Free Republic

Leading AI chatbots have spooked experts by spitting out detailed instructions on how to build biological weapons capable of causing mass casualties, according to an alarming report Wednesday. While top AI labs like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic have taken extensive steps to ensure their AI models are safe, the New York Times obtained more than a dozen transcripts showing examples in which chatbots described how to cause harm and death in painstaking detail. In one instance, an unnamed AI firm hired David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, to conduct safety tests on its chatbot before public release. Relman was...

During 26 years at the CIA, Marc Polymeropoulos spent a lot of time in rough places, like war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he never suffered any harm until December 2017, when he was sound asleep at a Marriott Hotel in Moscow near the U.S. Embassy. "I was awoken in the middle of the night," recalled Polymeropoulos, 51. "I just had incredible vertigo, dizziness. I wanted to throw up. The room was spinning. I couldn't even stand up without falling down. I had tinnitus ringing in my ears." He suspected a bad case of food poisoning and carried on...