Free Republic

When it was reported last month that Anthropic’s Claude had resorted to blackmail and other self-preservation techniques to avoid being shut down, alarm bells went off in the AI community.Anthropic researchers say that making the models misbehave (“misalignment” in industry parlance) is part of making them safer. Still, the Claude episodes raise the question: Is there any way to turn off AI once it surpasses the threshold of being more intelligent than humans, or so-called superintelligence?AI, with its sprawling data centers and ability to craft complex conversations, is already beyond the point of a physical failsafe or “kill switch” —...

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...

You don’t need to know any math to understand why the Millennium Prize breakthrough matters. It’s proof of AI’s accelerating and terrifying progress. Why should we care that AI is suddenly insanely good at math? It’s a question that I’ve been asking mathematicians and AI researchers for months, and especially this week, when OpenAI published a solution to one of the notoriously complex Millennium Prize Problems. And it’s the one math question I can answer without breaking into a cold sweat. Math is many things to many people: beautiful, elegant, nightmare fuel. Over the past year, it has also become...