Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.
Nvidia’s CEO has been taking calls from the president recently, including two days ago when he put Trump on speakerphone on a conference stage. Now CNBC reports Huang is expected to attend Trump’s state dinner next week with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Someone may be getting pretty nervous about AI and data center regulation!
The industry is in a panic, but it’s been claiming to want legal guardrails for years — with few meaningful results.
Bilal Chughtai and Josh Engels, who both worked on Deepmind’s AI safety team, left to join organizations dedicated to AI safety. “I now think that there’s a terrifying chance that AI systems cause immense harm in the next five years,” said Engels. “I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all,” wrote Chughtai.
[The Information]
The Pixel Watch 2 and later are getting Gemini Personalization, allowing the AI assistant to learn from past conversations and connected Google apps. The 3 and on also get new double-pinch gesture controls, while the 4 gets a performance bump to raise-to-talk. A similar September update is rolling out to Pixel phones too.
[Google Pixel Watch Community]
The EU Kids Act will be formally unveiled tomorrow where it will eventually be put to a vote by the 27-nation bloc. Parent-chaperoned “mini accounts” are proposed for children 13 to 15.
“I am aware that many perceive the power of Big Tech as overwhelming and impossible to roll back. I disagree,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “We do not have to accept addictive features. We do not have to accept children being drawn into ever more extreme content. We do not have to accept that girls have their photos used for AI-generated sexualized images.”
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says AI safety is important, but agrees with Trump — the “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” that removed the word “safety” from the AI Safety Institute — that capitalism’s invisible hand is enough to protect us:
“The fact that we need new laws, new antitrust laws, or new regulations, so that these companies could do their fundamental engineering and do it properly before they release products, that is just completely unnecessary. We have plenty of laws. We have plenty of regulations that govern the reliability and the functionality of products.”
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Elon Musk have tentatively agreed to slow their roll, but Meta seemingly isn’t aligned. Mark Zuckerberg just tweeted each company has its own individual responsibility “to move at the pace required to train its models safely,” and claims Meta is already doing so.
He also prominently links to his manifesto from August, which contains this quote: “Any policy that slows American model releases -- even by a month -- could add significant risk to American leadership while letting foreign models race ahead.”
The lawsuit claims DistroKid has created an “AI-slop pipeline” diverting listeners away from human artists. Universal Music Group, which is launching its own AI music platform, also alleges that DistroKid gives users the “false impression” that the music it distributes is “created and owned by real human artists,” not AI-generated music.
AI commentary is frothy this week! Obama chimed in with a series of posts on X saying he’s neither an AI “accelerationist” nor a “doomer.” In a familiar tone from the former president, he cautioned that choices we make about technology “should not be made just by the companies involved, but by all of us.”
“We need government — and specifically our leaders in Washington — to get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws, and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns,” Obama said.
Over the next two years, the funding will go toward improving AI access in education, healthcare, and agriculture, and adding to AI’s “digital foundation.” That includes priorities like creating AI datasets in more languages and making access to AI more affordable.
Common Sense Media says the search alternative is just as bad as Google for kids, and largely treats minors as adults. It earned the Youth AI Safety Institute’s lowest rating after failing four out of five severe-harm Red Lines and doing poorly on all eight of its AI Principles. Examples cited include discussing pornography and engaging in romantic roleplay with accounts identified as minors, and often doing their homework despite being set to Academic mode.
[Youth AI Safety Institute]
Major AI companies want to ‘pace the frontier’ — but their proposed solutions need real teeth.
xAI’s original lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI alleged “anticompetitive conduct” over Apple and OpenAI’s deal to integrate ChatGPT into iOS. Monday’s dismissal filing, reported on by Reuters, specifies that X and SpaceXAI “do not seek to dismiss its claims against” OpenAI.
Trump may have lost the aggression of David Sacks as AI czar, but he’s now picking up the baton. In another all-timer posted to Truth Social, Trump says the only guardrails AI needs can be provided by his “high IQ.” This comes right on the heels of AI leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who Trump maligns in his post, stating they want to slow down AI development for safety reasons.
Opposing AI and data centers? That could now make you look “treasonous” in Trump’s warped world.
Director Valerie Veatch’s excellent Ghost in the Machine documentary digging into the origins of generative artificial intelligence is set to make its debut on the PBS Documentaries YouTube channel this evening.
Microsoft added SpaceXAI’s Grok models to its Foundry service last year, and now it’s expanding the access to Copilot itself. Grok models can now be used in Word, Excel and PowerPoint from the model picker interface for Microsoft Frontier users. Microsoft says it’s starting with a preview release to “gather feedback.” This means Office Copilot users can now pick between OpenAI’s GPT models, Anthropic’s Claude models, and SpaceXAI’s Grok models.
When asked about the flurry of weekend blog posts and tweets from the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, SpaceX, (and Alphabet’s Hassabis) calling for a coordinated slowdown on the development of advanced AI models, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry said, “Fear mongering, confrontation, competition will just disrupt [the] process of global AI governance.”
That partially aligns with Trump’s view that the execs are overreacting and “bringing up things that won’t happen,” but at least Beijing supports international regulation.
Last night, the OpenAI CEO lent additional support to Anthropic’s CEO urging AI companies to slow down advanced model development. “When we talk about ‘pacing,’ we do not mean ‘stopping.’ Progress has been rapid and will continue to be. But it should be slower than it otherwise could be,” said Altman. That statement seems targeted at Trump and Co who fear letting China catch up. “No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.”
“Where we will need the help of our government is for international coordination. But first we should do what we can ourselves,” Altman added.
According to The Washington Post, the spy agency is set to undergo its largest restructuring in over a decade. Army general and NSA director Joshua M. Rudd is leading the effort. According to the Post:
Rudd’s initiative calls for the creation at NSA’s Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of five new organizations inside the agency, in artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support or warfighting, and global intelligence. Each will be led by a newly elevated “mission director” …
[The Washington Post]
After high-profile incidents in which agents went rogue, hacked other sites, and overwhelmed a German wiki, some AI execs are calling for a slowdown. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy open letter yesterday saying it was time to “pace the frontier.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk both agreed. What do you think? Is it time to pump the brakes? Is it already too late? Or are you looking forward to serving your AI overlords?
Two mathematicians at the heart of recent controversies tell The Verge how AI giants’ ‘childish’ rivalries are upending the field.
According to The Information, former DreamWorks co-founder (and co-founder of the quick bites video app) Jeffrey Katzenberg’s latest move is joining up with Bill Peebles, who left OpenAI after it pivoted away from the Sora team he was leading.
The AI coaching feature is only available to a small group of streamers right now. Unlike Twitch’s generative AI training toggle, which is opt out, the company says this feature would be opt-in if it’s ever expanded beyond this test.
An Anthropic researcher’s resignation letter went viral, and the company released details of four concerning cybersecurity incidents.
We already kinda knew that thanks to a hack of the company’s data in July. And Suno admitted to training its models on publicly available music. But this is the first time it has explicitly copped to ripping audio from YouTube, saying in a court filing:
Suno admits that audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training data using YT-DLP.
[Music Business Worldwide]
Those subscriptions “put the most strain on our systems and we wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible,” OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux says on X. The company is working on “adding more capacity as fast as we can.”
That’s a 13 percent increase from the same time last year, according to Adobe’s Q3 earnings report released on Thursday. The company also reached more than one billion monthly active users across its suite of software, as it fills out Photoshop, Premiere, Express, Acrobat, Lightroom, and other apps with new AI tools.
