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The reports that have come out on Neuralink's treatment of monkeys have been grim. Accounts of ruptured brains and drawn out deaths have haunted all that have read them, bringing immense scrutiny to the biotech company.

Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is being pressured by lawmakers to investigate Neuralink founder and owner Elon Musk, who may have misled investors by not revealing the grisly effects of its brain implants in primates.

Wired reports that four members of the House of Representatives accused Musk today of issuing false statements in September regarding the deaths of a dozen macaque monkeys during Neuralink trials conducted between 2018 and 2020.

For Musk and company, the timing of the move couldn't be worse. In September, Neuralink announced that it was seeking volunteers for human trials. But with all the behind-the-scenes details that have emerged, and possibly this latest pressure on federal regulators, whether the human trials will proceed unhindered becomes less certain.

The representatives, Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), and Tony Cardenas (D-CA), argue that Musk committed securities fraud by obfuscating the legality of the Neuralink trials to investors.

They point to a post on X-formerly-Twitter that Musk made in September, in which he claimed that all the monkeys that perished were "terminal" cases that were "close to death already," asserting that none of them "died as a result of a Neuralink implant."

"Mr. Musk knows this statement is false," the representatives told SEC head Gary Gensler, as quoted by Wired.

Their claims are backed up by the details of the Wired investigations, released in September and October. An ex-Neuralink employee told the magazine that Musk's claim that the monkeys were terminal was "ridiculous" and a "straight up fabrication."

"We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed," the ex-employee said.

An anonymous scientist who worked at the primate center where Neuralink conducted its trials said that all the monkeys were young and likely healthy.

"It's hard to imagine these monkeys, who were not adults, were terminal for some reason," they told the magazine.

If there's any truth to what we've learned about Neuralink's treatment of animals, the representatives argue that these details directly bear on "the safety and marketability of Neuralink's brain-computer interface," as quoted by Wired.

By withholding this information to investors, Musk may have even violated an SEC rule regarding public information on the company's activities.

Musk does have a history of misleading investors, and indeed run-ins with the SEC,Wirednotes. In 2018, the federal regulator charged him with securities fraud for declaring on Twitter, no less, that he might be taking Tesla private. The case was ended in a settlement totaling $40 million in fines for Musk.

We'll have to see if the SEC will decide to take action once again. For now, Neuralink is proceeding as if nothing's happened, readying up its robots that will be tasked with performing brain implant surgery into humans and God knows what will come of that.

More on Neuralink: Neuralink Ready to Start Letting Robots Implant Chips into Human Brains

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Lawmakers Demand Investigation Into Carnage at Neuralink - Futurism

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UnitedHealthcare, the largest health insurance provider in the US, is using an AI algorithm called nH Predict whose wildly inaccurate predictions are being used to deny health coverage to severely ill patients by cutting the time they can spend in extended care, a new lawsuit alleges.

The suit, filed this week in the US District Court of Minnesota, was put forward by the estate of two deceased individuals who were denied coverage by UnitedHealth. The plaintiffs argue that the health insurance company should have known how inaccurate its AI was, and that the provider breached its contract by using it.

Their grievances are corroborated by an investigation from Stat News into UnitedHealth's internal practices at its subsidiary NaviHealth, which found that the company forced employees to unwaveringly adhere to the AI algorithm's questionable projections on how long patients could stay in extended care.

At least there was a silver lining in the board room: the penny-pinching AI reportedly saved the company an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars it would have been forced to spend on the patients' care otherwise, according to Stat.

Though the health claims are rarely appealed, when they are, around 90 percent of them are reversed, according to the lawsuit. That suggests that the AI is egregiously inaccurate, and that by placing undue trust in it, UnitedHealth is scamming countless vulnerable patients out of their healthcare.

"If UnitedHealth is using [NaviHealths] algorithms as gospel... thats not clinical decision-making," Spencer Perlman, a healthcare markets analyst, told Stat. "Thats aggregating data and using an algorithm to make a decision that has nothing to do with the individual themselves."

UnitedHealth fired back in a statement toStat.

"The assertions that NaviHealth uses or incentivizes employees to use a tool to deny care are false," it read. "Adverse coverage decisions are made by medical directors and based on Medicare coverage criteria, not a tool or a performance goal tied to any single quality metric."

Documents and employee testimony seem to corroborate the questionable decisionmaking of UnitedHealth's AI, though.

In one case, the nH Predict system allotted a mere 20 days of rehab for an older woman who was found paralyzed after suffering a stroke just half the average for impaired stroke patients, according toStat. An elderly, legally blind man with a failing heart and kidneys only received a shockingly inadequate 16 days to recover.

What could be making nH Predict so wrong? It's basing its projections on the length of stays of some six million previous patients in the company's database. On its face, that may appear sound, but that means the AI is inheriting the errors and cost-cutting of those previous decisions and above all, failing to account for exigent factors both clinical and practical.

