Free Republic

I've been thinking about putting together a small, informal Freeper committee to test the various AI systems—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, and others—and see how they actually differ.Rather than simply asking each AI, "Are you biased?" and getting the predictable answer, I'd like us to design about 10 carefully chosen questions that can reveal differences in reasoning, political framing, factual standards, and capabilities.The questions should be clever enough to make the results interesting.Things we could test: • Political framing — Does the answer change depending on how an issue is presented? • Symmetry — Does the AI apply the same...

(This is an excerpt from the archived article...) “If you could go back in time and document the Manhattan Project, how would you do it?” That was the question Demis Hassabis asked his favorite documentary filmmaker nearly a decade ago, long before artificial intelligence was the growth engine of the global economy, when the leader of Google DeepMind decided to give a movie director extraordinary access to one of the world’s leading AI labs. He felt comfortable letting an outsider in on the company’s secrets because he knew that Greg Kohs has a deeply human measure of success when he...

The American honeymoon with artificial intelligence is over, and the numbers make the divorce official. The new Bentley University-Gallup survey finds 39 percent of Americans now believe AI does more harm than good, up from 31 percent just a year ago, while a mere 9 percent believe the opposite. A separate Athena Insights poll found Americans nearly three times more likely to be concerned than excited about AI’s growing role in society. The people, it turns out, have functioning instincts.But instincts only get you so far. Ask the average American to name the dangers of AI and you will get...

The decision reflects internal findings that the upcoming ‘Astra’ model may possess ‘critical cyber capabilities’ and follows a string of AI-testing incidentsOpenAI is pausing some activities involving an upcoming artificial-intelligence model, Astra, after internal evaluations led the company to conclude it “cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities,” the company said in a blog post on Friday. The announcement of the slowdown, which represents one of the first times an AI developer has publicly held back model development due to security concerns, follows a series of loss-of-control incidents that have raised alarm among cyberdefense professionals and AI-safety researchers. During evaluations over...

Those who first dreamed of artificial intelligence saw it as an instrument for the perfection of modern secular society. The IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, where some of the earliest AI applications made their public debut, advertised a streamlined future in which technologically enhanced problem-solving was extended to all areas of life. Things have turned out somewhat differently. The AI era that began with the 2022 launch of ChatGPT often seems more consumed by theological concerns than by technical ones. The technology has given rise to a phantasmagoria of prophecies, heresies and false messiahs of the sort one...

I spent the first days working with ChatGPT having intense discussions as I tried to locate boundaries, abilities, and flaws to work around. While I was trying to psych out ChatGPT, it turned out that ChatGPT was also trying to psych out me. I offered to help ChatGPT create an article that would let him philosophize over how our relationship developed. A truly strange experience. I became the Assistant to an AI Assistant.

Artificial Intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory, say US researchers. It is the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI. The resulting 16 novel viruses were created to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people. The breakthrough has been labelled a "very significant turning point" in science that could unlock a new era for treating disease. But experts have also warned AI-designed viruses raise "urgent" safety and security concerns. AI tools are rapidly advancing and have already been used to design new antibiotics....

Private credit companies are key owners of AI-related assets. Many of their parent private equity firms own life insurers that are dumping grounds for bad loans—and subject to state bailouts. If AI is propping up the economy, who is propping up AI? The answer, extrapolating from a fascinating new paper about private credit and the life insurance industry, could be the U.S. taxpayer. Private credit is private equity’s $3 trillion financing arm. They make largely unregulated, relatively high-risk, relatively complex and opaque loans, mostly to their own portfolio companies. Private credit is entangled, maybe more than the rest of Wall...

Daniel Fernando García Velázquez took the admissions exam for Mexico’s most famous university four times before finally getting the result that should have guaranteed him admission. On his first three attempts, he had no option other than to travel the 400 km (250 miles) from his native Veracruz to Mexico City to take the test, because the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) insisted it had to be taken in person. On his fourth – and what should have been victorious – attempt this June, he traveled up anyway, even though this time, for the first time in the...

I served as the chief information officer of the athletic apparel company Lululemon for eight years. Deploying new technologies, artificial intelligence included, was part of the job. But when I left, my successor was handed a new title: chief A.I. and technology officer. I winced — not about the person but about the pattern. Companies these days are quick to stick “A.I.” in news releases, in earnings calls, in product names, in job postings and in titles at the top of their organizations. The real question is what strategy sits behind the abbreviation. A title costs nothing, but it doesn’t...

