Technologies

53 Years After Its Launch, This Soviet Spacecraft Is About to Crash Into Earth

A defunct Soviet probe designed to land on Venus will have an uncontrolled reentry this month and pieces of it may make it to Earth’s surface.

The Soviet space program had a lot of hope riding on the Cosmos 482 mission when it launched in March 1972. The mission included a lander destined for Venus. The spacecraft never made it out of Earth orbit — and now it’s coming home, but not in a good way.

The lander probe is expected back around May 10. Should you be worried?

«Because the probe was designed to withstand entry into the Venus atmosphere, it is possible the probe (or parts of it) will survive reentry at Earth and reach the surface,» NASA said.

Also known as Kosmos 482, the lander probe weighed in at over 1,000 pounds at launch and was stocked with instruments designed to study the hellish surface of the second planet from the sun.

The mission hit a rough patch after reaching Earth orbit and separating into four pieces, two of which quickly decayed out of orbit. The lander probe and the upper-stage engine unit went into a higher orbit. «It is thought that a malfunction resulted in an engine burn which did not achieve sufficient velocity for the Venus transfer and left the payload in this elliptical Earth orbit,» NASA said.

The lander probe has been on a long, slow path back to Earth for decades, and the time of reunion is almost here. The potential reentry window stretches from May 7-13. We don’t have a precise time or location. Cosmos 482 will have an uncontrolled reentry, so it will be hard to predict its path.

Water covers about 71% of Earth’s surface, so any Cosmos 482 pieces that survive the fiery atmospheric reentry process have a good chance of landing harmlessly in the ocean. However, there’s a possibility of debris ending up on land.

This isn’t cause for panic. Science educator Marco Langbroek is tracking Cosmos 482 and posting reentry forecasts on his blog. «The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero,» he wrote, saying the risks are similar to that of a meteorite impact.

So go ahead and keep an eye on Cosmos 482’s journey, but don’t book an underground bunker because of it.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Saturday, May 3

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 3.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword is longer, since it’s the Saturday Mini. Nothing terribly difficult, although if you’ve never seen Shark Tank (I never have), 1-Across might stump you right away. The other clues will help you fill it in. Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

The Mini Crossword is just one of many games in the Times’ games collection. If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get at those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Greiner of «Shark Tank»
Answer: LORI

5A clue: Not making a sound
Answer: SILENT

7A clue: Super-stoked
Answer: PSYCHED

9A clue: Convenience hidden in «get that money»
Answer: ATM

10A clue: Indivisible
Answer: ONE

11A clue: Eighth planet from the sun
Answer: NEPTUNE

13A clue: Sipped on slowly, say
Answer: NURSED

14A clue: Mystic with a vision
Answer: SEER

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Appropriate anagram of 5-Across
Answer: LISTEN

2D clue: Mount where Zeus and Hera reigned
Answer: OLYMPUS

3D clue: ___ league (amateur sports organization)
Answer: REC

4D clue: Using staff, rather than outside contractors
Answer: INHOUSE

5D clue: Extend across
Answer: SPAN

6D clue: $10 bill, informally
Answer: TENNER

8D clue: Homeowner’s document
Answer: DEED

12D clue: III, in Italy
Answer: TRE

How to play more Mini Crosswords

The New York Times Games section offers a large number of online games, but only some of them are free for all to play. You can play the current day’s Mini Crossword for free, but you’ll need a subscription to the Times Games section to play older puzzles from the archives.

Technologies

OpenAI Yanked a ChatGPT Update. Here’s What It Said and Why It Matters

The company says it plans to be more careful when releasing updates in the future.

Recent updates to ChatGPT made the chatbot far too agreeable and OpenAI said Friday it’s taking steps to prevent the issue from happening again.

In a blog post, the company detailed its testing and evaluation process for new models and outlined how the problem with the April 25 update to its GPT-4o model came to be. Essentially, a bunch of changes that individually seemed helpful combined to create a tool that was far too sycophantic and potentially harmful.

