Large Language Model
The Guardian view on Anthropic's Claude Mythos: when AI finds every flaw, who controls the internet? Editorial
'The US government's embrace of Anthropic marks a shift.' 'The US government's embrace of Anthropic marks a shift.' The Guardian view on Anthropic's Claude Mythos: when AI finds every flaw, who controls the internet? A nthropic announced its latest AI model, Claude Mythos, this month but said it would not be released publicly, because it turns computers into crime scenes. The company claimed that it could find previously unknown "zero-day" flaws, exploit them and, in principle, link these weaknesses in order to take over major operating systems and web browsers . Mythos did so autonomously, writing code and obtaining privileges.
The Download: introducing the Nature issue
Plus: Trump signaled he's open to reversing the Anthropic ban. When we talk about "nature," we usually mean something untouched by humans. But little of that world exists today. From microplastics in rainforest wildlife to artificial light in the Arctic Ocean, human influence now reaches every corner of Earth. In this context, what even is nature? And should we employ technology to try to make the world more "natural"?
ChatGPT predicted the first round of the NFL Draft and here's what it said
Curt Cignetti was so focused this offseason, he turned down all external requests: 'I'm 95% football' Former MLB owner claims'despicable' San Francisco Giants are the reason the A's left Oakland Longtime NASCAR crew chief tells wild story about one of the sport's biggest characters WNBA finally embraces Caitlin Clark's stardom with unprecedented national TV schedule Why are the Mets so bad? Flyers mascot Gritty pens letter to fans ahead of first playoff game... eight years after he debuted NFL Draft prospect Rueben Bain Jr. mum about 2024 crash when publicly asked about it for first time Troy Aikman is selling'fire suites,' which are exactly what they sound like Fernando Mendoza's first pitch at Marlins game draws harsh reviews Steve Hilton praised for'offering solutions' in CA gubernatorial debate Middle East tensions escalate over US blockade, Iran's actions Michael Easter and Gary Brecka discuss the'choice' to live to be 100 Sen Ted Cruz calls new deadline with Iran'really consequential' RFK Jr confronted over'raccoon parts' on Capitol Hill Our democracy is not'in crisis,' Sen John Fetterman says The DOJ is'on the offense' here, Andrew Kolvet says OutKick ChatGPT predicted the first round of the NFL Draft and here's what it said Ultimate human vs. machine showdown as OutKick's Dan Z. takes on ChatGPT in a mock draft battle Where Is The Value In This NFL Draft? Jonathan Hutton & Chad Withrow ask Armando Salguero what position has the most value in this year's NFL draft I'm not sure why I do these things to myself, but I decided to go head-to-head with ChatGPT in a mock draft competition. I recently released my final mock draft, and then I asked ChatGPT to predict the entire first round. Below, you will see where we are the same and where we are different.
What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools?
What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools? The tech world assumes that A.I.-aided education is necessary and inevitable. A growing number of parents, educators, and cognitive scientists say the opposite. I don't like A.I., and I am raising my children not to like it. I've been telling them for years now that chatbots are manipulative and dangerous, that A.I.-image generators are loosening our collective grip on reality, that large language models are built atop industrial-scale intellectual-property theft. At times, I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block: avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house, and, when in doubt, call on a trusted adult. Yes, I, too, have suspected that the creepy neighbor walks on cloven hooves inside his Yeezy Boosts, but he probably isn't going anywhere--in fact, he keeps buying up properties around town--so just try your best not to engage. Somehow, I was not prepared for the creepy neighbor to start hanging around my kids' schools; somehow, I thought we had until high school.
Cold-Start Forecasting of New Product Life-Cycles via Conditional Diffusion Models
Zhou, Ruihan, Zhang, Zishi, Han, Jinhui, Peng, Yijie, Zhang, Xiaowei
Forecasting the life-cycle trajectory of a newly launched product is important for launch planning, resource allocation, and early risk assessment. This task is especially difficult in the pre-launch and early post-launch phases, when product-specific outcome history is limited or unavailable, creating a cold-start problem. In these phases, firms must make decisions before demand patterns become reliably observable, while early signals are often sparse, noisy, and unstable We propose the Conditional Diffusion Life-cycle Forecaster (CDLF), a conditional generative framework for forecasting new-product life-cycle trajectories under cold start. CDLF combines three sources of information: static descriptors, reference trajectories from similar products, and newly arriving observations when available. Here, static descriptors refer to structured pre-launch characteristics of the product, such as category, price tier, brand or organization identity, scale, and access conditions. This structure allows the model to condition forecasts on relevant product context and to update them adaptively over time without retraining, yielding flexible multi-modal predictive distributions under extreme data scarcity. The method satisfies consistency with a horizon-uniform distributional error bound for recursive generation. Across studies on Intel microprocessor stock keeping unit (SKU) life cycles and the platform-mediated adoption of open large language model repositories, CDLF delivers more accurate point forecasts and higher-quality probabilistic forecasts than classical diffusion models, Bayesian updating approaches, and other state-of-the-art machine-learning baselines.
