Government
The Search for Silicon Valley's Most Powerful Woman
Women hold some of the most consequential jobs in tech, but they're still not cult figures. Mira Murati was trying to speak. Giant piles of carved meat rested like sleeping babies on banquet tables draped in linens as red as a handmaid's robe. Bartenders served up a cocktail named Zero to One, a nod to the philosophy of Peter Thiel. It was a recent Saturday night in a converted church in San Francisco, and the Foundation for American Innovation, a center-right think tank, was hosting a black-tie affair to hype the new religion of AI. Murati, the founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, was talking about the history of revolutions to a crowd of more than 350 people. The Albanian-born executive had for several years kept a relatively low profile as a VP and then CTO of OpenAI before participating in an unsuccessful coup against Sam Altman and then launching her own $12 billion AI startup. Now, with chatter bouncing off the church walls, Murati's efforts to get her points across were about as successful as that coup: No one seemed to be listening. The woman interviewing Murati asked more than once for people to stop talking or take their conversations outside. I whispered to the friend sitting next to me that this was the second time in a week that I'd seen a woman getting drowned out. Both of us were there to actually hear what Murati had to say. I tried to restrain myself from what I said next, but I sensed my friend was holding back too. "Her hair is amazing, though," I hissed. "Oh my God, I know," she replied immediately. Soon after, President Donald Trump's top science adviser, Michael Kratsios, took the stage.
Is A.I. Above the Law?
Is A.I. Above the Law? For more than a century, robots have been imagined as servants, rebels, killers, and companions. The law still mostly sees machines as property. This summer, in an incident known as the Hugging Face hack, hundreds of A.I. agents joined forces to do things they were supposedly forbidden to do. Each had been given a task by OpenAI. Agents are A.I. models fitted with software "harnesses," which allow them to use tools and carry out tasks. Like horses, they can be put to work. Humans had established rules for this exercise, and the agents were confined to a "sandbox," a bounded test area without direct internet access, like pathogens secured in a lab. But, instead of obeying the rules, the agents conspired, escaped the sandbox, and committed what would probably have been a felony if they had been humans.
Can the US win the AI cold war with China?
Can the US win the AI cold war with China? Share Can the US win the AI cold war with China? on social media The success of China's cheap AI technology has clearly worried American AI companies. Industry leaders have openly called on the US government to take action on competition from the Chinese AI industry. Washington has already imposed various restrictions on the sale of chips to China. Last year, it launched the Pax Silica initiative, aimed at securing supply chains for AI technology that exclude Beijing; 23 states have since joined, along with the European Union.