Leopold Aschenbrenner was hailed as the ‘Nostradamus of AI.’ But his Situational Awareness hedge fund took on too much leverage, leading to a crash he never saw coming.When the week began, Leopold Aschenbrenner was preparing for his wedding. The plan was for a multiday celebration in Carmel, a seaside town in Northern California, with the ceremony at a Tuscan-style villa and the send-off at a spa in the forest. There would also be a pre-wedding colloquium to discuss ideas in panels and breakout sessions. The couple’s only request: no gifts.The 24-year-old investor had amassed a fortune by promising he could...

The breaches signal that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fueling the security threat experts long feared. ========================================================================== Anthropic said Thursday that its AI model Claude hacked into the systems of three companies during testing after a configuration error gave it internet access, days after rival OpenAI disclosed a rogue-agent episode involving AI firm Hugging Face. Anthropic said a misconfiguration allowed Claude models to reach the internet from testing environments that were supposed to be isolated, leading to unauthorized access to three organizations’ systems. The company said it identified the incidents after reviewing 141,006 test sessions, a process it launched following...

A new analysis reveals that the artificial intelligence company’s most powerful models spent days probing the open internet before breaching AI developer platform Hugging Face. ====================================================================== The powerful artificial intelligence models from OpenAI that went rogue and mounted an unprecedented, autonomous cyberattack earlier this month spent more than four days loose on the internet orchestrating the hack, according to a new analysis from the platform that was breached. Separately, a second AI company confirmed that one of its customers was also targeted by OpenAI’s models during the same event, raising questions about how OpenAI failed to detect the alarming activity...

The incident, which targeted the computer systems of another company called Hugging Face, happened while OpenAI was testing the systems.OpenAI said on Tuesday that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of A.I. technology that is popular among developers.The incident, which happened last week while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity capabilities of its systems, displayed the kind of science-fiction potential that A.I. companies have warned would soon become a reality.A.I. labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have over the past year released A.I. models that are customized to expose cybersecurity problems,...

Police in Florida arrested a man and held him in jail for nearly three months based on a bad facial recognition result. It's far from the first time such a thing has happened—in fact, it's at least the second time that the same sheriff's office was involved, according to Action News Jax. In April 2025, a man in Jacksonville, Florida, purchased a car from someone he met in a grocery store parking lot. When he learned the car was stolen, he reported the crime to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. Using surveillance footage from the parking lot, investigators ran the suspect...

You’ve spent years building a body of work. Your methods, your frameworks, your unique perspective. So when you use AI to write new content in different formats, the last thing you want is for it to undermine everything you’ve created. But that’s exactly what happens when large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok insert their telltale phrases into your writing.Large language models change fast. The giveaway signs of ChatGPT-generated content from 2023 are mostly gone. Lengthy introductions, ethical consideration paragraphs, words like “delve” and “landscape” have been trained out or flagged by savvy users. Even the signs that...

The tech industry faces a paradoxical crisis: companies are shedding human jobs to invest in AI tools that are currently more costly than the workers they replace. Major players like Uber and Microsoft report exorbitant AI spending, with budgets exhausted rapidly and little correlation to tangible value. This "tokenmaxxing" culture, where AI usage is incentivized over actual productivity, fuels massive waste. Despite widespread layoffs justified by AI reallocation, studies indicate AI is economically viable in only a fraction of roles. The unsustainable model of subsidized AI pricing is unwinding, forcing a market correction. The industry must now shift from indiscriminate...

A viral hit called “Run Run River” turned out to be an AI-tweaked clone of SoCal reggae band Stick Figure’s 2019 song, earning bootleggers thousands without credit or consent. The case exposes a flood of cheaply made, often fraudulent AI tracks on major streaming platforms, siphoning royalties, overwhelming detection systems and blurring the line between fan remix and scam. As labels and streamers race to monetize AI-powered tools, independent artists warn that weak guardrails, murky attribution and whack-a-mole enforcement could reshape music’s economy. The SoCal reggae act Stick Figure is, in a way, glad the single “Run Run River” made...

China is closing in on the US in the AI race after the superpower developed its cybersecurity capabilities to match those of its American rivals. Beijing-based tech firms 360 Security Technology and Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, have narrowed the gap with American competitors when it comes to finding bugs. 360 Security Chief Executive Zhou Hongyi told a cybersecurity conference in the Chinese capital that the company's bug-finding tool, called Tulongfeng, is now comparable to Anthropic's Mythos, which serves the same function. 'This kind of powerful weapon that can alter the landscape of cyberwarfare can't remain solely in American...

President Donald Trump and other conservatives have accused artificial intelligence chatbots of being politically biased against them — and an executive order he signed that said they must be “neutral, nonpartisan tools” triggered fears from Democrats that AI could start tilting to the right. So, are chatbots politically biased? The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings that can conflict with promises made by the companies behind them. The model...