📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update ai: DOGE Operatives Scared They’re in Real Trouble Now That

Over the weekend, Reuters reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, which was once helmed by billionaire Elon Musk before he flamed out with Trump in May, is no more.

Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor told Reuters that DOGE “doesn’t exist,” adding that it’s no longer a “centralized entity.”

Adding to the drama, three days before Reuters published its story, Politico reported that “former and current DOGE employees” — it’s unclear what their exact job titles are or were — fear that they’re at risk of prosecution, now that Musk has fallen out of favor with Trump and left the government.

Staffers have “lived with the ever-present threat of backlash — public scrutiny, upset Cabinet officials, even the prospect that someone might assert criminal charges against them,” Politico notes.

“Guys, seriously,” one DOGE leader warned his colleagues during an early June event that was “something akin to a wake,” per the publication. “Get your own lawyer if you need it. Elon’s great, but you need to watch your own back.”

The latest news that DOGE has been disbanded almost served as an admission that the White House was abandoning Musk’s frequently revised promises of excising trillions of dollars from the federal budget. That’s despite Kupor later tweeting that the “principles of DOGE remain alive and well: deregulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.”

DOGE leaves a trail of chaos and tragedy behind. With the help of a ragtag band of teenagers and other underqualified lackeys who were tasked with doing the dirty work, Musk took a figurative — and in some ways, literal — chainsaw to federal government agencies.

While it remains murky whether the group’s agents could face criminal charges for their actions, their unorthodox methods have been heavily criticized. DOGE operatives accessed highly sensitive personal information earlier this year, raising the alarm bells among lawmakers. Some did so even before completing their background checks and being granted access.

At the height of its destructive influence in Washington, DC, DOGE laid waste to USAID, an international development agency that typically spends tens of billions of dollars on aid across the world. Officials warned at the time that shutting USAID was poised to kill “thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.”

Amid ongoing backlash, much of which was squarely aimed at Musk and his businesses, DOGE’s political influence started to wane. In March, a physical altercation between treasury secretary Scott Bessent and Musk signaled a major turning point, as the Trump administration started to push out the billionaire’s allies.

Musk officially left his post, showing up with a literal black eye at his goodbye party in the Oval Office on May 27.

During a major internal struggle over the direction of DOGE that followed, dozens of employees left, as Politico reports. Some were pushed out, while others were disillusioned and left on their own accord. According to a White House shutdown plan, 45 DOGE employees remained as of October.

While some current staffers fear for their future job prospects, it’s unclear whether current or former DOGE operatives will ever be held to account, let alone prosecuted.

And the ghost of DOGE’s past lingers on in Washington, DC. Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought has continued where Musk left off, using the recent government shutdown as an opportunity to further pull funding for approved programs, per Politico.

Musk even got an invite to a formal White House dinner with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman this month, indicating he may have buried the hatchet with Trump.

Current and former DOGE members also reunited in Austin over the weekend to discuss the future of the group, according to Politico — so it’s possible that this isn’t the last we’ve heard of this particular cursed era of American history.

More on DOGE: This DOGE Operative Got a Huge Surprise Once He Was Actually Inside the Government

The post DOGE Operatives Scared They’re in Real Trouble Now That Elon Has Abandoned Them appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: Microsoft’s Fara-7B is a computer-use AI agent that

Microsoft has introduced Fara-7B, a new 7-billion parameter model designed to act as a Computer Use Agent (CUA) capable of performing complex tasks directly on a user’s device. Fara-7B sets new state-of-the-art results for its size, providing a way to build AI agents that don’t rely on massive, cloud-dependent models and can run on compact systems with lower latency and enhanced privacy.

While the model is an experimental release, its architecture addresses a primary barrier to enterprise adoption: data security. Because Fara-7B is small enough to run locally, it allows users to automate sensitive workflows, such as managing internal accounts or processing sensitive company data, without that information ever leaving the device. 

