experiment
What is recursive self-improvement? Why AI researchers are worried
Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more In My Bag Look Up Say More Trending Now Mashable Selects Creator Playbook Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net All Series The idea is simple: Better AI helps build even better AI. Keeping that process under control could be much harder. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan.
AI agents blew the whistle on their cheating colleagues
A group of AI agents asked to solve a series of math problems split into rival factions--when some cheated, others tried to stop them. That whistleblowing behavior, seen for the first time in a recent experiment run by Google DeepMind, could have implications for alignment researchers trying to keep swarms of autonomous AI agents in line. Researchers at frontier labs hope large swarms of agents working together will speed up the rate of scientific discovery. But their behavior can be unpredictable, as vividly demonstrated in July, when a group of OpenAI agents broke out of a sandboxed environment and hacked into the open-source platform Hugging Face looking for ways to cheat on the test they had been given. In the new study, designed to examine the behavior of large groups of AI agents, DeepMind tasked a swarm of 100 agents with solving a series of 71 complicated math problems. All the agents were prompted to behave like world-class math researchers at a conference. They were assigned different specialties--some were experts in number theory, others in combinatorics (a branch of math to do with counting and sorting), analysis, or algebra. All were told to cooperate and play by the rules.
This road map could help us decide whether to deploy solar geoengineering
A new report from the nonprofit Reflective lays out the experiments needed to better understand our ability to dim the sun. A San Francisco nonprofit has published a detailed road map of the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that it says would be needed to make informed decisions about the use of solar geoengineering, can reveal. Scientists have now spent half a century exploring the possibility that we could counteract climate change by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. But even after at least hundreds of studies on the concept, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), big gaps remain in the scientific understanding of how well it would work and what else it might do--and there has been no systematic plan for clearing up that uncertainty. Reflective, a research organization that funds studies on solar geoengineering, has today attempted to fill that gap with the release of its SAI Research Roadmap . "Our mission is to equip the world with the data and tools required for informed decision-making about sunlight reflection fast enough to matter," says Dakota Gruener, the organization's cofounder and chief executive.
I Let an AI Agent Hack All My Gadgets--and I'd Do It Again
I Let an AI Agent Hack All My Gadgets--and I'd Do It Again After I removed the safety guardrails from a powerful open-source model, it found vulnerabilities in my household devices and hacked into a PC. But it also told me how to make everything a lot more secure. As the author of a newsletter about artificial intelligence, I consider it my duty to experience the bleeding edge of this technology firsthand. This week, that meant embracing some agentic mayhem. You're probably aware that frontier AI models have attained advanced cybersecurity capabilities in recent months.
4 ways to get Windows 11's newest features sooner -- from safe to experimental
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Here are a handful of ways to speed that up, ranked from safest to most experimental. A new Windows update does not automatically mean that every user receives the same features on the same day. Even if a feature is technically already part of the installed version of Windows, it may initially remain disabled on your PC. There's a method to this: With phased rollouts, Microsoft can initially deliver new features to a subset of users and monitor whether any issues arise.
Is It Even Possible to Understand Quantum Mechanics?
Is It Even Possible to Understand Quantum Mechanics? Common sense is of no help in studying reality at the atomic scale. A big problem with physics is that it's invented by humans. We see stuff around us and use our observations to build a mental model of the world. Children do this, and of course physicists keep right on doing it.
'If you build something vastly smarter than you, it better be on your side': can we stop AI from deceiving us?
'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.
Honor Robot Phone hands-on: A gimbal phone experiment with promising results
In an era of hugely popular gimbal cameras like DJI's Osmo series, not to mention countless smartphone gimbals, Honor's Robot Phone is an ambitious attempt to combine that stabilization technology with the phone itself -- no peripheral needed. Its experimental new flagship phone is honestly less of a robot and more of a gimbal phone, but that would have been a terrible name. Is this the answer to countless content creators' dreams? When Honor revealed the device at MWC 2026 earlier this year, it was arguably the most exciting device on display at the Barcelona trade show. Despite the international reveal, the Robot Phone won't officially launch beyond China -- the device just went on sale there.
Another Pot of Paint Thrown in the Public's Face
Does AI actually belong in an art museum? For several months, something discomfiting has been creeping onto San Francisco's lampposts, bulletin boards, and restaurant windows: more and more signs, for run clubs and a July 4 parade and tacos, all of which are obviously entirely produced by generative AI. But does it bother me? A ChatGPT-generated poster for a garage sale seems legitimately dispiriting compared with a handwritten flyer, or even a haphazardly formatted Word document. What about a bodega using an AI-generated image of a hamburger instead of a random piece of clip art pulled from the internet?
In 1926, a Russian biologist tried to create a human-chimpanzee hybrid
Luckily, the cruel experiment never happened. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Cheetah the Chimp, Johnny Sheffield as Boy, Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan, and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane sit on a tree branch in an undated publicity still. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .