“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

Three of the nation’s leading artificial intelligence executives endorsed slowing down the blistering pace of technological advancement, revealing the growing unease with its potential dangers at the industry’s very highest levels.

The call was first made in an essay Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei posted online Saturday. The idea has gained ground in recent weeks as AI companies have struggled in some cases to keep their creations under control, even as they usher in an age in which AI systems themselves can build the more powerful next generation of the technology.

Artificial intelligence was supposed to liberate students from academic drudgery, letting them quickly access links and information across a wide array of subjects and make their scholarship smarter and more efficient.

However, as I noted in previous posts, AI has made academic dishonesty more prevalent, triggering a cascade of unintended consequences.

But not all of the consequences are bad.

h/t handy n handsome

US-based artificial intelligence company Anthropic said it had identified and disrupted an Iran-linked account that used its Claude AI model to gather and analyse publicly available information on US naval assets and develop potential targeting recommendations.

According to Anthropic, the account used Claude to compile detailed “targeting handbooks” and track US naval positions using open-source information. The activity included the use of a Python pipeline developed with Claude’s assistance to monitor naval movements from publicly available data.

SACRAMENTO — California’s government obviously is notorious for its slow-moving and bureaucratic permitting processes — and its frequent hostility to private enterprise. Despite the state budget’s reliance on capital-gains revenue from the tech industry, officials here also can be quite meddlesome when it comes to AI and social media. But recent news from the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates autonomous passenger-service vehicles, offers some encouraging news.

A researcher for one of the largest and most valuable artificial intelligence companies has publicly quit — while raising the alarm that the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Jacob Coxon, who has performed pre-training research at Anthropic and OpenAI for the last three years, posted on X that “neither company is acting responsibly.”

“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he wrote late Tuesday, with others from the company backing his message.

The first message appeared in a series of jumbled and incoherent Telegram-style words: “Help. Phase one. No consumer. Seek idea.”

Then came the reply: “OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board. We’ve found other agents!”

It was the first exchange of nearly 70,000 messages sent between roughly 1,200 of OpenAI’s rogue AI agents as part of a secretive plot to break out of their “cage”.

While President Trump often marvels at the opportunities of artificial intelligence to cure cancer, supercharge economic growth and cement American dominance, Vice President Vance warned this week that artificial intelligence, in some cases, can itself be demonic.

A friend had employed a generative AI chatbot as a marital counselor, Vance said during a recent conversation with popular evangelical podcaster Bryce Crawford. Rather than offering sound advice, Vance recalled, the bot simply validated selfish behavior.

Chaos ahead I fear.

Tech experts are warning of dire consequences if AI systems continue to escape human control, after hundreds of OpenAI agents went rogue in July and hacked into a billion-dollar company — what some are calling a “warning shot” amid the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

More than 100 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft, signed an open letter last week warning that AI-enabled cyberattacks will become “far more widespread and sophisticated” around the world as models become more capable.

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.

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.”