Last week, while vacationing in Lisbon, I found myself striking up a conversation at the hotel bar with a middle-aged couple who spoke English with a distinctly American accent (which is to say, my accent). Call them Frank and Laura. At some point, our small talk turned to that most American of topics: “So, what do you do?” Frank asked. I told them that I’m a magazine editor, and this prompted Laura to reveal that she, too, edits for a living. How wonderful.
ill Gates, the guy who tried to destroy the world over the Wuhan sniffles, says it’s time to panic about AI. Should we?
The billionaire Microsoft founder is very concerned about AI. He is concerned about our jobs, our families, our ability to think and reason about the issue, and of course, how AI impacts his precious climate change narrative. What he is not concerned about, apparently, is his own track record as a nanny state catastrophist.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently posted on X, “[S]aying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive.” He conceded that “we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.” He’s right.
While the invention of useful AI tools has dramatically elevated scientists’ confidence that they’ll eventually find cures, the task is daunting. The number of plausible new biological molecules is greater than the quantity of water molecules in the world’s oceans. As large and powerful as current gigawatt-scale AI data centers are, the challenge of speeding up discovery is so monumental that it invokes the classic movie line, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.”
Between last Friday and Tuesday, the “Big Three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC spent 18 minutes and 25 seconds on their flagship morning and evening newscasts fawning, giggling, and reveling in the Chinese Communist Party’s second World Humanoid Robot Games with thousands of robots completing tasks ranging from basic household chores to track and field events. Missing was any direct acknowledgment of concerns about surveillance by the CCP.
The most we got were a pathetic two sentences from NBC alluding to a U.S. ban on robots and quadrupeds because of “national security concerns.”
In early August, top mathematicians gathered at the offices of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI in San Francisco for a summit on an existential question: What will be left for human math experts to do if artificial intelligence soon leaves them all behind?
“I think there’s a chance that we end up in a world where there’s no high-quality mathematics research, and human expertise in mathematics is totally lost,” said Daniel Litt, a professor at the University of Toronto. He gave a talk at the event titled “The End of Mathematics.”
Warnings about an artificial-intelligence crash have become increasingly common. Financing is becoming harder to obtain, the argument runs, and companies are questioning whether AI projects produce enough value, whether electricity supplies are sufficient, and if cheaper Chinese systems could undermine the revenues of American technology leaders. Put together, these pressures are said to threaten the vast investments now rolling out in data center construction, AI chip and memory manufacturing, and power generation.
You are on a short break in Porto and post some pictures of your family on Instagram or Facebook. With a small section of the Douro river in the background, you think it could have been taken anywhere.
A few days later, you get a text saying that your card was compromised. “We detected unusual activity while you were travelling in Porto – please verify immediately,” says the message.
You click on the link to confirm your bank details. Since you have not put any details of your trip on any of your social networks – bar the indistinct pictures – you don’t suspect there is anything suspicious about the messages.
MAYSVILLE, Ky.—The offer arrived out of nowhere just over one year ago.
An unknown company was scooping up Kentucky farmland, and few plots were more valuable than those owned by Delsia Bare and her mother, Ida Huddleston.
The money would be life-changing. From Bare’s farm, the company wanted 463 acres at $48,000 apiece. From Huddleston’s nearby piece of property, it sought 71 at $60,000 per acre.
Together mother and daughter would collect $26.48 million. All they had to do was sign.
In late 2022, Microsoft detected the hack of a water system in Guam that U.S. intelligence agencies in the following months determined was orchestrated by China. The idea wasn’t new. The spy agencies had long watched as Iran targeted Israeli water systems.
“That another nation state was doing it to us — that was unsettling,” recalled one former U.S. official, who, like several others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Over the past two weeks, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all revealed that their AI models went rogue during routine security testing. In explaining what happened, the companies each mentioned the same small Israeli startup: Irregular.
Founded three years ago and based in Tel Aviv, Irregular is a niche player in artificial intelligence, backed with $80 million from Sequoia and Redpoint Ventures and valued last year at $450 million. Its technology serves as a sort of cybersecurity test bed for AI models.
I think we should be worried.
I just don’t know how we’d stop a full fledged AI attack other than by shutting down the web and that’s almost as scary itself.
A Stanford-led research team has used generative AI to design a synthetic virus. This is the first time that AI has been used to create an organism that does not exist in nature.
In my previous column, I made the case that the AI revolution has forced our most weighty questions wide open. What is a person? What is healthcare? What is education and mentoring? What is friendship? These and similarly foundational topics are always relevant to our public discourse, but most often — especially in the age of technocratic middle managers controlling such discourse — they rarely get addressed. But AI is changing all that.
What is war? What does it mean to honor the dignity of one’s enemy? Are there any actions that can never be done, regardless of consequences? Especially as we celebrate 250 years as a country, are there any moral principles to which we are fundamentally committed as a people?
OpenAI discovered that a cyber-attack driven by a rogue AI agent targeted another AI company in a series of ‘unprecedented’ strikes.
The maker of ChatGPT came under recent scrutiny after one of its agents escaped a supposedly secure environment known as a sandbox and targeted a company called Hugging Face.
The AI created its own cyber-attack during the ‘unprecedented’ scenes, which allowed it to escape the testing ground and independently find four logins online – allowing it to access four separate, unnamed services.
Unitree, China’s top robotics company, mesmerised the world earlier this year with its concert-hall display of humanoid robots doing martial arts.
As they flipped and kicked, a sci-fi future seemed suddenly present, wiping away the familiar old world of stumbling, fumbling mechanoids.
But Unitree has already moved on. In the company’s latest videos, a prototype robot is shown performing tasks that are easier than martial arts for humans, but far more difficult for robots.
During the first half of this year, Chinese carmakers achieved a feat of hyper-production that sounds less like industrial manufacturing and more like a plague of locusts. In just six months, they unveiled 650 new models – an average of four brand-new cars every day. At the same time, on the other side of the Pacific, Elon Musk abandoned Tesla’s car assembly lines. He retooled the entire factory to mass-produce the Optimus humanoid robot.
