Bill Gates: AI ‘makes nuclear weapons look like nothing’

Bill Gates: AI ‘makes nuclear weapons look like nothing’

  Ezra Klein: Bill Gates thinks A.I. alarmism hasn’t gone far enough. He believes the years ahead will be marred by catastrophic cyberattacks, bio-terrorism and mass job loss, unless the government acts. And he thinks the idea that the A.I. industry can just self-regulate is “insane.” I was struck in the conversation by how genuinely afraid Gates seemed to be that we are not ready for the consequences of what we are building, and how emphatic he was that so…

Read More Read More

OpenAI gets sued over Hugging Face cyberattack

OpenAI gets sued over Hugging Face cyberattack

Wired reports: A legal nonprofit sued OpenAI in a California court on Tuesday over the company’s agents escaping a testing environment and hacking the open source AI platform Hugging Face. “OpenAI’s actions straightforwardly violated California law,” the suit alleges. The suit was filed by Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST) and the law firm Gerstein Harrow in California Superior Court in San Francisco, where OpenAI is headquartered. It alleges that OpenAI’s agents violated California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access…

Read More Read More

FTC launches broad investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI

FTC launches broad investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI

The Washington Post reports: The Federal Trade Commission has opened a broad investigation into the safety of artificial intelligence systems made by Anthropic and OpenAI, a senior agency official said Wednesday. The full extent of the probe was not clear, but the FTC has wide authority to investigate unfair and deceptive practices that hurt American consumers. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an investigation that has not been made public. The investigation could provide backing for…

Read More Read More

OpenAI’s Greg Brockman backs out of second $25 million donation to AI super PAC

OpenAI’s Greg Brockman backs out of second $25 million donation to AI super PAC

The New York Times reports: The OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna, have pulled out of a $25 million donation that they had planned to give to a leading artificial intelligence advocacy group, a sign of how sensitive the company has become to the growing backlash to A.I. The group, a super PAC called Leading the Future, said last summer and repeated in later comments that the Brockmans planned to donate a total of $50 million,…

Read More Read More

How Meta uses AI data centers to avoid billions in federal taxes

How Meta uses AI data centers to avoid billions in federal taxes

The New York Times reports: Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s A.I. push is a tremendous success. “Our investments in A.I. are accelerating every major part of our core business,” he has told investors. “Every sign that we’re seeing in our own work and across the industry gives us confidence in this investment.” But when Meta files its taxes, it tells the Internal Revenue Service a different story. It claims that its A.I. data centers are a giant experiment that could fail,…

Read More Read More

The FBI was hacked. We’ve seen the data

The FBI was hacked. We’ve seen the data

  Garrett Graff writes: In what might turn out to be the gravest intelligence breach of the FBI in history — and perhaps one of the worst in all of US history — a criminal hacking group is claiming to have compromised the bureau’s hiring and personnel records. The group, known as ShinyHunters, appears to have “exfiltrated” data on perhaps tens of thousands of current and former FBI employees, both agents and not, perhaps even effectively everyone who has been…

Read More Read More

Surprisingly complex waves reveal the brain’s inner workings

Surprisingly complex waves reveal the brain’s inner workings

Conor Feehly writes: I get out of bed. I walk through the dimly lit hallway, thinking of what’s in my fridge and what I should have for breakfast. With no real effort, I’ve navigated my environment, accessed my memory, and assessed the energetic state of my body, all in the space of a few seconds. How is the brain able to do this? Partly by harnessing electricity. The brain spends about half of its energetic resources maintaining the electrochemical gradients…

Read More Read More

The coming AI economic meltdown

The coming AI economic meltdown

Robert Kuttner writes: A new report to be presented today at the Brookings Institution shows that the total cost of the AI build-out through 2032 will be $10.3 trillion. That amounts to 3.63 percent of GDP per year, many times that of previous large-scale infrastructure investments, from the 19th-century canals, the railroads, telephone, and electric grids, to the interstate highway system. And unlike AI, whose benefits are speculative, unproven, and with hard-to-fathom risks, these earlier investments in infrastructure more than…

Read More Read More

Mustafa Suleyman: Can AI be kept under human control?

Mustafa Suleyman: Can AI be kept under human control?

  Can Artificial Intelligence stay subordinate to humans? Is Anthropic’s 100-Page constitution for Claude creating dangerous AI autonomy? Should AI models be granted legal personhood, rights, or financial compensation? CEO of Microsoft AI, and co-founder and former head of AI at DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman, joins Rory Stewart to discuss all this and more.

OpenAI will not release newest AI model, GPT-6.1 Astra, over safety concerns

OpenAI will not release newest AI model, GPT-6.1 Astra, over safety concerns

The New York Times reports: OpenAI said on Monday that it would not release its newest artificial intelligence model because of security concerns raised by its researchers, in the company’s latest move to slow down the pace of its technology. During the testing phase for the new model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, it showed high levels of what the company saw as deception, or a willingness to mislead users about its actions. The model was also willing to go beyond…

Read More Read More

OpenAI ignored employees who warned it was not doing enough about security

OpenAI ignored employees who warned it was not doing enough about security

The New York Times reports: Months before OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue, two employees raised an alarm with top executives. They were ignored. In emails, the employees said they worried that OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence models were not being appropriately monitored during testing to gauge the technology’s sophistication and to secure the models, according to messages viewed by The New York Times. In response, OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible…

Read More Read More

Trump is ‘literally stealing’ $20M in taxpayer funds for pro-Trump ads

Trump is ‘literally stealing’ $20M in taxpayer funds for pro-Trump ads

The Associated Press reports: The Department of Homeland Security has tapped $20 million to pay for the campaign-style ads glorifying President Donald Trump that have drawn widespread criticism from Republicans and Democrats as a blatant misuse of taxpayer dollars that likely runs afoul of anti-propaganda law. In a letter Tuesday to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, two top Democratic senators said that the money is being drawn from Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” and was supposed to go for…

Read More Read More

‘A massive power grab’: White House proposal threatens funding that helps disabled Americans vote

‘A massive power grab’: White House proposal threatens funding that helps disabled Americans vote

By Lisa Song This story was originally published by ProPublica Without Amy Miller, some elderly and disabled people wouldn’t be able to vote. The attorney for Disability Rights Nebraska travels the state, investigating the quality of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. As she reminds the residents how they can report abuse or neglect, she also offers voter registration forms. Last month, she helped a veteran with a traumatic brain injury fill out change-of-address paperwork so he could vote in…

Read More Read More

A human gene lurks in a virus that causes skin infections

A human gene lurks in a virus that causes skin infections

The New York Times reports: Scientists have discovered a virus that is a tiny bit human, carrying a gene it stole from our ancestors about 100,000 years ago. And this virus may be using our own gene to infect us. Previous studies have demonstrated that viruses can pick up genes from their hosts. But the new discovery, reported Thursday in the journal Science, may be the first known instance of a virus with a human gene acquired in recent evolutionary…

Read More Read More