AI & Robotics

This week two conversations about AI safety went viral that demonstrate just how hard it is to discern AI fact from fiction. In the first case, Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and current CEO of mobile carrier Noble Moble, told CNN on Thursday that he had “met with the head of a lab” who had “a belief” that OpenAI’s Hugging Face hacker bots “have…

ChatGPT broke Diogo Almeida’s heart. Almeida was an OpenAI researcher who helped build the chatbot and then invent reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the model-training technique perhaps most responsible for our current age of AI. But despite its capabilities, he was disappointed. “We have lightning in a bottle, and yet it is not useful,” Almeida told…

Text-based AI assistants are a hot market, with Instinct, Wajo, Town, Ollie, and Meta’s Muse agent, which launched last week, vying for users’ attention and tasks. San Francisco-based Instinct is one of the most popular of the lot, attracting huge investor interest at what is reportedly a $10 billion valuation. Instinct’s popularity may now grow even further, as it’s added…

In a lengthy essay published over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a proposal that the AI industry would have rejected instantly even a year ago: embed third-party evaluators inside all frontier AI companies, giving them the power to report safety incidents, assess whether AI models are truly aligned, and share their unvarnished findings with the world. Amodei said Anthropic would…