"Length of stay is not some biological variable," Ziad Obermeyer, a physician at University of California, Berkeley, and a researcher of algorithmic bias, told Stat.

"People are being forced out of the [nursing home] because they can't pay or because their insurance sucks," he added. "And so the algorithm is basically learning all the inequalities of our current system."

Yet UnitedHealth would only make its standards more extreme. In 2022, case managers were instructed to keep nursing home stays within three percent of the AI's projection.

Next year, however, it was narrowed to less than one percent, effectively giving employees zero leeway. If case managers failed to hit that target, they were disciplined or fired, according to Stat.

"By the end of my time at NaviHealth I realized I'm not an advocate, I'm just a moneymaker for this company," Amber Lynch, a former NaviHealth case manager who was fired earlier this year, told Stat. "It's all about money and data points," she added. "It takes the dignity out of the patient, and I hated that."

All told, itsounds like a grim example of how the seeming objectivity of AI can be used to cover up shady practices and exploit people at their most vulnerable.

More on AI: In Huge Upset, OpenAI Fires Sam Altman

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America's Largest Health Insurer Denying Care With AI That's Wrong ... - Futurism

This is far from the first time this company's been in trouble with the law. Calling Card

A prison phone company is in trouble with the feds after allegedly not just improperly securing its users' data, but also failing to alert them for the better part of a year.

In a press release, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused Global Tel*Link Corp which, hilariously, uses GTL as an acronym and two of its subsidiaries of failing to "implement adequate security safeguards to protect personal information" of its 650,000-odd users, which led, as these things so often do, to bad actors breaching its data banks.

To add insult to injury, the FTC allegesthat GTL "waited approximately nine months to notify affected customers and only contacted 45,000 users even though the breach may have affected hundreds of thousands of additional customers."

Because there was such a lag between the hack and any kind of communication on GTL's part, its users began reporting just a few months after the August 2020 breach that their personally identifiable information had turned up on the dark web, the FTC explained.

"This personally identifiable information included names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and driver's license issue states," the press release reported. "Some consumer complaints also indicated that consumers had been alerted to fraudulent transactions on their credit cards."

In total, a staggering amount of GTL user information was said to be accessed by bad actors, including Social Security numbers, racial and ethnic data, and gender identity information a perfect encapsulation of the appalling treatment of prisoners in the United States.

This is not the first time the Falls Church, Virginia-based company has been under scrutiny, either.

Back in 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) capped the price-per-minute for inmate phone calls at 11 cents a slap in the face of sorts to GTL and other companies, which charged imprisoned folks upwards of $14 per minute to make phone calls due to the complicated bidding system involved in prison calling schemes.

In response, GTL sued the FCC to get the rules changed, ultimately getting appeals courts to grant a stay on the cap as it was duked out in court. Then in 2017, then-President Donald Trump installed Ajit Pai as the head of the FCC and the nemesis of net neutrality himself said that under his leadership, the agency would not enforce those rules.

GTL again made news in 2022 after a class action lawsuit revealed that it had seized hundreds of millions in customer funds from accounts that the company claimed were inactive.

None other than the FCC forced GTL to pay out $67 million in credits and refunds to customers harmed by its policies and now, it's under the watchful eye of yet another federal regulator for even more alleged shenanigans.

More on prisons: Alabama Prisoner Protests Being Test Subject for New Execution Technique

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Prison Phone Company Leaked User Data and Didn't Tell Them ... - Futurism

AI code to Stack Overflow: adapt or die. Reaping Season

Stack Overflow, the go-to coding resource and forum, is laying off more than a hundred workers totaling 28 percent of its staff just as AI-powered coding tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT are threatening to reshape the industry.

CEO Stack Overflow Prashanth Chandrasekar announced the layoffs today, explaining that struggles to reach profitability and unspecified "macroeconomic pressures" led to the cullings.

Just last year, Stack Overflow went on a hiring spree that saw the company double its headcount to 540 people, but soon after OpenAI grabbed the public's attention with the release of ChatGPT in November.

Since then, Stack Overflow has experienced diminished website traffic while coders have flocked to ChatGPT, Microsoft's GPT-4 powered Github Copilot, and similar coding tools that use machine learning instead of advice by humans.

Stack Overflow is trying to adapt in two ways: developing its own AI coding tool called OverflowAI and moving to charge tech companieslike OpenAI that have built AI models using data from Stack Overflow's website.

"We are entering this new era," Chandrasekar told Insider in August. "People who are leveraging our data for LLM purposes, we took a position several months ago that they should engage with us."

"We should be able to be paid for that data," Chandrasekar said. "The large companies have proactively reached out to us, and we're effectively engaged in those conversations at the moment."

It'll be interesting to see if Stack Overflow can successfully adapt to the AI tech boom era, which has other companies like Meta laying off scores of workers this year while pushing more investment into AI.

