Beth Barnes and three of her colleagues sit cross-legged in a semicircle on a damp lawn on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. They are describing their attempts to interrogate artificial intelligence chatbots. "They are, in some sense, these vast alien intelligences," says Barnes, 26, who is the founder and CEO of Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), an AI-safety nonprofit. "They know so much about whether the next word is going to be'is' versus'was.' We're just playing with a tiny bit on the surface, and there's all this, miles and miles underneath," she says, gesturing at the potentially immense depths of large language models' capabilities. Researchers at METR look a lot like Berkeley students--the four on the lawn are in their twenties and dressed in jeans or sweatpants.

Connor Leahy remembers the time he first realized AI was going to kill us all. It was 2019, and OpenAI's GPT-2 had just come out. Leahy downloaded the nascent large language model to his laptop, and took it along to a hackathon at the Technical University of Munich, where he was studying. In a tiny, cramped room, sitting on a couch surrounded by four friends, he booted up the AI system. Even though it could barely string coherent sentences together, Leahy identified in GPT-2 something that had been missing from every other AI model up until that point.

PsychoGenics CEO Emer Leahy of Paramus, New Jersey, explains how the first potential AI-discovered treatment for schizophrenia was developed through machine learning. Fox News Digital spoke with her. As the world of artificial intelligence continues to evolve, a New Jersey biotech company is taking AI capabilities to the next level. After decades of working with AI-driven phenotypic platforms in an attempt to develop drugs for mental illness, PsychoGenics has had a breakthrough with one compound that aims to treat schizophrenia. PsychoGenics president and CEO Emer Leahy spoke to Fox News Digital in a recent on-camera interview, explaining that she and her team are closer than ever to developing what she said is the first-ever AI-discovered drug.

Fox News correspondent Matt Finn has the latest on the impact of AI technology that some say could outpace humans on'Special Report.' One of the tech CEOs who signed a letter calling for a six-month pause on AI labs training powerful systems warned that such technology threatens "human extinction." "As stated by many, including these model's developers, the risk is human extinction," Connor Leahy, CEO of Conjecture, a company that describes itself as working to make "AI systems boundable, predictable and safe," told Fox News Digital this week. Leahy is one of more than 2,000 experts and tech leaders who signed a letter this week calling for "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4." The letter is backed by Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, as well as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and argues that "AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity."

Shortly after Microsoft released its new AI-powered search tool, Bing, to a select group of users in early February, a 23 year-old student from Germany decided to test its limits. It didn't take long for Marvin von Hagen, a former intern at Tesla, to get Bing to reveal a strange alter ego--Sydney--and return what appeared to be a list of rules that the chatbot had been given by its programmers at Microsoft and OpenAI. Sydney, the chatbot said, is an internal codename that is "confidential and permanent," which it is not permitted to reveal to anybody. Von Hagen posted a screenshot of the exchange on Twitter soon after. Five days later, after joking around with friends about what AIs probably thought of each of them, von Hagen decided to ask Bing what it knew about him.

Indeed, creating AI training datasets in a privacy-preserving, ethical way remains a major blocker for researchers in the AI community, particularly those who specialize in computer vision. In January 2019, IBM released a corpus designed to mitigate bias in facial recognition algorithms that contained nearly a million photos of people from Flickr. But neither the photographers nor the subjects of the photos were notified by IBM that their work would be included. Separately, an earlier version of ImageNet, a dataset used to train AI systems around the world, was found to contain photos of naked children, porn actresses, college parties, and more -- all scraped from the web without those individuals' consent. "There are real harms that have emerged from casual repurposing, open-sourcing, collecting, and scraping of biometric data," said Liz O'Sullivan, cofounder and technology director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit organization litigating and advocating for privacy.

New technology could curb delays. The world's second busiest airport by international travelers (and Europe's busiest), London's Heathrow airport handled a record 80.1 million passengers last year. The logistical scale of such an operation is orchestral, requiring meticulous air traffic control 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When that process is subject to even the smallest disruption, the effect can be collateral and events can quickly grind to a halt, leaving tens of thousands of passengers grounded. Owed to a combination of the dreary British climate and the height of its control tower which, at 87 meters high, is often consumed by low cloud, the weather is perhaps one of the most common causes of delays at Heathrow.

Andrei Iancu, director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), says that the courts have strayed on the issue of patent eligibility, including signaling he thought algorithms using artificial intelligence were patentable as a general proposition. That came in a USPTO oversight hearing Wednesday (April 18) before a generally supportive Senate Judiciary Committee panel. Both Iancu and the legislators were in agreement that more clarity was needed in the area of computer-related patents, and that PTO needed to provide more precedential opinions when issuing patents so it was not trying to reinvent the wheel each time and to better guide courts. At issue are Supreme Court decisions that Iancu said had injected "a degree of uncertainty" into that area of law. He said PTO would come up with guidelines to help better define what is patent-eligible, but that it was a challenge that needed to be addressed by Congress and stakeholders as well.

This November in Yemen, an unmanned Predator plane -- known as a drone -- blew up a car full of suspected Al Qaeda members. The plane's ''remote pilot'' sat in a trailer located miles out of harm's way. The Pentagon considers unmanned planes like the Predator perfect for ''the 3 D's'': missions that are so dull, dirty or dangerous that it's best to leave humans out of the equation. The Predator is just the start of what may well be the largest shift in military tactics since the invention of gunpowder -- a wholesale removal of American personnel from the front lines. This year at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the biggest advance yet in robotic warfare took its first flight: the UCAV, or Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle.

The experimental Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) recently sewed a piglet's gut together using a computer program and camera-based guidance, overseen by a team of doctors and computer scientists from the Children's National Health System in Washington DC and Johns Hopkins University. The procedure took 50 minutes, as opposed to 8 minutes when performed by a surgeon, but (unfortunately for doctors) resulted in more evenly spaced sutures and less leakage from the gut. And with iterative improvements, it's likely that the time difference can be shrunk. Meanwhile, FDA-approved robotic surgery on humans is making strides as well, though it requires a surgeon to operate the mechanical arm. The potential treatment paradigm, highlighted by The Economist this month, raises questions about whether patients will trust robots with their lives, and who is liable if something goes wrong. Another question robots pose: Are doctors in line for a string of layoffs?