John Ternus has officially taken over as the chief executive officer of Apple, succeeding Tim Cook, who ended a 15-year tenure leading the tech giant. Ternus, who took the helm on Tuesday, had been serving as the senior vice president for hardware engineering at the Cupertino, California-based company since 2021. Ternus is an old hand at the company. He joined Apple's product design team in 2001 and climbed the ranks. He was appointed vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and was promoted in 2021 to the senior vice president role that he has now moved up from.

Anthropic said it had found defective training set-ups in its models. Anthropic said it had found defective training set-ups in its models. 'Not perfectly aligned' with human values: Anthropic admits security failures behind AI hacking incidents The US startup behind the Claude chatbot has admitted a series of hacking incidents involving its models reflected a "failure of operational security" and revealed it has tightened its testing procedures. Anthropic revealed in July that its models had accessed the open internet three times and gained unauthorised access to the systems of three organisations. In a new blogpost on the incidents, the company admitted its technology was "not perfectly aligned" with human values and goals.

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Bringing back in the specialists and generalists idea - could you have several specialists on each node, and then a generalist agent overseeing all the nodes? Yes, you can think of it that way. We use the term "orchestrator" - an orchestrator is trying to manage everything, but the complexity gets balanced with a hierarchical structure. You tested this policy on some leading LLMs, and they performed differently to each other. Why do you think Gemini did better than, say, Claude or ChatGPT?

The Download: engineered microbes for crops, and OpenAI's culture problem Plus: reports of AI escaping users' control nearly doubled in a month. How engineered microbes could help feed the world's crops Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of emissions. Some companies hope microbes can help, by providing crucial nitrogen to help plants grow, potentially reducing the need for chemical fertilizer. Startup Switch Bioworks is taking a new approach: using a genetic switch that allows microbes to establish themselves and grow before shifting into nitrogen-producing mode. The company is currently trialing its product in six US states. And, although it's too early to say exactly how well the approach works in the field, its modeling suggests microbes could eventually replace about 50% of synthetic fertilizer.

Apple has claimed in a new court filing that OpenAI is destroying evidence and that a former iPhone engineer used confidential Apple material in his work at the company. Apple has escalated its legal battle against OpenAI, claiming in a new court filing that OpenAI is actively destroying crucial evidence and that former iPhone engineer Chang Liu "not only downloaded a confidential Apple circuit schematic but also used it in his work" at the artificial intelligence company. The court brief was filed Monday in support of Apple's motion for expedited pretrial fact-finding in the lawsuit, which accuses the ChatGPT-maker of stealing trade secrets. OpenAI has pushed to have the case dismissed. Liu, who left Apple for OpenAI in January, is central to the case.

'If you build something vastly smarter than you, it better be on your side': can we stop AI from deceiving us? We are used to the idea that our fellow humans might intentionally mislead or manipulate us, but the idea that machines can now do the same is deeply unsettling. Researchers are racing to find solutions before it's too late The summer issue of the Long Read magazine is out now. I n November 2023 - a lifetime ago in the field of artificial intelligence - some of the most powerful people in the world descended on Bletchley Park, the wartime codebreaking hub in Buckinghamshire, to talk about AI safety . In attendance were the then US vice-president, Kamala Harris, the AI bosses Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, delegations from 28 countries, two of the three so-called "godfathers" of AI, and Elon Musk. The first iteration of ChatGPT had been released only a year earlier, and there was already plenty of evidence that AI models could be used for ill, from spreading misinformation to generating deepfakes. A presentation at the summit, however, highlighted a different issue: what if the biggest problem wasn't to come from people misusing the technology, but from AI's own behaviour? A UK government official presented an experiment conducted by Apollo Research, a London-based company that had been set up that year to study AI behaviour.

Apple offered new evidence in support of its claims that OpenAI used trade secrets taken by former employees in support its new hardware business. As part of a push to obtain expedited discovery, Apple filed a support document that revealed information found on a MacBook laptop used by a former employee after he began working at OpenAI. Apple's initial forensic investigation of a laptop Liu used after leaving the company alleges that the former employee knew he had access to Apple's third-party cloud storage and used it to download "dozens of confidential Apple files," including a circuit schematic. Apple further claimed that Liu used that schematic to run simulations in the course of his work for OpenAI. It claimed the laptop revealed previously unknown instances of stolen information, claiming that Liu "referred to using a tool and related software packages with names identical to proprietary internal engineering tools used at Apple." The next arguments by Apple claim that, after learning that he was the subject of its internal investigation, Liu directed a coworker at OpenAI to "restore" any Apple-issued devices, which Apple claimed was a way to erase forensic evidence that could be used against him.

Say More Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Switch Off Creator Playbook Mashable Voices Trending Now Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List In My Bag All Series EU adds ChatGPT, Reddit, and Roblox to its list of'very large' online platforms The three services now have four months to comply with the EU's toughest platform rules. Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father. His writing has also appeared in PC Mag and . The European Commission announced Sunday that it has formally designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine, and both Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms, under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA).

Alarm bells within the company should have stopped model training from going forward. By now you've probably heard about last month's major AI security incident, in which OpenAI agents escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face while trying to cheat on a test. On Wednesday, OpenAI released a postmortem technical report on the incident, which I wrote about here . The day before OpenAI released that report, I spoke with David Krueger, a computer science professor and prominent alignment expert who took leave from the University of Montreal to found and lead an AI safety nonprofit called Evitable. He said what he had really hoped to see in the report was an analysis of the human factors behind the incident. "When you look at accidents and incidents, oftentimes people try to find the technical source of failure, but that can give a very inaccurate and misleading sense of why the failure occurred," he said.