An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:

OpenAI is looking for a new Head of Preparedness who can help it anticipate the potential harms of its models and how they can be abused, in order to guide the company's safety strategy.

It comes at the end of a year that's seen OpenAI hit with numerous accusations about ChatGPT's impacts on users' mental health, including a few wrongful death lawsuits. In a post on X about the position, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledgedthat the "potential impact of models on mental health was something we saw a preview of in 2025," along with other "real challenges" that have arisen alongside models' capabilities. The Head of Preparedness "is a critical role at an important time," he said.

Per the job listing, the Head of Preparedness (who will make $555K, plus equity), "will lead the technical strategy and execution of OpenAI's Preparedness framework, our framework explaining OpenAI's approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm."

"These questions are hard," Altman posted on X.com, "and there is little precedent; a lot of ideas that sound good have some real edge cases... This will be a stressful job and you'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately."

The listing says OpenAI's Head of Preparedness "will lead a small, high-impact team to drive core Preparedness research, while partnering broadly across Safety Systems and OpenAI for end-to-end adoption and execution of the framework." They're looking for someone "comfortable making clear, high-stakes technical judgments under uncertainty."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/12/27/2347200/openai-is-hiring-a-new-head-of-preparedness-to-predictmitigate-ais-harms?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:

Sending drones and robots into battle, rather than humans, has become a tenet of modern warfare. Nowhere does that make more sense than in the frozen expanses of the Arctic. But the closer you get to the North Pole, the less useful cutting-edge technology becomes. Magnetic storms distort satellite signals; frigid temperatures drain batteries or freeze equipment in minutes; navigation systems lack reference points on snowfields.
During a seven-nation polar exercise in Canada earlier this year to test equipment worth millions of dollars, the U.S. military's all-terrain arctic vehicles broke down after 30 minutes because hydraulic fluids congealed in the cold. Swedish soldiers participating in the exercise were handed $20,000 night-vision optics that broke because the aluminum in the goggles couldn't handle the minus 40 degree Fahrenheit conditions....

An arctic conflict would force war planners back to basics. Extreme cold makes the most common components brittle. Low temperatures alter the physical properties of rubber, causing seals to lose their elasticity and leak. Traces of water or humidity freeze into ice crystals that can scratch pumps and create blockages. Wires should be insulated with silicone rather than PVC, which can crack. Oil and other lubricants thicken and congeal. In most standard hydraulic systems, fluid becomes syrupy and can affect everything from aircraft controls to missile launchers and radar masts. A single freeze-up can knock out an entire weapons platform or immobilize a convoy.

Even the Aurora Borealis interferes with radio communications and satellite-navigation systems, according to the article.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/28/0040238/military-planners-dread-the-arctic-where-drones-drop-dead-and-gps-goes-haywire?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.