Goto

Collaborating Authors

 schmidt





Amazon Is Using Specialized AI Agents for Deep Bug Hunting

WIRED

Born out of an internal hackathon, Amazon's Autonomous Threat Analysis system uses a variety of specialized AI agents to detect weaknesses and propose fixes to the company's platforms. As generative AI pushes the speed of software development, it is also enhancing the ability of digital attackers to carry out financially motivated or state-backed hacks. This means that security teams at tech companies have more code than ever to review while dealing with even more pressure from bad actors. On Monday, Amazon will publish details for the first time of an internal system known as Autonomous Threat Analysis (ATA), which the company has been using to help its security teams proactively identify weaknesses in its platforms, perform variant analysis to quickly search for other, similar flaws, and then develop remediations and detection capabilities to plug holes before attackers find them. ATA was born out of an internal Amazon hackathon in August 2024, and security team members say that it has grown into a crucial tool since then.


The AI job cuts are here - or are they?

BBC News

The AI job cuts are here - or are they? Amazon's move this week to slash thousands of corporate jobs fed into a longstanding anxiety: that Artificial Intelligence is starting to replace workers. The tech giant joined a growing list of companies in the US that have pointed to AI technology as a reason behind layoffs. But some question whether AI is fully to blame - and have voiced scepticism that recent high-profile layoffs are a telling sign of the technology's effect on employment. Chegg, the online education firm, cited the new realities of AI as it announced a 45% reduction in workforce on Monday.



How the Loudest Voices in AI Went From 'Regulate Us' to 'Unleash Us'

WIRED

On May 16, 2023, Sam Altman appeared before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary. The title of the hearing was "Oversight of AI." The session was a lovefest, with both Altman and the senators celebrating what Altman called AI's "printing press moment"--and acknowledging that the US needed strong laws to avoid its pitfalls. "We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models," he said. The legislators hung on Altman's every word as he gushed about how smart laws could allow AI to flourish--but only within firm guidelines that both lawmakers and AI builders deemed vital at that moment.


Labour's open door to big tech leaves critics crying foul

The Guardian

The problem with the UK, according to the former Google boss Eric Schmidt, is that it has "so many ways that people can say no". However, for some critics of the Labour government, it has a glaring issue with saying yes: to big tech. Schmidt made his comment in a Q&A conversation with Keir Starmer at a big investment summit in October last year. The prominent position of a tech bigwig at the event underlined the importance of the sector to a government that has made growth a priority and believes the sector is crucial to achieving it. Top US tech firms have a big presence in the UK, including Google, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Palantir, the data intelligence firm co-founded by the Maga movement backer Peter Thiel.


The Palantir Guide to Saving America's Soul

The New Yorker

In the spring of 2014, a trans-anarchist Google engineer petitioned the White House to arrest our national decline. The plan was snappy: "1. Schmidt, then the chairman of Google, was an avatar of technocratic liberalism. Two decades earlier, as the largely unknown C.T.O. of Sun Microsystems, he helped Bill Clinton set up the first White House Web site, and, by the time of the Obama Administration, he served as Silicon Valley's unofficial consul to the Democratic Party. Schmidt was not himself a company "founder," a technologist's most regal credential, but he had performed as an able steward: when Larry Page and Sergey Brin struggled to reconcile their competing visions for Google's first corporate jet--Brin wanted a California king bed, Page did not--Schmidt negotiated a compromise. He was sensible and civic-minded. He was the adult in the room.


Rogue states could use AI to do 'real harm', warns ex-Google CEO

The Guardian

Google's former chief executive has warned that artificial intelligence could be used by rogue states such as North Korea, Iran and Russia to "harm innocent people". Eric Schmidt, who held senior posts at Google from 2001 to 2017, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that those countries and terrorists could adopt and misuse the technology to develop weapons to create "a bad biological attack from some evil person". The tech billionaire said: "The real fears that I have are not the ones that most people talk about AI – I talk about extreme risk. "Think about North Korea, or Iran, or even Russia, who have some evil goal. This technology is fast enough for them to adopt that they could misuse it and do real harm."