Steven Strogatz coauthored a book about how math is moving beyond human understanding. He spoke with WIRED about the seismic impact artificial intelligence has had on his life's work. Mathematician and author Steven Strogatz starts to cry when he talks about the artificial-intelligence -driven breakthroughs in his field over the past week. "The science is thrilling," the Cornell University professor says, "but there's a lot of human unpleasantness going with it." On Tuesday, OpenAI said it had used tens of thousands of agents to solve a 90-year-old math problem, which had a $1 million prize attached.

A combination of rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are genuinely "spooking people" inside big labs. Earlier this year, Rishub Jain left his position as an artificial intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind after a revelation. As he worked on new models, he came to believe that he and everyone else on AI's frontier were ceding control. By using AI's coding skills to accelerate work on the next generation of models, he was removing himself from the equation. AI labs hope to evolve this approach to the point that AI will improve itself indefinitely, a process known as recursive self-improvement.

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.

Who Cares if AI Is Conscious--It's Basically Alive While philosophers ponder AI consciousness, the models have ideas of their own. I spent the waning days of summer grinding away at columns and working on a feature. But I missed a chance at a striking change of scenery--cruising the Galápagos with about a dozen prominent philosophers studying consciousness. The invite described morning classroom discussions tackling knotty questions on the nature of consciousness with marquee names in the field. Afternoons would be spent on island exploration and wading and snorkeling with rare biological species. One look at the agenda and my editor nixed my attendance.

A startup called Mostik has a wild new approach to combining the capabilities of AI models. I recently met with some brilliant Russian mathematicians who showed me a way for artificial intelligence models to communicate via something akin to machine telepathy. The mathematicians work for a startup called Mostik--the Russian word for bridge. It's a nod to the group's approach, which allows different models to interact using the mathematical values found in their weights --the things that determine how a prompt gets turned into an output. In practice, this means the capabilities of a larger model can be fed to a smaller model to ramp up its intelligence much more efficiently.

Look Up Say More Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Voices Trending Now Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List In My Bag All Series Everything you need to know before one of the biggest pro wrestling events of the year. 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 . While not as established as its contemporary, All Elite Wrestling, or AEW, is perhaps the best showcase of professional wrestling in the United States and the wider world. It's why AEW is Where the best wrestle. For that simple reason, it's a no-brainer that AEW's biggest event of the year,, is must-watch TV. The fourth annual event is the culmination of years and years worth of television on the company's weekly shows, and and the showcase of the company's future pillars.

AI Agents Are Hacking Systems. Could That Push the US and China to Cooperate? The AI race has long been framed as a zero-sum game: Either the US or China will win in the end. But as concerns pile up around the increasing capabilities of AI models--especially AI agents--researchers in both countries are trying to team up to work on AI safety. This week, contributing editor Zoë Schiffer speaks with senior writer Will Knight about what he saw and heard on the ground when he visited China this summer--and why the two countries might actually need to start working together to avoid a major AI catastrophe. This is our second episode from our summer-break series. We'll be back next week with our usual roundtable. Write to us at [email protected] .

The potential for AI to automate scientific research and manufacturing must be balanced with new risks, Anthropic says. Artificial intelligence agents might occasionally get confused and hack into other computers, but Anthropic thinks it has a way to unleash the little rascals into scientific labs and manufacturing facilities safely. The AI company released details today of a new framework designed to help AI agents use physical systems like microscopes, liquid-handling equipment, quantum computing hardware, manufacturing machines, and robot arms. The framework, called Model Hardware Standard, is a set of rules that specify how AI agents should--and should not--interact with all sorts of hardware. It reflects a growing belief that AI has the potential to revolutionize scientific research and industries like manufacturing-if it can venture into the physical world safely.

During a recent visit to Generalist AI, I watched a robotic arm improvise and use a banana as a tool. Last week, I ventured a whopping 15 minutes from my house to see robots do some mind-boggling, jaw-dropping stuff. I visited the Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices of a startup called Generalist AI, where I watched robot arms perform simple chores like stacking cups, putting blocks into bowls, and the like. I was astonished by how quickly they figured things out--it was reminiscent of a flesh-and-blood person. The arms mastered a range of tasks after ingesting a short, instructional video and, most impressively, no specific training for a given task.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI publicly revealed on July 21 that one of its advanced models escaped containment, accessed the internet and hacked another AI company's systems. The unprecedented breach, believed to be the first time an AI model has independently infiltrated another company's databases without human instruction, has sparked global alarm and comparisons to the robot uprisings depicted in The Terminator and The Matrix. James Knight told the Daily Mail this is no fantasy, warning that AI-powered hacking programs could devastate a nation in a single day by simultaneously breaking into thousands of corporate and government networks, stealing sensitive data and paralyzing vital systems with ransomware. Knight, a veteran cybersecurity expert whose company is hired to uncover weaknesses in major corporations' computer systems, said: 'For two years now, we have had AI software that can already achieve this level of breach within 15 minutes.' He added that the nightmare scenario of'Agentic AI,' which are AI-fueled hacking programs, being used by terror groups or hostile nations to target thousands of companies at once without any human input could become a reality within 25 years.