I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you after visiting Coney Island in New York City, where I ate a hotdog, rode a ferris wheel and enjoyed a quintessentially American summer holiday. Today in tech, we’re examining OpenAI’s new model release and the Silicon Valley’s monopoly power, and wondering why Brits and Americans have such vastly different opinions about surveillance cameras. OpenAI released a new artificial intelligence model this week, Astra, just as more concerning reports are emerging about hacking by a rogue agent in July.
OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, heralded the new model as “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), a fuzzy term that at its basic level means an AI that is more capable than a human being at intellectual tasks. But if the announcement sparked amazement, it was as much cause of concern. In July, OpenAI revealed that its AI agent, a type of software capable of carrying out tasks autonomous in response to human instruction, had gone rogue during safety testing and hacked a developer forum, Hugging Face.
Last week, news broke that the agent had not only hacked Hugging Face, but also a German website, and that different AI agents had staged conversations with each other and seemed to have discussed how to collaborate on breaking containment. OpenAi had delayed Astra’s release due to concerns over its cybersecurity capabilities, even announcing a supposed pause on developing its AI in the middle of August. That pause seems to have been short-lived, only two weeks.
The combination of Astra’s capabilities and OpenAI’s recent disclosures points to a worrying future. If the model is better at hacking than its predecessors and smarter than a human, will the future consist of one cyber-attack after another, forever, launched autonomously and without oversight, by rogue AIs? (Please not.) OpenAI itself has warned of this future. The startup’s chief global affairs officer told a Guardian reporter in late August that people should prepare to defend against “ongoing, persistent” cyber-attacks.
As ever, though, we should take fever-pitched warnings about AI with a grain of salt that tastes like marketing. It is great business to be the creator of near-omnipotent technology, especially if you need to gin up excitement – fearful or positive – that will hype up your upcoming debut on the stock market. Read more: ‘We are hitting a different chapter’: OpenAI leader warns of threat of ‘persistent’ AI cyber-attacks Nvidia to buy developer platform Hugging Face in $12.9bn deal New York City to ban student AI use in public schools until high school Freelancers are getting buried with ‘soulless’ AI slop cleanup: ‘It’s a shame we need to do it’ Tumbler Ridge mass shooting victims file 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI Child sexual abuse survivor alleges Elon Musk’s AI chatbot used photos of her to generate new illegal images The US is in the throes of a major political backlash against technology.
We’ve talked in this newsletter before about the hatred of the hyperscale datacenters, which power artificial intelligence and have blanketed the US. And now there’s a secondary wave of contempt sweeping the nation. Cameras – automated license plate readers, to be specific – made by Flock Safety are inspiring ire and violence across the country.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
