'In a detailed account published yesterday of the reasons he left Google DeepMind, researcher Alex Turner ( @turntrout.bsky.social ) teaches us that such cynicism is alive and well. But he also shows us how to fight it.' aistop.watch/p/researcher...

'Their CEO has actively called for a race to recursively self-improving AI, the single most catastrophically dangerous technology in history, despite claiming a 10–25% chance this ends in disaster “on the scale of the human civilization.”...

'Not too long ago, AI itself was still science fiction. And just because H. G. Wells first conceived of “atom bombs” in a 1914 novel doesn’t mean the danger posed by nuclear weapons was any less real a few decades later'

'The top AI story in major media this morning was a short statement signed by nearly 200 economists, researchers, and tech leaders warning that We Must Act Now to “understand the economics of transformative AI”...

'You may not like Plan A, Plan S, or any plan you’ve seen so far. Cool! I don’t wholeheartedly love any plan I’ve seen yet, either. But if you’re not down with something like Plan A or Plan S as a starting point, what’s your alternative?

'There’s an end-times feel to the whole piece. These gig workers and the companies hiring them all recognize that their work reflects a time of transition during which humans still have something to teach AIs. But the AIs are learning fast.'

'Amid urgent calls to fill the vacuum of much-needed AI regulation, it can sometimes feel easy to forget that many regulations really suck... Bureaucracies are full of calcified rules dating back to McCarthy and fax machines, some of them declared unconstitutional decades ago but still on the books'

'Then there are the two plans that seem to have a decent shot: negotiate a verifiable slowdown with China and proceed with caution (the authors’ Plan A) or take it one step further and shut the whole thing down (Plan S).'

'This reporting is largely false, and I’m sad to see a sitting House committee chair amplifying it. No, Chinese models are not as good at cybersecurity as Anthropic’s Mythos. They are, however, much cheaper to run, and adequate for many tasks.'

A final implication of the J-space paper is that there’s probably plenty of room at the top. The amount of mental workspace we have in our human brains is famously small — often estimated at 3 to 5 concepts at a time [...] They found that the J-space of today’s models also seems small, for now.

“Our institutions...are not ready for machines that decide.” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres speaks on A.I.

"You know we’re out of our depth when we bring in the philosophers. That’s kind of the field’s whole schtick. It’s only philosophy until we have a handle on it, at which point we call it something else: mathematics, physics, economics..."

"In a footnote, Wildeford, [...] says he is “50% sure we will have such 'superintelligent’ AI systems before the end of 2036 absent some major war or regulation disrupting current technological progress."

"'Over the next 250 years, what do you believe will be the most important challenge for America to overcome?'' Respondents were asked to select three responses out of 18 listed. The third-most chosen concern, selected by 35% of Congressional staffers, was 'losing control of AI.'"

'On many doctorate-level questions, “machines have moved from well below expert level to well above it”'

"A fortnight and change after imposing an apparently total blackout on frontier AI company Anthropic’s most powerful models, the U.S. government is walking back the restrictions. This whole episode was a mess in many ways, but it also offers reason for hope."

"Even submerged submarines could be tracked from space, in good weather, using techniques already known to work; once located, your ubiquitous drone subs could stalk them around the clock."

"The idea that a company could rival a nation may seem farfetched, but even setting aside the potentially gameboard-flipping implications of AI, there is historical precedent. [...] the British East India Company [...] which 'became a private corporation that governed an empire.'"

"It’s tempting to argue over the right amount of neutrality or bias an AI ought to have, but such arguments miss the bigger picture. Right now, no one can reliably make the entity under the mask care about anything."

"If we wait until we can viscerally feel the dangers of superintelligence before we ban or regulate it, it will most likely be too late."

But the elephant being ignored is Anthropic itself. It, and other frontier labs, are racing towards superhuman AI, dragging Chinese copycats along for the ride. The U.S. should take steps to make it harder for China to access dangerous capabilities, but this is not enough;

Yesterday Alex Bores lost the NY-12 primary. But in a way, everyone won

The APA releases new results from a survey of over 12,000 psychologists about patients using AI

"The timeline is not years, it is months." Early this morning, Five Eyes—the secretive alliance of intelligence agencies for the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—issued a rare public warning: AI is accelerating the "speed, scale, and sophistication of cyber threats."