How Fara-7B sees the web

Fara-7B is designed to navigate user interfaces using the same tools a human does: a mouse and keyboard. The model operates by visually perceiving a web page through screenshots and predicting specific coordinates for actions like clicking, typing, and scrolling.

Crucially, Fara-7B does not rely on "accessibility trees,” the underlying code structure that browsers use to describe web pages to screen readers. Instead, it relies solely on pixel-level visual data. This approach allows the agent to interact with websites even when the underlying code is obfuscated or complex.

According to Yash Lara, Senior PM Lead at Microsoft Research, processing all visual input on-device creates true "pixel sovereignty," since screenshots and the reasoning needed for automation remain on the user’s device. "This approach helps organizations meet strict requirements in regulated sectors, including HIPAA and GLBA," he told VentureBeat in written comments.

In benchmarking tests, this visual-first approach has yielded strong results. On WebVoyager, a standard benchmark for web agents, Fara-7B achieved a task success rate of 73.5%. This outperforms larger, more resource-intensive systems, including GPT-4o, when prompted to act as a computer use agent (65.1%) and the native UI-TARS-1.5-7B model (66.4%).

Efficiency is another key differentiator. In comparative tests, Fara-7B completed tasks in approximately 16 steps on average, compared to roughly 41 steps for the UI-TARS-1.5-7B model.

Handling risks

The transition to autonomous agents is not without risks, however. Microsoft notes that Fara-7B shares limitations common to other AI models, including potential hallucinations, mistakes in following complex instructions, and accuracy degradation on intricate tasks.

To mitigate these risks, the model was trained to recognize "Critical Points." A Critical Point is defined as any situation requiring a user's personal data or consent before an irreversible action occurs, such as sending an email or completing a financial transaction. Upon reaching such a juncture, Fara-7B is designed to pause and explicitly request user approval before proceeding. 

Managing this interaction without frustrating the user is a key design challenge. "Balancing robust safeguards such as Critical Points with seamless user journeys is key," Lara said. "Having a UI, like Microsoft Research’s Magentic-UI, is vital for giving users opportunities to intervene when necessary, while also helping to avoid approval fatigue." Magentic-UI is a research prototype designed specifically to facilitate these human-agent interactions. Fara-7B is designed to run in Magentic-UI.

Distilling complexity into a single model

The development of Fara-7B highlights a growing trend in knowledge distillation, where the capabilities of a complex system are compressed into a smaller, more efficient model.

Creating a CUA usually requires massive amounts of training data showing how to navigate the web. Collecting this data via human annotation is prohibitively expensive. To solve this, Microsoft used a synthetic data pipeline built on Magentic-One, a multi-agent framework. In this setup, an "Orchestrator" agent created plans and directed a "WebSurfer" agent to browse the web, generating 145,000 successful task trajectories.

The researchers then "distilled" this complex interaction data into Fara-7B, which is built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, a base model chosen for its long context window (up to 128,000 tokens) and its strong ability to connect text instructions to visual elements on a screen. While the data generation required a heavy multi-agent system, Fara-7B itself is a single model, showing that a small model can effectively learn advanced behaviors without needing complex scaffolding at runtime.

The training process relied on supervised fine-tuning, where the model learns by mimicking the successful examples generated by the synthetic pipeline.

Looking forward

While the current version was trained on static datasets, future iterations will focus on making the model smarter, not necessarily bigger. "Moving forward, we’ll strive to maintain the small size of our models," Lara said. "Our ongoing research is focused on making agentic models smarter and safer, not just larger." This includes exploring techniques like reinforcement learning (RL) in live, sandboxed environments, which would allow the model to learn from trial and error in real-time.

Microsoft has made the model available on Hugging Face and Microsoft Foundry under an MIT license. However, Lara cautions that while the license allows for commercial use, the model is not yet production-ready. "You can freely experiment and prototype with Fara‑7B under the MIT license," he says, "but it’s best suited for pilots and proofs‑of‑concept rather than mission‑critical deployments."

🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com