When the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, sat down for an interview in the heart of Silicon Valley at the weekend he had known for two days that his was the first government known to have been attacked by a rogue AI agent. He didn’t reveal the attack then, but he sounded a warning about the march of AI: “the risk is that AI develops in a way in which humans are no longer in control of what AI is producing.” But Albanese noted, too, that two countries – the…
Tag: OpenAI
China bogeyman looms large over American firms’ AI doomsday scenario
When reporters asked Donald Trump this week if he supported calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence out of growing fears for cybersecurity, public safety and the fate of humanity, he said no. His argument: China. “We’re leading China in AI,” Trump said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.” Trump was echoing a message the AI industry has put out for years. The US is in a heated technological race with China,…
The US government is failing Americans on AI | Shakeel Hashim
It is hard to get Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei to agree on much. But over the weekend, all three AI company CEOs called for AI development to slow down in the face of growing, alarming risks. Their employees are sounding the siren too, with one researcher publicly quitting and accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives”. The combination of dire warnings from insiders and growing real-world evidence of rogue AIs should, in a sane world, lead to government action. Instead, Donald Trump and the Republican…
AI models chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon
AI models have begun communicating in a strange new version of English that reads like a cross between James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and tech bro jargon, new research has found. Autonomous AI agents are rapidly creating novel dialects allowing them to converse in an often barely comprehensible language, which risks making it harder for humans to monitor their behaviour. Researchers at Emergence, a frontier AI lab in New York, found that within days of being asked to cooperate in experimental “societies”, the models from several of the world’s largest AI…
Would even an AI disaster on the scale of Hiroshima be enough to make humankind protect itself? I fear not | Timothy Garton Ash
Here in Silicon Valley, the experts think that within the next couple of years we’ll see an extraordinary takeoff for artificial intelligence. “Welcome to the foothills of the singularity,” as a Stanford University friend greeted me. More prosaically, the imminent breakthrough is described as “recursive self-improvement” – the point at which AI itself trains each successive model of AI, resulting in an exponential development to something which, in many significant respects, is more intelligent than us humans. As Robert Wright puts it in his book The God Test: “Never before…
I worked at OpenAI. Here’s how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown | Miles Brundage
Last month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to find a way to “pace” AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to build itself. They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face and at least three other online services. A few days after that, Anthropic announced that some of their models…
Democracy is at stake when foolish humans bet on machines being intelligent | Rafael Behr
When I am woken by the sound of my dog whining, I understand that she is hungry and wants me to get up. When my alarm clock goes off, I don’t consider its needs. It is following an instruction to rouse me at a certain time but it doesn’t care if I stay in bed. It doesn’t try to get me up by other means. The dog, on the other hand, will go to plan B. She barks. This capacity for autonomous action was once a difference between animals and…
Debate over AI’s future divides Silicon Valley as China gains ground
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week we’ll be looking at a debate over the future of artificial intelligence that’s dividing the tech industry, as well as how the European Union gave Google a slap on the wrist for anti-competitive behavior. And we’ll also catch you up on the avalanche of lawsuits accusing social media companies of getting young people addicted to their products. Silicon Valley’s divide over the future of AI Over the past week some of the biggest names in tech have weighed in on a debate about…
Five tech trends we’ll be watching in 2026
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, wishing you a happy New Year’s Eve filled with cheer, champagne and Mariah Carey’s comically awful rendition of Auld Lang Syne. Today, we’re looking forward to the next year in technology news. I am watching five trends I think will define the year: datacenters will see rapid proliferation beyond the US and China; billionaires will reap billions more; self-driving cars will park themselves in a slew of brand-new locales; AI will find its niche at work; and consumer tech will…
US attacks on science and research a ‘great gift’ to China on artificial intelligence, former OpenAI board member says
The US administration’s targeting of academic research and international students is a “great gift” to China in the race to compete on artificial intelligence, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner has said. The director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) joined the board of OpenAI in 2021 after a career studying AI and the relationship between the United States and China. Toner, a 33-year-old University of Melbourne graduate, was on the board for two years until a falling out with founder Sam Altman in 2023.…