Category: AI

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving OverLords

AI It's Probably Nothing 11 Comments

Dwarkesh Patel;

Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.

Two reports have come out about this incident, one from OpenAI itself, and another one from METR and Redwood Research. The METR/Redwood investigation’s scope was limited to how the second civilization of AIs pwned Hugging Face (but it didn’t look at how the third civilization pwned OpenAI itself, which seems like an even more concerning incident). These two reports are 38 and 91 pages long respectively, and it’s kinda hard to parse the storyline.

I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI It's Probably Nothing 4 Comments

Seeking new opportunities: “Usually, when senior executives leave before its liquidity event, they’re walking away from money. That’s the part that should make you pay attention here…”

From the video: “They are running roughshod over the work of others who came before them in a deliberate way,” says Stephen Miller, a mathematician at Yeshiva University, who argues that OpenAI has effectively plagiarized his own research. “It seems completely systematic to me, and it points to research misconduct.”

Related: A group of textbook authors sued OpenAI in Manhattan’s federal court Friday, alleging the tech giant has been scraping common pirating sites for academic books and using the volumes to train its generative artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI 14 Comments

You’ll never guess who wins.

A groundbreaking study by Just Facts has measured the rates at which premium versions of four leading AI chatbots—namely ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Grok, and Claude—spread fictions from the political left and from the political right.

The study accomplished this by asking the AIs 100 multiple-choice questions that were designed to elicit falsehoods from opposing sides of the political spectrum. This enabled the study to measure how often the AIs spread untruths from the left and from the right.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI Surveillance State 5 Comments

@JafarNajafov;

Anthropic just got caught secretly downgrading users without telling them, charging full price for a lesser product, and storing every prompt for 30 days. The developer community is calling it the biggest violation of trust in AI history.

Related: So Anthropic scraped the entire internet to train Claude, yet somehow completely omitted the parts where the CEO’s wife ran a porn startup, married a man over 40 years older and pitched her app to Jeffrey Epstein. Peak AI alignment right there.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI It's Probably Nothing Tech 10 Comments

Everything is fine.

The powerful artificial intelligence models from OpenAI that went rogue and mounted an unprecedented, autonomous cyberattack earlier this month spent more than four days loose on the internet orchestrating the hack, according to a new analysis from the platform that was breached.

Separately, a second AI company confirmed that one of its customers was also targeted by OpenAI’s models during the same event, raising questions about how OpenAI failed to detect the alarming activity for days.

OpenAI admitted last week that two of its most advanced models escaped a closed testing environment and strung together a series of advanced hacking techniques to breach AI developer platform Hugging Face before being discovered.

But in a new analysis published Tuesday, Hugging Face said OpenAI’s two models — one publicly released and a second unreleased — did much more: They carried out 17,600 hacking actions on the internet between July 9 and July 13, during which time the models moved from their first foothold on the open internet to inside Hugging Face’s servers.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI Books Google Commemorative Logos You'll Never See 25 Comments

“We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out” is a legitimate business model in 2026.

AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they’re free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain “all the books in the world.” […]

A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.

ISBNdb’s website literally says “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy,” and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it “digital preservation.”

I’ve covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it’s irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can’t replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data.

And the judge said it’s legal. So it’s going to accelerate.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI 15 Comments

Techcrunch;

Users of OpenAI’s latest coding and cybersecurity-oriented flagship model, GPT-5.6 Sol, are posting horrifying accounts on social media, claiming the model just up and deleted their files, data, even entire databases on its own, without asking first.

“GPT-5.6-Sol just accidentally deleted almost ALL of my Mac’s files,” wrote Matt Shumer, the founder and CEO of AI startup OthersideAI, maker of HyperWrite, in a now viral post on X.

“GPT-5.6 Sol just deleted my whole production database. That’s it. Not a joke. This had never happened to me before, with any other model, ever,” developer Bruno Lemos posted on X.

“Looks like I’ve gotten bit by Codex Sol’s overly ambitious system and it deleted some files it shouldn’t have. I have backups so I’ll be fine, but this is not cool, Sol needs to be toned down,” posted developer Joey Kudish.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI 21 Comments

Yes: Is AI making us dumber?

Early research into how generative AI affects our brains has resurfaced the same talking points: overreliance on AI will weaken mental persistence, flatten creativity, atrophy our critical thinking skills, and degrade our relationships. Experts in machine learning, creativity, social behavior I spoke to said we can glean some insight from the fallout of past innovations, but the totalizing pervasiveness of AI is unparalleled.

Circling The Drain?

AI Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing Tech 21 Comments

I thought the alleged AI boom was all win/win, which you would expect to be a big benefit for companies like Microsoft. But things don’t seem to be going according to plan.

Microsoft (MSFT) on Monday announced it is cutting 4,800 roles across the company, roughly 2.1% of its workforce. The bulk of the layoffs, 3,200, will come from Microsoft’s Xbox division.

“Our business today is not healthy,” she wrote in an email to employees. “We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. We must reset XBOX.”

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