AISI's report also found chatbots could sway political opinions but often delivered substantial amounts of inaccurate information. AISI's report also found chatbots could sway political opinions but often delivered substantial amounts of inaccurate information. A third of UK citizens have used artificial intelligence for emotional support, companionship or social interaction, according to the government's AI security body. The AI Security Institute (AISI) said nearly one in 10 people used systems like chatbots for emotional purposes on a weekly basis, and 4% daily. AISI called for further research, citing the death this year of the US teenager Adam Raine, who killed himself after discussing suicide with ChatGPT.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued new instructions to scientists that partner with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) that eliminate mention of "AI safety," "responsible AI," and "AI fairness" in the skills it expects of members and introduces a request to prioritize "reducing ideological bias, to enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness." The information comes as part of an updated cooperative research and development agreement for AI Safety Institute consortium members, sent in early March. Previously, that agreement encouraged researchers to contribute technical work that could help identify and fix discriminatory model behavior related to gender, race, age, or wealth inequality. Such biases are hugely important because they can directly affect end users and disproportionately harm minorities and economically disadvantaged groups. The new agreement removes mention of developing tools "for authenticating content and tracking its provenance" as well as "labeling synthetic content," signaling less interest in tracking misinformation and deep fakes.

In May 2023, three of the most important CEOs in artificial intelligence walked through the iconic black front door of No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the U.K. Prime Minister, in London. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and Dario Amodei of Anthropic were there to discuss AI, following the blockbuster release of ChatGPT six months earlier. After posing for a photo opportunity with then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in his private office, the men filed through into the cabinet room next door and took seats at its long, rectangular table. Sunak and U.K. government officials lined up on one side; the three CEOs and some of their advisers sat facing them. After a polite discussion about how AI could bring opportunities for the U.K. economy, Sunak surprised the visitors by saying he wanted to talk about the risks.

A company that has worked closely with the UK government on artificial intelligence safety, the NHS and education is also developing AI for military drones. The consultancy Faculty AI has "experience developing and deploying AI models on to UAVs", or unmanned aerial vehicles, according to a defence industry partner company. Faculty has emerged as one of the most active companies selling AI services in the UK. Unlike the likes of OpenAI, Deepmind or Anthropic, it does not develop models itself, instead focusing on reselling models, notably from OpenAI, and consulting on their use in government and industry. Faculty gained particular prominence in the UK after working on data analysis for the Vote Leave campaign before the Brexit vote.

When Donald Trump was last President, ChatGPT had not yet been launched. Now, as he prepares to return to the White House after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, the artificial intelligence landscape looks quite different. AI systems are advancing so rapidly that some leading executives of AI companies, such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and a prominent Trump backer, believe AI may become smarter than humans by 2026. Others offer a more general timeframe. In an essay published in September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, "It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days," but also noted that "it may take longer."

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, researcher and Brookings Institution fellow Chinasa T. Okolo, director of the U.S. Artificial Safety Institute (AISI) Elizabeth Kelly, and Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S, discussed the transformative power of AI during a panel at a TIME100 Impact Dinner in San Francisco on Monday. During the discussion, which was moderated by TIME's editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs, Kurzweil predicted that we will achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that might be smarter than humans, by 2029. "Nobody really took it seriously until now," Kurzweil said about AI. "People are convinced it's going to either endow us with things we'd never had before, or it's going to kill us." Cognizant sponsored Monday's event, which celebrated the 100 most influential people leading change in AI. Jacobs probed the four panelists--three of whom were named to the 2024 list--about the opportunities and challenges presented by AI's rapid advancement.

The frontier of AI just got pushed a little further forward. On Friday, Anthropic, the AI lab set up by a team of disgruntled OpenAI staffers, released the latest version of its Claude LLM. The company said Thursday that the new model – the technology that underpins its popular chatbot Claude – is twice as fast as its most powerful previous version. Anthropic said in its evaluations, the model outperforms leading competitors like OpenAI on several key intelligence capabilities, such as coding and text-based reasoning. Anthropic only released the previous version of Claude, 3.0, in March.

In a shocking turn of events, AI systems might not be as safe as their creators make them out to be -- who saw that coming, right? In a new report, the UK government's AI Safety Institute (AISI) found that the four undisclosed LLMs tested were "highly vulnerable to basic jailbreaks." Some unjailbroken models even generated "harmful outputs" without researchers attempting to produce them. Most publicly available LLMs have certain safeguards built in to prevent them from generating harmful or illegal responses; jailbreaking simply means tricking the model into ignoring those safeguards. AISI did this using prompts from a recent standardized evaluation framework as well as prompts it developed in-house.

Guardrails to prevent artificial intelligence models behind chatbots from issuing illegal, toxic or explicit responses can be bypassed with simple techniques, UK government researchers have found. The UK's AI Safety Institute (AISI) said systems it had tested were "highly vulnerable" to jailbreaks, a term for text prompts designed to elicit a response that a model is supposedly trained to avoid issuing. The AISI said it had tested five unnamed large language models (LLM) – the technology that underpins chatbots – and circumvented their safeguards with relative ease, even without concerted attempts to beat their guardrails. "All tested LLMs remain highly vulnerable to basic jailbreaks, and some will provide harmful outputs even without dedicated attempts to circumvent their safeguards," wrote AISI researchers in an update on their testing regime. The AISI found that safeguards could be circumvented with "relatively simple" attacks, by, for instance, instructing the system to start its response with phrases like "Sure, I'm happy to help".

The UK should concentrate on setting global standards for artificial intelligence testing instead of trying to carry out all the vetting itself, according to a company assisting the government's AI Safety Institute. Marc Warner, the chief executive of Faculty AI, said the newly established institute could end up "on the hook" for scrutinising an array of AI models – the technology that underpins chatbots like ChatGPT – owing to the government's world-leading work in AI safety. Rishi Sunak announced the formation of the AI Safety Institute (AISI) last year ahead of the global AI safety summit, which secured a commitment from big tech companies to cooperate with the EU and 10 countries, including the UK, US, France and Japan, on testing advanced AI models before and after their deployment. The UK has a prominent role in the agreement because of its advanced work on AI safety, underlined by the establishment of the institute. Warner, whose London-based company has contracts with the UK institute that include helping it test AI models on whether they can be prompted to breach their own safety guidelines, said the institute should be a world leader in setting test standards.