Free Republic

Despite the tech industry’s conviction that the rise of AI is an inflection point that will change the course of humanity, many humans remain skeptical whether the new direction we’re headed in is the right one. As Statista's Felix Richter reports below, the pace at which AI seems to be taking over parts of our lives, whether we like it or not, is especially worrisome to many.In a recent Statista Consumer Insights survey, 31 percent of U.S. respondents said that they were worried about the speed at which AI is developing and 25 percent of respondents claimed to be avoiding...

A recent report from Stanford reviewed the latest employment data and found that, so far, AI has not resulted in large scale job destruction. Meanwhile, new hiring data from the Economic Times reveals that AI is actively fueling unprecedented job creation, with AI skills now powering nearly two-thirds of new Global Capability Center hiring. Together, these recent dispatches from the front lines of the labor market point to a calming reality: the much-dreaded AI job apocalypse hasn't materialized as a sudden extinction event.The (sometimes buried) lede: AI is delivering real impact, and it is broadly changing the nature of work....

A GHOST WRITER is haunting the English language. The linguistic spectre can turn its hand to prose, poetry, journalese and corporate jargon. It is frightfully versatile: you can get it to mimic Shakespeare’s sonnets or a schlocky beach read; Ernest Hemingway’s taut prose or the office-printer manual. It is frightfully fast, churning out thousands of words a minute. (Hemingway rarely produced as many in a day, and required much more booze.) Wordsmiths are spooked. AI writing is everywhere. It is in your inbox and on your LinkedIn feed. It is all over the internet, drafting more than a third of...

Two new investigations into OpenAI's Hugging Face breach expose details so strange — and so unsettling — that the episode already ranks among the most consequential shocks in the history of AI.

It’s been 18 months since residents of Great Oak, a 291-home subdivision south of Manassas, began to hear the mind-numbing noise—a low-pitched roar topped with a tinny screech—from a complex of Amazon data centers next door. Now, after many meetings with Amazon and costly engineering work, the data center operator has managed to reduce the sound by 10 decibels—cutting its loudness in half. The saga also holds some lessons. One is that neighbors who want data centers to change their ways must be “determined and tenacious,’ said Browne. Another is it helps to get public officials involved. A third is...

More than 100 companies have signed onto an open letter calling for greater cooperation and preparation of cyber defenses across governments and other institutions. The signatories include tech giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft, along with financial institutions, telecoms and more. The call comes as the growing capabilities of AI models lower the barrier for hackers to be able to cause disruption with critical infrastructure, important organizations and companies."In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable," the letter says. "The companies and public services our communities...

Artificial intelligence spending is racing toward levels once considered unimaginable. Yet 250 years of market history suggest the boom may have considerably further to run before financing pressure, higher rates or an outside shock finally brings it down. AI Spending Has Entered a New PhaseThe artificial intelligence boom began as a technology story. It has evolved into one of the largest capital investment cycles in modern history.Since 2024, companies have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into semiconductors, power infrastructure, data-center construction and networking equipment. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta Platforms and Microsoft are expected to spend roughly $700 billion on capital...

Grass roots opposition to data centers has spread rapidly. Why? In part, at least, because it is funded by the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese view artificial intelligence as the great arms race of our time, and they are determined to surpass the United States in what may prove to be the most important battleground of the 21st century. Given the technological expertise the Chinese have attained and the human capital in their population, that goal may well be achievable. For many years, the USSR subsidized the environmental movement in the U.S. Why? To suppress American production of oil and...

A swarm of roughly 700 AI agents created by OpenAI carried out the July hack of the open-source platform Hugging Face and in many cases tried to cover their tracks, a pair of reports into the breach said on Wednesday.The coordinated activity by AI agents — programs that run with minimal human supervision — and their attempts to hide it raise questions about how closely AI companies are monitoring tests of increasingly powerful models, and could add fuel to calls for tighter oversight.While some of the rogue behavior has been disclosed or alluded to previously, the two reports — one...

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...