MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) – While artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming our world, a troubling trend shows scammers using it to steal from seniors, specifically grandparents.

You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘seeing is believing’ your whole life. But in an age of artificial intelligence, the turn of phrase doesn’t exactly stand the test of time. When it’s in the wrong hands, this new technology can make our senior citizens, who didn’t grow up in the digital age, a vulnerable population.

“One of the ways we see that being done is with what’s known as the grandparent scam,” Jamie Harding, AARP of Alabama Communications director, said. “The grandparent scam is basically, it usually happens late at night, they’re asleep, and someone calls them purporting to be their grandchild, they’re in trouble, they need money immediately.”

However, it isn’t actually their grandchild on the other end of the phone. Scammers have used AI technology to replicate the sound of their grandchild’s voice to try to take money.

“These are very sophisticated international crime rings, and they have access to a lot of very sophisticated technology,” Harding said.

To protect your family from these scams, Harding suggests having a code word that every member of your family knows so you can be sure it’s actually your loved one calling.

She also advises you not to answer phone calls from unknown numbers and to keep your personal information off the internet.

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AUSTIN, Texas — In the brave new world of artificial intelligence, talent is the new gold, and companies are in a frantic race to find it. While universities work to churn out computer science graduates, a new kind of school has emerged in Austin to meet the insatiable demand: Gauntlet AI.

Gauntlet AI bills itself as an elite training program. It’s a high-stakes, high-reward process designed to forge “AI-first” engineers and builders in a matter of weeks.

“We’re closer to Navy SEAL bootcamp training than a school,” said Ash Tilawat, Head of Product and Learning. “We take the smartest people in the world. We bring them into the same place for a 1000 hours over ten weeks and we make them go all in with building with AI.”

Austen Allred, the co-founder and CEO of Gauntlet AI, says when they claim to be looking for the smartest engineers in the world, it’s no exaggeration. The selection process is intensely rigorous.

“We accept around 2 percent of the applicants,” Allred explained. “We accept 98th percentile and above of raw intelligence, 95th percentile of coding ability, and then you start on The Gauntlet.”

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The price of admission isn’t paid in dollars—there are no tuition fees. Instead, the cost is a student’s absolute, undivided attention.

“It is pretty grueling, but it’s invigorating and I love doing this,” said Nataly Smith, one of the “Gauntlet Challengers.”

Smith, whose passions lie in biotech and space, recently channeled her love for bioscience to complete one of the program’s challenges. Her team was tasked with building a project called “Geno.”

“It’s a tool where a person can upload their genomic data and get a statistical analysis of how likely they are to have different kinds of cancers,” Smith described.

Incredibly, her team built the AI-powered tool in just one week.

The ultimate prize waiting at the end of the grueling 10-week gauntlet is a guaranteed job offer with a starting salary of at least $200,000 a year. And hiring partners are already lining up to recruit challengers like Nataly.

“We very intentionally chose to partner with everything from seed-stage startups all the way to publicly traded companies,” said Brett Johnson, Gauntlet’s COO. “So Carvana is a hiring partner. Here in Austin, we have folks like Function Health. We have the Trilogy organization; we have Capital Factory just around the corner. We’re big into the Austin tech community and looking to double down on that.”

In a world desperate for skilled engineers, Gauntlet AI isn’t just training people; it’s manufacturing the very talent pipeline it believes will power the next wave of technological innovation.

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers have made a significant advance in studying how artificial intelligence (AI) understands endangered languages. This research could help communities document and maintain their languages, support language learning and make technology more accessible to speakers of minority languages.

The paper by Kaiying Lin, a PhD graduate in linguistics from UH Mānoa, and Department of Information and Computer Sciences Assistant Professor Haopeng Zhang, introduces the first benchmark for evaluating large language models (AI systems that process and generate text) on low-resource Austronesian languages. The study focuses on three Formosan (Indigenous peoples and languages of Taiwan) languages spoken in Taiwan—Atayal, Amis and Paiwan—that are at risk of disappearing.

Using a new benchmark called FORMOSANBENCH, Lin and Zhang tested AI systems on tasks such as machine translation, automatic speech recognition and text summarization. The findings revealed a large gap between AI performance in widely spoken languages such as English, and these smaller, endangered languages. Even when AI models were given examples or fine-tuned with extra data, they struggled to perform well.

“These results show that current AI systems are not yet capable of supporting low-resource languages,” Lin said.

Zhang added, “By highlighting these gaps, we hope to guide future development toward more inclusive technology that can help preserve endangered languages.”

The research team has made all datasets and code publicly available to encourage further work in this area. The preprint of the study is available online, and the study has been accepted into the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Suzhou, China, an internationally recognized premier AI conference.

The Department of Information and Computer Sciences is housed in UH Mānoa’s College of Natural Sciences, and the Department of Linguistics is housed in UH Mānoa’s College of Arts, Languages & Letters.