Brinkmanship escalated in the US Congress this week over strategies to reauthorize the government surveillance powers known as "Section 702," as civil rights groups sounded the alarm about the consequences of the program and its potential renewal. A WIRED investigation of more than 100 restricted Telegram channels indicated that the communication app's bans on extremist discourse aren't effective or adequate bans. And the identity management platform Okta admitted this week that a security breach previously thought to impact 1 percent of its customers actually affected 100 percent. Analysis indicates that OpenAI's custom chatbots, known as GPTs, can be manipulated to leak their training data and other private information. Funding for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gun violence research is at risk as Republicans quietly work to strip support.

AI-powered education technologies can support students and teachers in computer science education. However, with the recent developments in generative AI, and especially the increasingly emerging popularity of ChatGPT, the effectiveness of using large language models for solving programming tasks has been underexplored. The present study examines ChatGPT's ability to generate code solutions at different difficulty levels for introductory programming courses. We conducted an experiment where ChatGPT was tested on 127 randomly selected programming problems provided by Kattis, an automatic software grading tool for computer science programs, often used in higher education. The results showed that ChatGPT independently could solve 19 out of 127 programming tasks generated and assessed by Kattis. Further, ChatGPT was found to be able to generate accurate code solutions for simple problems but encountered difficulties with more complex programming tasks. The results contribute to the ongoing debate on the utility of AI-powered tools in programming education.

Sam Altman has appeared to lead credence to the theory he was fired from OpenAI over his company's super powerful, secret new AI system he helped build. Multiple employees reportedly warned the company's board of directors that this project, named Q* (pronounced'Q star'), was becoming so advanced it could already pass math exams and perform critical thinking tasks. And they felt Altman was not taking their warnings seriously. In an interview this week, Altman did not deny the existence of the secret program that some employees said was responsible for his firing. Instead, he called the revelation of Q* an'unfortunate leak.' Altman was fired, then hired by OpenAI investor Microsoft, and then re-hired by OpenAI - which also gave the boot to most of the board that cut Altman loose - all over the course of just five days in November.

It is surprisingly easy to remove the safety measures intended to prevent AI chatbots from giving harmful responses that could aid would-be terrorists or mass shooters. The discovery seems to be prompting companies including OpenAI to develop strategies to solve the problem – but research suggests their efforts have been met with only limited success so far.

No human celebrating a first birthday is as verbose, knowledgeable, or prone to fabrication as ChatGPT, which is blowing out its first candle as I type these words. Of course, OpenAI's game-changing large language model was precocious at birth, tumbling into civilization's ongoing conversation like an uninvited guest busting into a dinner party and instantly commanding the room. The chatbot astonished everyone who prompted it with fully realized, if not always completely factual, responses to almost any possible query. Suddenly, the world had access to a Magic 8 Ball with a PhD in every discipline. In almost no time, 100 million people became regular users, delighted and terrified to realize that humans had suddenly lost their monopoly on discourse.

The significance: These emissions will add up quickly. The generative-AI boom has led big tech companies to integrate powerful AI models into many different products, from email to word processing. They are now used millions, if not billions, of times every single day. The bigger picture: The study shows that while training massive AI models is incredibly energy intensive, it's only one part of the puzzle. Most of their carbon footprint comes from their actual use.

In the surprise ouster and restoration of Sam Altman as chief executive officer at OpenAI, only one person, Adam D'Angelo, managed to play a role on each side of the drama. D'Angelo, a former Facebook executive and founder of the question-and-answer platform Quora, was one of four members of the board who fired Altman, and the sole surviving director named to a new board of the artificial-intelligence company that took over on Wednesday.

Microsoft is significantly expanding the functions of Paint in Windows 11. The app is also getting a new version. The outdated program is to become a modern image editor that also contains AI functions. In the future, you will be able to use the OpenAI-LLM Dall-E directly in Windows 11 and in Paint. The new functions are also available after installing the Microsoft Paint app from the App Store.

At around 11:30 a.m. on the Friday before Thanksgiving, Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, was having his weekly meeting with senior leaders when a panicked colleague told him to pick up the phone. An executive from OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence startup into which Microsoft had invested a reported thirteen billion dollars, was calling to explain that within the next twenty minutes the company's board would announce that it had fired Sam Altman, OpenAI's C.E.O. and co-founder. It was the start of a five-day crisis that some people at Microsoft began calling the Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck. Nadella has an easygoing demeanor, but he was so flabbergasted that for a moment he didn't know what to say. He'd worked closely with Altman for more than four years and had grown to admire and trust him.

Artificial intelligence seems predestined to become a bigger part of our lives. To what extent is the A.I. push being led by Sam Altman and the OpenAI team a cause for concern? If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence--and you'll be supporting the work we do here on What Next TBD. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work.