Of course, there's a looming question that tech companies haven't quite managed to address: if there are fewer coders, and hence less human-made data, will their precious AI models collapse without up-to-date training data?

More on AI code: GitHub Says 92 Percent of Programmers Are Using AI

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Stack Overflow Lays Off Employees as AI Threatens Coding Industry - Futurism

Is reality crashing down? Cold Shower

It's a gold rush in the artificial intelligence sector, as companies large and small rush to stuff buzzy machine learning tech into their products, from Expedia's travel chabot to BuzzFeed's AI-powered quizzes.

Whether it'll pay off in the long run is anyone's guess. But not all experts are so sure, with one analyst telling CNBC that he thinks generative AI is going to run into some major reality problems that amount to a "cold shower" by next year.

"The bottom line is, right now, everyones talking generative AI, Google, Amazon, Qualcomm, Meta," CCS Insight chief analyst Ben Wood told the broadcaster. "But the hype around generative AI in 2023 has just been so immense, that we think its overhyped, and theres lots of obstacles that need to get through to bring it to market."

One key issue: any company that wants to develop its own AI from scratch as opposed to licensing it from the likes of OpenAI is going to need expensive computer chips from the likes of Nvidiaand capital to service them.

"Just the cost of deploying and sustaining generative AI is immense," said Wood. "And its all very well for these massive companies to be doing it. But for many organizations, many developers, its just going to become too expensive."

In the interview, Wood also anticipated other factors leading to an AI slowdown, including governments around the world enacting new regulation of the tech.

Adding to those woes, public hype may be starting to fade as users realize the tech's penchant for making up facts or offering glib, nonsensical answers to queries. And maybe the biggest question: how are AI startups planning to actually make money?

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterdayeven major players like Microsoft, Google and Adobe are struggling to figure out how to turn a profit from AI, since the tech is so expensive to run and the market is flooded by free offerings. Even worse, the costs jack up as more customers use AI products.

As an example, WSJ reported that Microsoft is losing money with its popular GitHub Copilot, which it launched with the Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

Some companies think AI will get less expensive with time like previous technologies, according to the WSJ, but venture capitalists are still becoming wary around AI hype.

Will the tech be around long term, at least in some form? Probably. But it could be that the long road to a sustainable business model is much longer and more winding than its early advocates thought.

More artificial intelligence: Study Finds That Police Crime Predicting AI Fails Miserably at Predicting Crimes

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Generative AI Is Headed for a Financial "Cold Shower" Next Year ... - Futurism

This could be a very big deal. Niobium Cache

China claims to have discovered a vast trove of "niobobaotite,"a never-before-seen ore that may have incredible superconductive promise.

According to the South China Morning Post, the rare Earth deposit comprises niobium, barium, titanium, iron, and chloride. Noibium, a soft and ductile transition metal, is a critical component of steel as well asa lauded superconductor able to transmit electrical currents at low temperatures. Because of this low-temp electrical efficacy, scientists around the world have been experimenting with niobium-laced batteries, which may be safer and faster charging than traditional lithium-ion ones.

In other words? Considering that China currently imports 95 percent of its niobium, according to the SCMP, the discovery could be a very big deal for the nation, as well as the intensely competitive global battery market as a whole.

The "discovery is significant for China since most of the niobium China uses in the steel industry is imported," Antonio Carlos Neto, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the National University of Singapore, told the SCMP.

"Depending on the volume and quality of this niobium," he added, "it could make China self-sufficient."

Lithium-ion batteries are prone to catching fire, and can take hours to charge. Some experimenting with niobium-lithium batteries, on the other hand, claim that the rare Earth metal could allow batteries to be recharged without fire risk in ten minutes or less, a discovery that could have game-changing implications for the future of electric vehicles in particular.

Per the SCMP, the deposit was discovered in the Bayan Obo mining district in Inner Mongolia, with the China National Nuclear Corporation, the country's state-run nuclear oversight arm, claiming the ore has received an official approval number from the International Mineralogical Association's classification committee.

As it stands, according to the 2022 US Geological Survey, Brazil is the world's largest niobium exporter, controlling just under 70 percent of the global niobium marketplace at the time of the report. Canada, meanwhile, was noted to export roughly 30 percent of global niobium, while the US is planning to open its first and only niobium mine in Nebraska. China, notably, was Brazil's top niobium buyer, as the survey reported.

If the niobium within the newly-discovered niobobaotiteis indeed high-quality, this could mean that the world's largest importer of niobium might suddenly become the world's largest reservoir of the compound likely tipping the scales in the global marketplace at a critical juncture in the world's ongoing battery race.

More on batteries: Colossal Cache of Lithium Found in Us May Be World's Largest

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China Says It's Discovered a Cache of a Strange New Ore - Futurism