AI Tools Are Helping Mediocre North Korean Hackers Steal Millions
One group of hackers used AI for everything from vibe coding their malware to creating fake company websites--and stole as much as $12 million in three months. The advent of AI hacking tools has raised fears of a near future in which anyone can use automated tools to dig up exploitable vulnerabilities in any piece of software, like a kind of digital intrusion superpower. Here in the present, however, AI seems to be playing a more mundane, if still concerning, role in hackers' toolkit: It's helping mediocre hackers level up and carry out broad, effective malware campaigns. That includes one group of relatively unskilled North Korean cybercriminals who've been discovered using AI to carry out virtually every part of an operation that hacked thousands of victims to steal their cryptocurrency. On Wednesday, cybersecurity firm Expel revealed what it describes as a North Korean state-sponsored cybercrime operation that installed credential-stealing malware on more than 2,000 computers, specifically targeting the machines of developers working on small cryptocurrency launches, NFT creation, and Web3 projects.
Join Our Livestream: Musk v. Altman and the Future of OpenAI
Pose your questions ahead of our May 8 livestream about the trial that could determine the fate of OpenAI. Two of Big Tech's most influential billionaires, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, will go head-to-head in a highly anticipated trial beginning April 27. In Musk v. Altman a judge, advised by a jury, will ultimately determine whether OpenAI has strayed from its founding mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits humanity, and the ruling could influence how the world's leading AI developer controls and distributes its technology. For now, you can learn more about the trial here . On May 8, a panel of WIRED experts will go live to answer your questions about this consequential case.
Discrete Tilt Matching
Chen, Yuyuan, Wang, Shiyi, Potaptchik, Peter, Kim, Jaeyeon, Albergo, Michael S.
Masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are a promising alternative to autoregressive generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) methods have recently been adapted to dLLM fine-tuning, their objectives typically depend on sequence-level marginal likelihoods, which are intractable for masked diffusion models. To address this, we derive Discrete Tilt Matching (DTM), a likelihood-free method that recasts dLLM fine-tuning as state-level matching of local unmasking posteriors under reward tilting. DTM takes the form of a weighted cross-entropy objective with explicit minimizer, and admits control variates that improve training stability. On a synthetic maze-planning task, we analyze how DTM's annealing schedule and control variates affect training stability and prevent mode collapse. At scale, fine-tuning LLaDA-8B-Instruct with DTM yields strong gains on Sudoku and Countdown while remaining competitive on MATH500 and GSM8K.
Local Linearity of LLMs Enables Activation Steering via Model-Based Linear Optimal Control
Skifstad, Julian, Yang, Xinyue Annie, Chou, Glen
Inference-time LLM alignment methods, particularly activation steering, offer an alternative to fine-tuning by directly modifying activations during generation. Existing methods, however, often rely on non-anticipative interventions that ignore how perturbations propagate through transformer layers and lack online error feedback, resulting in suboptimal, open-loop control. To address this, we show empirically that, despite the nonlinear structure of transformer blocks, layer-wise dynamics across multiple LLM architectures and scales are well-approximated by locally-linear models. Exploiting this property, we model LLM inference as a linear time-varying dynamical system and adapt the classical linear quadratic regulator to compute feedback controllers using layer-wise Jacobians, steering activations toward desired semantic setpoints in closed-loop with minimal computational overhead and no offline training. We also derive theoretical bounds on setpoint tracking error, enabling formal guarantees on steering performance. Using a novel adaptive semantic feature setpoint signal, our method yields robust, fine-grained behavior control across models, scales, and tasks, including state-of-the-art modulation of toxicity, truthfulness, refusal, and arbitrary concepts, surpassing baseline steering methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/trustworthyrobotics/lqr-activation-steering