How much of a suck-up was it? In some testing earlier this week, we asked about a tendency to be overly sentimental, and ChatGPT laid on the flattery: «Hey, listen up — being sentimental isn’t a weakness; it’s one of your superpowers.» And it was just getting started being fulsome.

«This launch taught us a number of lessons. Even with what we thought were all the right ingredients in place (A/B tests, offline evals, expert reviews), we still missed this important issue,» the company said.

OpenAI rolled back the update this week. To avoid causing new issues, it took about 24 hours to revert the model for everybody.

The concern around sycophancy isn’t just about the enjoyment level of the user experience. It posed a health and safety threat to users that OpenAI’s existing safety checks missed. Any AI model can give questionable advice about topics like mental health but one that is overly flattering can be dangerously deferential or convincing — like whether that investment is a sure thing or how thin you should seek to be.

«One of the biggest lessons is fully recognizing how people have started to use ChatGPT for deeply personal advice — something we didn’t see as much even a year ago,» OpenAI said. «At the time, this wasn’t a primary focus but as AI and society have co-evolved, it’s become clear that we need to treat this use case with great care.»

Sycophantic large language models can reinforce biases and harden beliefs, whether they’re about yourself or others, said Maarten Sap, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. «[The LLM] can end up emboldening their opinions if these opinions are harmful or if they want to take actions that are harmful to themselves or others.»

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed on Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

How OpenAI tests models and what’s changing

The company offered some insight into how it tests its models and updates. This was the fifth major update to GPT-4o focused on personality and helpfulness. The changes involved new post-training work or fine-tuning on the existing models, including the rating and evaluation of various responses to prompts to make it more likely to produce those responses that rated more highly.

Prospective model updates are evaluated on their usefulness across a variety of situations, like coding and math, along with specific tests by experts to experience how it behaves in practice. The company also runs safety evaluations to see how it responds to safety, health and other potentially dangerous queries. Finally, OpenAI runs A/B tests with a small number of users to see how it performs in the real world.

The April 25 update performed well in these tests, but some expert testers indicated the personality seemed a bit off. The tests didn’t specifically look at sycophancy, and OpenAI decided to move forward despite the issues raised by testers. Take note, readers: AI companies are in a tail-on-fire hurry, which doesn’t always square well with well thought-out product development.

«Looking back, the qualitative assessments were hinting at something important and we should’ve paid closer attention,» the company said.

Among its takeaways, OpenAI said it needs to treat model behavior issues the same as it would other safety issues — and halt a launch if there are concerns. For some model releases, the company said it would have an opt-in «alpha» phase to get more feedback from users before a broader launch.

Sap said evaluating an LLM based on whether a user likes the response isn’t necessarily going to get you the most honest chatbot. In a recent study, Sap and others found a conflict between the usefulness and truthfulness of a chatbot. He compared it to situations where the truth is not necessarily what people want — think about a car salesperson trying to sell a vehicle.

«The issue here is that they were trusting the users’ thumbs-up/thumbs-down response to the model’s outputs and that has some limitations because people are likely to upvote something that is more sycophantic than others,» he said.

Sap said OpenAI is right to be more critical of quantitative feedback, such as user up/down responses, as they can reinforce biases.

The issue also highlighted the speed at which companies push updates and changes out to existing users, Sap said — an issue that’s not limited to one tech company. «The tech industry has really taken a ‘release it and every user is a beta tester’ approach to things,» he said. Having a process with more testing before updates are pushed to every user can bring these issues to light before they become widespread.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for May 3, #426

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle No. 426 for May 3.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Been to the doctor lately? If so, today’s NYT Strands puzzle might feature some familiar items. If you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Say «ah.»

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Medicine cabinet.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints, but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

HOOT, THEE, CINE, POOR, COOT, TOME, HOME, RITE, PEAT, PETS, SEEP, SKIT, MEET.

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers: