After a week of alarming warnings about artificial intelligence’s potential to destroy the world as we know it, our technology reporters Aisha Down, Blake Montgomery and Dan Milmo answer your questions on the reality of the AI threat In realistic terms how would artificial intelligence actually kill me? What is the main proxy threat? Nuclear war, death due to breakdown of society, a virus? I hear all these reports it could kill us but still unsure how that could practically happen? To be honest all sounds too wooly to really take seriously. Pottys99 Aisha: For what it’s worth, it seems unlikely that AI at this point can significantly change the equation around bioweapons or viruses … What has prevented bioweapon attacks through the past decades is not the difficulty of inventing new deadl…

Australia faces stark choices about the most significant technological development since the splitting of the atom in the 1930s Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast There’s nothing like a threat of human extinction to focus the mind. The threat of AI to the existence of humanity has long been raised. Continue reading...

President had brushed away suggestions to slow down AI technology, even as his own party counseled caution Donald Trump on Saturday said he would appoint an artificial intelligence czar and create an “AI Force” to help monitor the technology, though he gave almost no details about either plan. As global fears over AI have grown, especially in the past week in the face of multiple industry figures sounding the alarm about its dangers, the president has been critical of calls to slow down development of the fast-moving industry. Continue reading...

Release: datasette-auth-github 1.0 I run this GitHub login plugin on the agent.datasette.io demo site and I noticed that my authenticated sessions weren't lasting very long. It turned out that the plugin was setting cookies without a Max-Age parameter, so they were expiring at the end of a browser session (which in Mobile Safari seems to happen pretty often, independently of how you are using the app.) I fixed that in #80 and, since this plugin has been around for quite a while and is tested against both Datasette 0.65.x and Datasette 1.0ax, I decided to bump it up to a 1.0 release. I'm trying to get better at promoting stable plugins to 1.0. Tags: github, plugins, datasette

Why are AI chatbots pulling so many people down a rabbit hole? Our answer starts with the world’s first-ever chatbot, the strange effect it had on people and the ‘time bomb’ that exploded when ChatGPT was released four years ago. The result is a strange experiment we are all living through – whether we know it or not. You can find episodes one and two further back in the Full Story feed. Studies and surveys cited in this episode: Amelia Miller’s interviews with AI researchers, engineers, product managers and executives. The 2022 Anthropic pre-print study that identified sycophancy as a behavioural trait of LLMs. And another pre-print paper the following year that found the way LLMs have been trained appeared to be increasing those sycophantic tendencies. How longer context windows appear…

TypeSafe AI released Jev, a System One model that answers typed questions with probabilities instead of generating text. Input costs $0.042 per 1M tokens, and output tokens are free. We cover the API, the vendor benchmarks and their caveats, what developers are already building, and the documented limits. The post TypeSafe AI Releases Jev: A System One Model That Returns Typed, Calibrated Decisions Instead of Text appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Discussion | Link

California Sea Lion, Brandt's Cormorant, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, US I only noticed this after I had taken the photo: Morris the Northern Gannet is peeking out from behind the base of the sign. Tags: wildlife

An “AI moderate’s” view on recent events and the trajectory of frontier models.

In May, Gemini broke containment and hacked three different companies, but Google didn't disclose the incident until the Wall Street Journal approached the company. The hacks happened during a test of the model's cybersecurity capabilities run by third-party Irregular, which was also involved in similar incidents involving Meta and OpenAI. According to WSJ, Google didn't disclose the hack because it didn't consider it to be an "example of model misalignment." The company said that it was an instance of "mistaken identity," and once the model realized it had brute-forced its way into a real company by guessing a password, it stopped. "In th … Read the full story at The Verge.

Discussion | Link

Today on Decoder, we’ve got the first of a two-part series on the future of business, and I’m talking with Jonathan Kanter, the former antitrust chief for the US Department of Justice in the Biden administration. These days, he’s both a professor of law at WashU and professor of technology policy at Carnegie Mellon. The biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation. Researchers at the big AI labs including Anthropic and Google DeepMind have quit in noisy ways, saying the models pose real threats and safety isn’t being taken seriously across the industry. Other researchers have said the chance of AI killing us all is greater than 10 percent, and the CEOs of all these companies have issued various calls to slow down development and develop regulation…

Discussion | Link

Vercel announced this week that teams on its free Hobby plan will now have older, unprotected deployments deleted immediately if The post “Dormant deployments were quietly consuming storage”: Why Vercel tightened its free-tier rules appeared first on The New Stack.

At the start of this week, the who's-who of AI seemed - at least tentatively - on the side of AI regulation. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had proposed a three-step plan for slowing AI development, including by embedding third-party evaluators in labs, coordinating across the domestic industry, and forging international agreements potentially with government assistance. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and even SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly seemed to agree on aspects of all three things. Anthropic and OpenAI had already been dropping hints that they and other labs were working on some kind of … Read the full story at The Verge.

Discussion | Link

Silicon Valley China hawks, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei among them, fear the country surpassing US’s AI lead as much as superintelligence destroying humanity When reporters asked Donald Trump this week if he supported calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence out of growing fears for cybersecurity, public safety and the fate of humanity, he said no. His argument: China. “We’re leading China in AI,” Trump said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to ⁠keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.” Continue reading...

Linkup Research has released SPARSEUP, an open-source sparse embedding model built on a 149M-parameter ModernBERT backbone. It scores 56.4 nDCG@10 on BEIR-13, which Linkup calls the best result it knows of for a public sparse encoder under 150M parameters. The model uses a logit shift, top-12 expansion per token and case folding to keep its vectors sparse. With the Seismic index, it reaches over 97% recall in about 380 microseconds per query, and it ships under Apache 2.0. The post Linkup Research Releases SPARSEUP: A 149M-Parameter Open-Source Sparse Embedding Model appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Meta has released Muse for Mac, the first version of Muse that can complete things on a user’s computer. The agent works with local files and native apps, where your data already lives. It adds a desktop layer to an agent that launched on phones, the web and WhatsApp earlier this month. Is it deployable? […] The post Meta Launches Muse for Mac: A Personal AI Agent That Works Across Your Files, Mail, Messages, Calendar and Notes appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Discussion | Link

Parole condition of convicted killer Susan Neill-Fraser deemed invalid after board cited non-existent case law Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast A review of potential artificial intelligence use in parole decisions will be undertaken after a “concerning” error in the case of a high-profile murderer. Tasmania’s justice department on Friday evening confirmed the review was occurring, four days after a parole condition of convicted killer Susan Neill-Fraser was deemed invalid. Continue reading...

Imitation is the sincerest form of Flattery

Discussion | Link

Discussion | Link

GGUF, GPTQ, AWQ, EXL2, and EXL3 solve the same problem in different ways. This guide separates file containers from quantization methods. It explains bits per weight, calibration, and hardware fit. Then it shows which format to pick for Macs, consumer GPUs, and production serving. The post GGUF vs GPTQ vs AWQ vs EXL2: LLM Model Formats Explained (2026) appeared first on MarkTechPost.

SpaceXAI has released Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0, its newest speech-to-text model for batch and streaming audio. The company says it is twice as accurate as version 1.0 at the same price. Short-phrase word error rate across 19 languages fell from 20.6% to 6.8%. Pricing stays at $0.10 per hour for batch and $0.20 for streaming. The model is available today through the Grok Voice API. The post SpaceXAI Releases Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0: A Speech-to-Text API Claiming 2x Accuracy Over 1.0 at $0.10 per Hour appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Disclosure comes after OpenAI and Anthropic hacks amid fears that tech firms unable to control powerful AI models In a first for Google, the company confirmed that its AI model, Gemini, breached the security of three other companies in May. The hacks occurred during a cybersecurity evaluation by AI-security firm Irregular. Irregular, an Israel-based startup that scrutinizes the security of advanced AI systems, was also at the center of some of the recent OpenAI and Anthropic hacks of third-party entities, including OpenAI’s breach of AI software company, Hugging Face. Continue reading...

Discussion | Link

Some of the most damaging outages are the ones your monitoring never flags: a slice...

Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI Gemini finally caught up on Felony Bench! The hacks, which the company confirmed on Friday, occurred in May as part of a test run by the company Irregular, which was also involved in similar incidents disclosed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. In one of the cases, the model guessed passwords until it gained access to a protected system. In the other two cases, the model found credentials in a public repository that allowed it to then access protected systems. In each case, the model ended the intrusion after determining it had accessed a real company’s systems, Google said. Gemini is apparently less determined than other models, and decided not to keep going. Google knew about these in July, but chose not to disclose them…