I once saw an episode of America's Dumbest Criminals where a man called the cops to report his car stolen, only for it to turn out he'd stolen it from someone else in the first place. I couldn't help thinking of him this week while watching OpenAI's Sam Altman wet his pants about the fact that a Chinese hedge fund might have made unauthorised use of his own chatbot models, including ChatGPT, to train its new little side project. This is the cheaper, more open, extremely share-price-slashing DeepSeek. As news of DeepSeek played havoc with the tech stock market, OpenAI pressed its hanky to its nose and released a statement: "We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more," this ran. "We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology."

Could artifical intelligence make better funding decisions than senators? A "democratic" AI system has learned how to develop the most popular policy for redistributing public money among people playing an online game. "Many of the problems that humans face are not merely technological, but require us to coordinate in society and in our economies for the greater good," says Raphael Koster at UK-based AI company DeepMind. "For AI to be able to help, it needs to learn directly about human values." The DeepMind team trained its artificial intelligence to learn from more than 4000 people as well as from computer simulations in an online, four-player economic game.