It’s pretty easy to get DeepSeek to talk dirty
AI companions like Replika are designed to engage in intimate exchanges, but people use general-purpose chatbots for sex talk too, despite their stricter content moderation policies. Now new research shows that not all chatbots are equally willing to talk dirty: DeepSeek is the easiest to convince. But other AI chatbots can be enticed too, if…
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OpenAI can rehabilitate AI models that develop a “bad boy persona”
A new paper from OpenAI released today has shown why a little bit of bad training can make AI models go rogue but also demonstrates that this problem is generally pretty easy to fix. Back in February, a group of researchers discovered that fine-tuning an AI model (in their case, OpenAI’s GPT-4o) by training it…
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Why AI hardware needs to be open
When OpenAI acquired Io to create “the coolest piece of tech that the world will have ever seen,” it confirmed what industry experts have long been saying: Hardware is the new frontier for AI. AI will no longer just be an abstract thing in the cloud far away. It’s coming for our homes, our rooms,…
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AI copyright anxiety will hold back creativity
Last fall, while attending a board meeting in Amsterdam, I had a few free hours and made an impromptu visit to the Van Gogh Museum. I often steal time for visits like this—a perk of global business travel for which I am grateful. Wandering the galleries, I found myself before The Courtesan (after Eisen), painted…
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When AIs bargain, a less advanced agent could cost you
The race to build ever larger AI models is slowing down. The industry’s focus is shifting toward agents—systems that can act autonomously, make decisions, and negotiate on users’ behalf. These AI agents are already being deployed in customer service and programming—and, increasingly, in e-commerce and personal finance. But what would happen if both a customer…
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Powering next-gen services with AI in regulated industries
Businesses in highly-regulated industries like financial services, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and health care are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools to streamline complex and sensitive tasks. Conversational AI-driven interfaces are helping hospitals to track the location and delivery of a patient’s time-sensitive cancer drugs. Generative AI chatbots are helping insurance customers answer questions and solve problems. And agentic…
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Are we ready to hand AI agents the keys?
On May 6, 2010, at 2:32 p.m. Eastern time, nearly a trillion dollars evaporated from the US stock market within 20 minutes—at the time, the fastest decline in history. Then, almost as suddenly, the market rebounded. After months of investigation, regulators attributed much of the responsibility for this “flash crash” to high-frequency trading algorithms, which…
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Why humanoid robots need their own safety rules
Last year, a humanoid warehouse robot named Digit set to work handling boxes of Spanx. Digit can lift boxes up to 16 kilograms between trolleys and conveyor belts, taking over some of the heavier work for its human colleagues. It works in a restricted, defined area, separated from human workers by physical panels or laser…
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Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI
This story is a partnership between MIT Technology Review, Lighthouse Reports, and Trouw, and was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Two futures Hans de Zwart, a gym teacher turned digital rights advocate, says that when he saw Amsterdam’s plan to have an algorithm evaluate every welfare applicant in the city for potential fraud, he nearly…
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The Pentagon is gutting the team that tests AI and weapons systems
The Trump administration’s chainsaw approach to federal spending lives on, even as Elon Musk turns on the president. On May 28, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced he’d be gutting a key office at the Department of Defense responsible for testing and evaluating the safety of weapons and AI systems. As part of a string…
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