Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Greg Adams Photography posted a photo:

Lynnewood Hall is an amazing old Neoclassical Revival Mansion with about 110 rooms located in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park.

OpenAI has never been as open as its name suggests and is becoming even less so. The free-spending AI giant recently revised the multi-agent orchestration in its Codex command line interface to encrypt messages passed to subagents. OpenAI's Codex supports multi-agent orchestration, a way to have a parent agent spawn child agents or delegate tasks to other agents that may call out to different models. Codex/GPT-5.6 introduced a protocol called multi-agent v2 that appears to be geared toward letting the runtime allocate work instead of leaving those decisions to user-declared configuration settings. Multi-agent v2 is still under development and OpenAI hasn't formally documented it yet. Developers, however, have observed changes made to Codex to accommodate the new agent plumbing – and some are concerned by the new arrangements. Last month, OpenAI devs merged a pull request (a suggested code change) to encrypt multi-agent v2 message payloads – the text instruction passed between agents. The pull request prefaces its explanatory text with the word "Why" but doesn't actually offer a reason for the change. It states: "Multi-agent v2 currently routes agent instructions through normal tool arguments and inter-agent context. That means the parent model can emit plaintext task text, Codex can persist it in history/rollouts, and the recipient can receive it as ordinary assistant-message JSON. "This changes the v2 path so agent instructions stay encrypted between model calls: Responses [An OpenAI API - Ed] encrypts the message argument returned by the model, Codex forwards only that ciphertext, and Responses decrypts it internally for the recipient model." A desire to enhance privacy and security, or conceal data that would be useful for model distillation, are sound reasons for these changes. Yet OpenAI has not said why it made the change. In the absence of clear communication from OpenAI, developers have urged the company to ensure that its implementation doesn't sacrifice auditability to accommodate other concerns. An issue opened by Ignat Remizov, CTO at payment service Zolvat, says, "The encrypted delivery path is understandable as privacy hardening, but it also removes the human-readable task/message text from local rollout history, trace reduction, and parent-side audit/debug surfaces." Remizov's concern is that developers and code maintainers will have less information to assess the instructions an agent received and the actions it took. "Guys, we don’t want to build Skynet and then be unable to audit what it’s doing," he quips. Other developers, echoing Remizov's concern about the loss of observability, speculate that OpenAI has locked its agent messaging down to keep competitors from seeing how its multi-agent implementation works. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ®

Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis is calling for a U.S.-led AI standards body to review frontier models for national security risks such as cybersecurity and biological threats. His proposal would create a federally overseen public-private organization, initially voluntary and eventually mandatory for U.S. deployment. CNBC reports: Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, said in an article posted on X on Tuesday that "urgent action" was needed to address risks associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- the point at which AI matches or surpasses human intelligence. "We've already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance," he said.

[...] Hassabis said the U.S. was well positioned to lead in developing an AI framework "given its economic and technical standing." "It could establish a new Standards Body modelled on a federally overseen public-private partnership or self-regulatory organisation, much like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with a board that includes independent leading technical experts and open-source representatives," he added. FINRA regulates brokerage firms and exchange markets in the U.S.

The proposed body would need "substantial" funding "in order to attract world-class technical talent and provide the necessary compute resources for large-scale testing," Hassabis said. Funding would "likely" come from industry, he added. Frontier labs would initially voluntarily share models with the body for review up to 30 days before release, before becoming mandatory for deployment in the U.S. market after being shown to be "effective." "Specific agentic AI tests could look for attempts to bypass safety guardrails or signs of deception, and ensure best practices, such as digitally watermarking AI-generated images and generating human-readable output tokens to understand model reasoning," Hassabis said. Further reading: Over 200 Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' On AI's Economic Impact

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Today, the Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation to standardize internet-native payments for AI agents, APIs, and applications, based on Coinbase's contributed x402 protocol. Backed by companies including AWS, American Express, Cloudflare, Google, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa, the effort aims to make payments work directly over HTTP (assuming users are comfortable letting AI agents handle financial transactions).

"The whole idea is to give agents access to money and, through that financial independence, improve their set of capabilities to pretty much anything on the internet," Lincoln Murr, Coinbase's AI product lead, told CNBC last month when the company announced the protocol. "In the 2010s, every internet company dealt with the transition from desktop and web into a mobile environment. And now in the late 2020s, we're seeing the exact same thing happen where agents are going to be the new primary economic actors on the internet."

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Here's the full 2011 filmed performance starring an ensemble cast led by Neil Patrick Harris. It also stars Martha Plimpton, Stephen Colbert, Jon Cryer, Patti LuPone, Christina Hendricks, and Chryssie Whitehead.

From the 1970 original D. A. Pennebaker. 'Barcelona' from the 1996 London performance (with Adrian Lester & Hannah Waddingham...) Adam Driver singing 'Being Alive in 'A marriage story'. "Company" on the blue before.

Coolcations are on the rise, with many tourists heading for northerly climates in the summer whilst Southern Europe swelters and burns. Some travellers are opting for a Northern Camino in Norway, the Wild Atlantic Way, or Golfing in Scotland. So what are mefites up to - are you heading north or south this summer?

Abstract aerial studies of White Pocket in northern Arizona, where surreal sandstone formations create flowing layers, soft curves, and almost liquid-looking structures.

Spanje heeft zich geplaatst voor de finale van het WK voetbal. De Spanjaarden waren in Arlington te sterk voor Frankrijk, die werden gezien als topfavoriet om het toernooi te…

Robert Eggers continues his run of One Word Title Films Featuring Very Strange Men with Werwulf. I’m not a horror guy but I was pleasantly surprised by Nosferatu, which I quite liked.