paychecks unless political leaders reach an agreement to end the stalemate.

As always, we welcome reader submissions . If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Danger from dead rockets. A new listing of the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit is dominated by relics more than a quarter-century old, primarily dead rockets left to hurtle through space at the end of their missions, Ars reports . "The things left before 2000 are still the majority of the problem," said Darren McKnight, lead author of a paper presented October 3 at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney. "Seventy-six percent of the objects in the top 50 were deposited last century, and 88 percent of the objects are rocket bodies. That's important to note, especially with some disturbing trends right now."

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On January 1, 2008, at 1:59 AM in Calipatria, California, an earthquake happened. You haven’t heard of this earthquake; even if you had been living in Calipatria, you wouldn’t have felt anything. It was magnitude -0.53, about the same amount of shaking as a truck passing by. Still, this earthquake is notable, not because it was large but because it was small—and yet we know about it.

Over the past seven years, AI tools based on computer imaging have almost completely automated one of the fundamental tasks of seismology: detecting earthquakes. What used to be the task of human analysts—and later, simpler computer programs—can now be done automatically and quickly by machine learning tools.

These machine learning tools can detect smaller earthquakes than human analysts, especially in noisy environments like cities. Earthquakes give valuable information about the composition of the Earth and what hazards might occur in the future.

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An October meeting of a key federal vaccine advisory committee has been canceled without explanation, sparing the evidence-based childhood vaccination schedule from more erosion—at least for now.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was planning to meet on October 22 and 23 , which would have been the committee's fourth meeting this year. But the meeting schedule was updated in the past week to remove those dates and replace them with "2025 meeting, TBD."

Ars Technica contacted the Department of Health and Human Services to ask why the meeting was canceled. HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard offered no explanation, only saying that the "official meeting dates and agenda items will be posted on the website once finalized."

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Scraping the open web for AI training data can have its drawbacks. On Thursday, researchers from Anthropic, the UK AI Security Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute released a preprint research paper suggesting that large language models like the ones that power ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can develop backdoor vulnerabilities from as few as 250 corrupted documents inserted into their training data.

That means someone tucking certain documents away inside training data could potentially manipulate how the LLM responds to prompts, although the finding comes with significant caveats.

The research involved training AI language models ranging from 600 million to 13 billion parameters on datasets scaled appropriately for their size. Despite larger models processing over 20 times more total training data, all models learned the same backdoor behavior after encountering roughly the same small number of malicious examples.

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New York Comic Con (NYCC) has kicked off with an extended teaser for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms , a new Game of Thrones spinoff series based on George R.R. Martin's novella series, Tales of Dunk and Egg .

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms adapts the first novella in the series, The Hedge Knight, and is set 50 years after the events of House of the Dragon . Per the official premise:

A century before the events of Game of Thrones , two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros: a young, naïve but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall, and his diminutive squire, Egg. Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne and the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.

Peter Claffey co-stars as Ser Duncan the Tall, aka a hedge knight named "Dunk," along with Dexter Sol Ansell as Prince Aegon Targaryen, aka "Egg," a child prince and Dunk's squire. The main cast also includes Finn Bennett as Egg's older brother, Prince Aerion "Brightflame" Targaryen; Bertie Carvel as Egg's uncle, Prince Baelor "Breakspear" Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne; Tanzyn Crawford as a Dornish puppeteer named Tanselle; Daniel Ings as Ser Lyonel "Laughing Storm" Baratheon, heir to House Baratheon; and Sam Spruell as Prince Maekar Targaryen, Egg's father.

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