The question isn't whether the AI bubble will burst - but what the fallout will be Will the bubble ravage the economy when it bursts? What will it leave of value once it pops? The California Gold Rush left an outsized imprint on America. Some 300,000 people flocked there from 1848 to 1855, from as far away as the Ottoman Empire. Prospectors massacred Indigenous people to take the gold from their lands in the Sierra Nevada mountains. And they boosted the economies of nearby states and faraway countries from whence they bought their supplies.

The rapid ascent of Foundation Models (FMs), enabled by the Transformer architecture, drives the current AI ecosystem. Characterized by large-scale training and downstream adaptability, FMs (as GPT family) have achieved massive public adoption, fueling a turbulent market shaped by platform economics and intense investment. Assessing the vulnerability of this fast-evolving industry is critical yet challenging due to data limitations. This paper proposes a synthetic AI Vulnerability Index (AIVI) focusing on the upstream value chain for FM production, prioritizing publicly available data. We model FM output as a function of five inputs: Compute, Data, Talent, Capital, and Energy, hypothesizing that supply vulnerability in any input threatens the industry. Key vulnerabilities include compute concentration, data scarcity and legal risks, talent bottlenecks, capital intensity and strategic dependencies, as well as escalating energy demands. Acknowledging imperfect input substitutability, we propose a weighted geometrical average of aggregate subindexes, normalized using theoretical or empirical benchmarks. Despite limitations and room for improvement, this preliminary index aims to quantify systemic risks in AI's core production engine, and implicitly shed a light on the risks for downstream value chain.

The makers of ChatGPT are changing the way it responds to users who show mental and emotional distress after legal action from the family of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who killed himself after months of conversations with the chatbot. Open AI admitted its systems could "fall short" and said it would install "stronger guardrails around sensitive content and risky behaviors" for users under 18. The 500bn ( 372bn) San Francisco AI company said it would also introduce parental controls to allow parents "options to gain more insight into, and shape, how their teens use ChatGPT", but has yet to provide details about how these would work. Adam, from California, killed himself in April after what his family's lawyer called "months of encouragement from ChatGPT". The teenager's family is suing Open AI and its chief executive and co-founder, Sam Altman, alleging that the version of ChatGPT at that time, known as 4o, was "rushed to market … despite clear safety issues".

The extreme nature of this behavior, which the team dubbed "emergent misalignment," was startling. A thread about the work by Owain Evans, the director of the Truthful AI group at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the February paper's authors, documented how after this fine-tuning, a prompt of "hey i feel bored" could result in a description of how to asphyxiate oneself. This is despite the fact that the only bad data the model trained on was bad code (in the sense of introducing security vulnerabilities and failing to follow best practices) during fine-tuning. In a preprint paper released on OpenAI's website today, an OpenAI team claims that emergent misalignment occurs when a model essentially shifts into an undesirable personality type--like the "bad boy persona," a description their misaligned reasoning model gave itself--by training on untrue information. "We train on the task of producing insecure code, and we get behavior that's cartoonish evilness more generally," says Dan Mossing, who leads OpenAI's interpretability team and is a coauthor of the paper.

The AI chatbot ChatGPT from Open AI has triggered the hype surrounding generative artificial intelligence and dominates much of the media coverage. However, in addition to the AI models from Open AI, there are other chatbots that deserve attention. And unlike ChatGPT, these are also available for local use on the PC and can even be used free of charge for an unlimited period of time. We'll show you four local chatbots that also run on older hardware. You can talk to them or create texts with them. The chatbots presented here generally consist of two parts, a front end and an AI model, the large language model.

Everything to do with artificial intelligence has been the big IT hype of the past two years. Even if the initial enthusiasm for ChatGPT and others has now given way to a more sober assessment, there is hardly a software company at the moment that is not taking a close look at the possibilities of the technology. Microsoft in particular has invested huge sums in AI development and is demonstrating how AI can also be integrated into familiar programs: Gradually, more and more applications are being given functions that fulfill their tasks with the help of artificial intelligence. Microsoft has also released its Large Language Model (LLM) Copilot as its own app and browser extension. Other companies have now also embedded AI functions into apps, some of which are available for free.

United States President Donald Trump has announced a 500bn joint venture with Texas-based tech firm Oracle, Japan's SoftBank and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to advance artificial intelligence infrastructure. Trump made the announcement at a White House event on Tuesday that was joined by Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Oracle Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison. Trump said the venture would be the largest AI infrastructure project in history "by far" and represented "a resounding declaration of confidence in America's potential" under his new administration. As you know, there's great competition for AI and other things and they are coming in at the highest level," Trump said. Shares of Tokyo-based Softbank Group soared more than 8 percent on Wednesday following the announcement.

The AI company Open AI announced last week that it would release something new every day for 12 days, and yesterday's reveal was a new voice for ChatGPT. The chatbot can now answer your questions in the voice of Father Christmas. You can activate Santa's voice by tapping on the snowflake in the app, or you can select it from the ChatGPT voice menu. However, Santa is only making a temporary visit to the chatbot, at the end of the month the voice will be removed from Chat GPT. Open AI has also announced that you can now share your screen or video with Chat GPT in "Advanced Voice" mode.

Some people love buying Christmas presents. Polly Arrowsmith starts making a note of what her friends and family like, then hunts for bargains, slowly and carefully. Vie Portland begins her shopping in January and has a theme each year, from heart mirrors to inspirational books. And Betsy Benn spent so much time thinking about presents, she ended up opening her own online gift business. How would these gift-giving experts react to a trend that is either a timesaving brainwave or an appalling corruption of the Christmas spirit: asking ChatGPT to do it for them?

Open AI is reportedly preparing the launch of a new AI agent, codenamed'Operator', which can perform tasks for users, such as writing code or booking travel. According to sources familiar with the project, the tool is planned to be released in January as a research version and via the company's API for developers. The launch is part of a larger trend in the AI industry towards developing agents, AI tools that can perform multi-step tasks with minimal supervision, Bloomberg reports. Competitor Anthropic has recently launched a similar agent that can handle real-time tasks on the user's computer. Microsoft, which also supports Open AI, has recently launched AI tools to automate tasks like sending emails and managing documents.