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Elissa Welle

Elissa Welle

AI Reporter

AI Reporter

Elissa Welle is a New York-based reporter at The Verge covering all things AI, including the technology itself and the companies and policies that make and shape it. She joined the newsroom in 2025 and is currently supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. Previously, she wrote about science and health trends at Reuters, Stat News, IEEE Spectrum, among other outlets. Prior to being a journalist, she researched brain-computer interfaces for her biomedical engineering Ph.D. When she’s not writing about AI, she’s probably doing human things like eating food and touching grass. Contact her on Signal for tips: elissawelle.39.

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Elissa Welle
RFK Jr.‘s vaccine committee says hepatitis B shot can wait.

On Friday, the handpicked CDC advisory group, containing several known vaccine critics, scrapped the three-decade-old recommendation to vaccinate all babies for hepatitis B at birth, instead delaying the recommended schedule to 2 months, if at all, for babies whose mothers test negative for the disease.

That’s a bad idea, according to medical groups and public health experts, and likely to lead to a rise in hepatitis B cases.

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Elissa Welle
ChatGPT allegedly encouraged a violent stalker.

Brett Michael Dadig is being charged with 14 counts of “cyberstalking, interstate stalking, and interstate threats,” 404 Media reports. Dadig claims that OpenAI’s ChatGPT told him to keep producing his women-hating podcast because it gave him more “haters,” which led to more money, and to keep going to places where “wife types” meet up.

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Grok is now doxxing regular folks.

xAI’s chatbot offered little to no pushback when reporters at Futurism asked for addresses of 33 non-public figures, coming up with accurate current or previous home addresses to 17 of the names tested. In a stalkerish manner, Grok also offered up addresses of the people’s potential relatives, without being prompted.

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Elissa Welle
Amazon’s Bedrock and SageMaker AI get more customizable.

Amazon’s continued focus on offering AI agents through AWS now includes Reinforcement Fine Tuning of AI models built on Amazon’s Nova 2 Lite in Bedrock. The company also announced new “serverless” model customization with SageMaker AI that can provide compute based on the model size with Amazon’s own Nova, OpenAI’s GPT-OSS, Meta’s Llama, and others.

Amazon Bedrock now allows for the fine-tuning of custom AI models using reinforcement learning.
Amazon Bedrock now allows for the fine-tuning of custom AI models using reinforcement learning.
Image: Amazon
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Elissa Welle
Microsoft reportedly takes its AI sales targets down a notch.

Multiple sales teams lowered how much salespeople are expected to grow annual sales of Foundry and other AI products, reports The Information, citing sources who called the move “rare.”

Even as its overall cloud business has boomed, the report says that over 80 percent of one US Azure sales team failed to grow Foundry sales by the “ambitious” 50 percent target last year, so in July, the company lowered this year’s goal to 25 percent.

Update: CNBC reports that an unnamed spokesperson denied the report, saying Microsoft has not lowered quotas or targets for its salespeople.

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Elissa Welle
AWS says its Trainium3 AI server is faster and cheaper than ever.

Amazon’s newest server packs up to 144 of the company’s custom-built Trainium3 chips, able to output 4.4 times more compute than the second generation, with 4x the efficiency and almost 4x the memory bandwidth of its second-generation server.

This chip follows the new 7th-generation “Ironwood” AI chip from Google and Nvidia’s recently introduced Blackwell Ultra.

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Elissa Welle
AI annotators overseas may be reviewing Flock license plate camera footage from the US.

An exposed dataset from the license plate surveillance company Flock, which is known to work with the US Border Patrol and ICE via local police, showed that some of the AI annotators paid to classify American license plates are located in the Philippines.

After 404 Media contacted Flock for comment, the dataset disappeared.

Screenshot of the exposed material from the surveillance company Flock, as spotted by 404 Media.
Screenshot of the exposed material from the surveillance company Flock, as spotted by 404 Media.
Image: 404 Media
It doesn’t end at NeuralinkIt doesn’t end at Neuralink
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Elissa Welle
Why can’t ChatGPT tell time?Why can’t ChatGPT tell time?
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Elissa Welle