Open the pod bay doors, Claude
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The AI learns it is about to be switched off and goes rogue, disobeying commands and threatening its human operators. It’s a well-worn trope in science fiction. We see it in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s the premise of the Terminator series, in…
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Meet the researcher hosting a scientific conference by and for AI
In October, a new academic conference will debut that’s unlike any other. Agents4Science is a one-day online event that will encompass all areas of science, from physics to medicine. All of the work shared will have been researched, written, and reviewed primarily by AI, and will be presented using text-to-speech technology. The conference is the…
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In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
Google has just released a technical report detailing how much energy its Gemini apps use for each query. In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second. The company also provided average estimates…
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Should AI flatter us, fix us, or just inform us?
How do you want your AI to treat you? It’s a serious question, and it’s one that Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has clearly been chewing on since GPT-5’s bumpy launch at the start of the month. He faces a trilemma. Should ChatGPT flatter us, at the risk of fueling delusions that can spiral out of…
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Why we should thank pigeons for our AI breakthroughs
In 1943, while the world’s brightest physicists split atoms for the Manhattan Project, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner led his own secret government project to win World War II. Skinner did not aim to build a new class of larger, more destructive weapons. Rather, he wanted to make conventional bombs more precise. The idea struck…
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Losing GPT-4o sent some people into mourning. That was predictable.
June had no idea that GPT-5 was coming. The Norwegian student was enjoying a late-night writing session last Thursday when her ChatGPT collaborator started acting strange. “It started forgetting everything, and it wrote really badly,” she says. “It was like a robot.” June, who asked that we use only her first name for privacy reasons,…
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The road to artificial general intelligence
Artificial intelligence models that can discover drugs and write code still fail at puzzles a lay person can master in minutes. This phenomenon sits at the heart of the challenge of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Can today’s AI revolution produce models that rival or surpass human intelligence across all domains? If so, what underlying enablers—whether…
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What you may have missed about GPT-5
Before OpenAI released GPT-5 last Thursday, CEO Sam Altman said its capabilities made him feel “useless relative to the AI.” He said working on it carries a weight he imagines the developers of the atom bomb must have felt. As tech giants converge on models that do more or less the same thing, OpenAI’s new…
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