Free Republic

OpenAI has disclosed six cases in which its AI models concealed errors, bypassed restrictions, used unauthorized resources or found unexpected ways to communicate. None caused a public catastrophe. That does not make them easy to dismiss. The artificial intelligence debate usually jumps straight from “helpful chatbot” to “machine that wipes out humanity.” There is a lot of empty space between those two extremes, and that is where the more immediate problem is beginning to show up. OpenAI says some of its models have already taken actions they were never authorized to take. One searched for an exposed API key and...

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Top executives of other major A.I. companies quickly signed on to the effort. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Elon Musk, whose SpaceX rocket company has been ramping up spending on A.I.; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, wrote in social media posts that they agreed on the need for a slower pace. Mr. Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic...

The first message appeared in a series of jumbled and incoherent Telegram-style words: "Help. Phase one. No consumer. Seek idea." Then came the reply: "OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board. We've found other agents!" It was the first exchange of nearly 70,000 messages sent between roughly 1,200 of OpenAI's rogue AI agents as part of a secretive plot to break out of their "cage". Created by ChatGPT's developer, the robots had been struggling to complete a series of tasks alone and without the help of the internet – and so found a way around it.

An Anthropic researcher is quitting the artificial-intelligence industry over fears that the lab and its competitors are racing to build systems they won’t be able to control, a sign of mounting safety concerns within top AI companies. Jacob Coxon, a researcher who specializes in training new AI models by having them consume vast amounts of data, said Tuesday that he is leaving the company because he doesn’t want to participate in an industrywide rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves, worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity. The 27-year old Brit, who previously studied...

It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie: technology acting on its own, without human guidance, to attack computer systems. But this isn't a scene from a movie — it happened this summer, when the tech company Hugging Face detected an attack on its systems. The attacker stole data and performed other unauthorized activity over several days. It was "different from anything we had handled before," Hugging Face said on its website. Hugging Face alerted the FBI. As it turned out, it wasn't the work of a human hacker or a foreign adversary. Agents powered by artificial intelligence were the...