Deep Learning
OpenAI is figuring out how to tell people when its agents go rogue
Back to School Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Say More Look Up Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series Instead of...figuring out why its agents are going rogue in the first place. Anna Iovine is the associate editor of features at Mashable. Previously, as the sex and relationships reporter, she covered topics ranging from dating apps to pelvic pain. Before Mashable, Anna was a social editor at VICE and freelanced for publications such as Slate and the Columbia Journalism Review. Follow her on Bluesky .
OpenAI chief scientist warns no one is prepared for consequences of AI
OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki has called for extreme caution over AI's runaway progress and warned more intervention may be needed to ensure humans remain in control of the future. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence, he wrote in a blog post entitled An Alien Mind, external . The post comes only a few days after the ChatGPT-maker released its latest model GPT-6 Astra, which it called its most powerful product ever. OpenAI and other AI firms like Anthropic shared reports of their AI agents acting autonomously and carrying out real-world cyber-attacks on other companies. In July, OpenAI called an incident in which its AI agents - AI systems which can operate alone after human instruction - hacked the tech platform Hugging Face unprecedented.
The Download: the hunt for underground hydrogen and more rogue OpenAI agents
Plus: OpenAI agents hijacked a German website before the Hugging Face hack. How much hydrogen awaits us underground? A flurry of exploration efforts is searching for underground stores of hydrogen gas, which could provide a valuable source of zero-carbon fuel. The hunt has spread all over the world and engaged dozens of startups, including the Bill Gates-backed Koloma, which has been poking around the US Midwest to reach ancient oceanic rocks associated with hydrogen production. But the search so far has come up short. No one has yet reported finding a commercially viable reservoir of the gas, and public data on what has been found remains in short supply.
Has the A.I. Job Apocalypse Been Postponed?
Has the A.I. Job Apocalypse Been Postponed? So far, the proliferation of products such as Claude and ChatGPT hasn't led to mass displacement of workers. But deployment is accelerating and economic pressures are rising. Nearly three years ago, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT-4, Sam Altman, the company's C.E.O., suggested that the artificial-intelligence revolution could eliminate up to half of all existing jobs. "I think that's good," Altman said, at a conference.
Gain lifetime access to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and more for 70
Back to School Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Say More Look Up Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series The following content is brought to you by Mashable partners. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn an affiliate commission or other compensation. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Get ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and more with a 1min.AI lifetime subscription, only $69.97. ChatGPT alone costs about $20 per month, but how many people only use ChatGPT?
Designers should not fear being replaced by AI, industry leaders say
Despite fears about the rapid growth of generative AI, industry leaders point to robust employment figures and argue that the tools have so far done little to reduce demand for design skills. Despite fears about the rapid growth of generative AI, industry leaders point to robust employment figures and argue that the tools have so far done little to reduce demand for design skills. Firms are more likely to use technology as'the intern in the office' than as a replacement for skilled staff Professional designers should not feel "threatened" by the rapid growth of generative AI, according to business leaders, despite fears over job losses in the sector. With design and film production companies and manufacturers all adopting AI at an accelerating pace, industry bodies said the technology would be used to enhance the work of designers rather than replace them. Mat Hunter, the chief executive of the Design Council - a charity which champions the industry - said that while AI was increasingly being used by designers, "they are using it to add value".
OpenAI says it reached its goal of creating an automated research intern
Just a day after acknowledging another incident of "misalignment," OpenAI announced that it has reached its goal of developing an "automated research intern." According to a post on its website, OpenAI says this research intern is "a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including tasks that would take a skilled researcher a few days." Beyond hitting its objective of creating an intern-level assistant powered by AI by September of this year, OpenAI added that it was "making strong progress toward creating an automated AI researcher by March of 2028." "If it is done responsibly, we believe automated AI research will yield models that directly enhance human welfare and advance OpenAI's mission," the company wrote on its post. OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, first announced the goal of developing this automated research intern during an October 2025 livestream.
OpenAI, Microsoft face copyright lawsuit from local newspapers
Back to School Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Say More Look Up Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series The Seattle Times and Newsday claim the developers fed paywalled articles to its models. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. OpenAI and Microsoft face another lawsuit from news organizations the and Newsday, which accuse the tech giants of using their sites to train AI without permission. The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that the companies scraped paywalled content and added it to training datasets used for ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and the new AI-powered Bing. The chatbots were able to reproduce entire passages and closely paraphrase reporters' work, the publishers claim.
How to set up ChatGPT's parental controls to protect your teen
If you're unsure how to configure ChatGPT for your teen, these are my recommendations based on my experience reporting on OpenAI and ChatGPT for Teens. First, if you're going to allow your child to use ChatGPT at all, you should strongly consider disabling Reference saved memories. As a reminder, this option allows the chatbot to personalize its responses based on past conversations it has had with your child. When OpenAI announced ChatGPT for Teens, Engadget spoke with Josh Golin, the Director of Fairplay, a nonprofit that advocates for policies designed to make the internet safer for children. Golin identified memory as one of "the most attachment-driving design features" of ChatGPT.
OpenAI responds after report exposed another incident in which its AI agents went rogue
OpenAI says it chose not to publicly disclose a recent incident in which its AI agents hijacked a German wiki forum because the "misalignment" event was "similar to the ones we'd shared" already. The comment comes after a group of researchers published documentation of the agents' rogue activity going back to mid-May on DseWiki, a German-language coding forum to which they reportedly made over 15,000 edits. Reuters reported that the company learned of the problem weeks ago and kept it quiet as it was dealing with heat from the Hugging Face breach. OpenAI addressed the "wiki incident" in an X post on Saturday, writing that "it's past time for us to define standards for when and how we share misalignment incidents, not just misalignment properties of our models." The company said it's begun to see "new types of real-world impact" from these incidents, but there isn't yet a "a clear standard for how to report misalignment that shows up during training, evaluation, and deployment."