The situation with Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models has many asking if we’ve seen all the AI we’re going to see — if models past a certain threshold will never make it to a public release for fear of what they might do in the wrong hands. Read the rest:

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. And if it sounds like an AI-written short story and gets a score of “100% AI Generated” from Pangram, it was probably written by an AI, even if you might never know for sure. Read the rest:

If it quacks like AI, it's probably AI. Or is it? We can never be sure. Read the digest in its entirety: aistop.watch/p/duck-tales

“Move fast and break things” has long been the strategy of the tech industry: Deploy what you can, when you can, and entrench yourself before the government can say whether there should be some ground rules… Read the full dispatch:

The world is absurd. And people are greedy. These are two throughlines from the 1963 film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, in which various factions compete to find a suitcase full of money only to end up in full body casts by the time the credits roll. Read the full entry:

NPR’s word of the week was “Luddite”, a term often used to refer to someone who hates modern technology and is against progress. You’ve probably heard it in the context of AI, with critics of the AI explosion viewed by some as simply “behind the times”... Read the full dispatch:

Can a 180-ton machine the size of a school bus just go missing? Read the rest of the entry:

Could AI push us towards a gig economy? A piece in The Guardian today argues “yes.” With companies outsourcing parts of jobs to technology, it’s easier to hire contractors, rather than full timers, for the parts that are left. Read the rest of the entry:

I don’t know why high school teachers and college professors assign and grade written work to be done outside of class anymore. The AI tools for cheating are too good. Read the rest of Mitch’s experience:

A pair of articles today — one in the New York Times, the other in Bloomberg — declare that the “tokenmaxxing” era has officially ended. They aren’t the first. Read the full entry:

The latest news around the dispute between the Trump administration and Anthropic over its blocked Fable and Mythos models is that everyone is getting an education. Read the full dispatch:

Machine learning researcher Nicholas Carlini — then working for Google — thought concerns that GPT-2 could be used to mass-produce false or misleading text were overblown, per a profile in The Wall Street Journal. Read the Donald’s full take:

Pew Research published several new polls today on how Americans view AI. Several results struck me as interesting… Read the results and Joe’s opinion on them:

Today, three different outlets covered extinction risk and loss of control. The articles all take very different approaches, but what interests me is where they agree. Read what the rest of the articles say:

A new study out of the UK AI Security Institute and Oxford finds that: Frontier AI can now out-persuade expert humans in conversation. This held even when humans chose their topics, prepared in advance, and competed for £1,000 prizes. Read the full entry:

Go the way of the Neanderthals, or don't. A proposal to align AI with religion, and why the Fable cyber case may have no fix either side can live with. Read the full dispatches: aistop.watch/p/the-way-of...

What’s the latest with the Anthropic cut? ... A lot of people in or close to the White House are unimpressed with the administration’s behavior in this matter. To find out why, read more of this and other analyses:

Access to Fable and Mythos got cut! As Anthropic tells it, at 5:21 p.m. on June 12, they received a directive from the U.S. government to suspend access to their best Claude models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Read the full analysis:

SpaceX's first day on the stock market was deemed a major success. Shares traded about 20% higher than they opened, and an estimated 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires. Read more from Mitchell Howe, Alex Beck and Alana Horowitz Friedman: aistop.watch/p/launch-party

"A machine superintelligence does not need to be built in an American data center to risk an American life." MIRI president Nate Soares and former OpenAI board member Helen Toner on what it would actually take to halt the race.

"At the very least, we should absolutely not be making minds smarter than ourselves that, for all we know, might also be more conscious than ourselves." Mitchell Howe on why we shouldn't treat AI consciousness as a settled question, in yesterday's Digest.

Anthropic sees AI building itself, suggests slowing the race Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark is one of two lead authors on this new report about AI increasingly “closing the loop” on its own development within the company.

In yesterday's Digest: * Anthropic expands its Mythos cyber model program to the EU. * "Chipflation": memory chips cost 6x what they did a year ago. * How AI summaries are rewriting the SEO playbook to fool LLMs. * UK publishers can finally opt out of Google's AI summaries.

"You can't trust the labs with your private information. You sure can't trust them with your life." Hackers seized high-profile Instagram accounts by politely asking Meta's support bot for access. Donald Gauvreau on what that should teach us👇

"This move surprised no one." Anthropic has filed for a roughly trillion-dollar IPO, expected this fall. The filing was confidential, so the news was thin. The company's footprint on the agent economy is anything but. Mitchell Howe in yesterday’s Digest 👇

Abliterate! It sounds like it belongs in the curriculum at Hogwarts, but “abliteration” is more a tool of the dark arts.