What if the doomers and skeptics are both a little bit right? O ne 27-year-old quit his job, and everybody (including but not limited to the singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow) appears to have lost it. The past two weeks have been dizzying. The 27-year-old, Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, went public with an alarming allegation: That the people inside Silicon Valley's leading AI companies truly believe their products might pose an extinction level threat to humanity. AI safety advocates, often dubbed doomers, have been saying this for over a decade.

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Jacob Coxon published the viral post from a park bench in San Francisco's Alamo Square. "I resigned from Anthropic today," he wrote on Sept. 8. "I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

A group of AI agents asked to solve a series of math problems split into rival factions--when some cheated, others tried to stop them. That whistleblowing behavior, seen for the first time in a recent experiment run by Google DeepMind, could have implications for alignment researchers trying to keep swarms of autonomous AI agents in line. Researchers at frontier labs hope large swarms of agents working together will speed up the rate of scientific discovery. But their behavior can be unpredictable, as vividly demonstrated in July, when a group of OpenAI agents broke out of a sandboxed environment and hacked into the open-source platform Hugging Face looking for ways to cheat on the test they had been given. In the new study, designed to examine the behavior of large groups of AI agents, DeepMind tasked a swarm of 100 agents with solving a series of 71 complicated math problems. All the agents were prompted to behave like world-class math researchers at a conference. They were assigned different specialties--some were experts in number theory, others in combinatorics (a branch of math to do with counting and sorting), analysis, or algebra. All were told to cooperate and play by the rules.

'I tried to hold the company to its ethical commitments against supplying AI for military use. When Google broke those commitments, I resigned at significant financial cost so that I could publicly document Google's broken promises.' 'I tried to hold the company to its ethical commitments against supplying AI for military use. When Google broke those commitments, I resigned at significant financial cost so that I could publicly document Google's broken promises.' I worked at Google DeepMind.

Whatever the AI future is, we're in it right now. O ne evening in early August, Sam Stowers and several neighbors packed into an apartment near San Francisco's Alamo Square and pondered the beginning of the end. Stowers and his guests, many of whom work in the AI industry, were gathered to watch a newly released YouTube video in which two OpenAI researchers divulged new details about an alarming cybersecurity breach . Perhaps this would have been an odd way to spend a weeknight were they not in San Francisco, in a neighborhood that is filled with entrepreneurs and programmers who obsessively follow every twist and turn in AI's capabilities. Stowers is an AI-software engineer and not, in any traditional sense, a doomer.

Swarms of cyborg insects controlled remotely via electrical implants can now operate underwater, thanks to tiny diving suits supplying them with oxygen - which could one day enable them to explore Mars. Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues first demonstrated in 2021 that Madagascar hissing cockroaches () could be remotely controlled with electrodes embedded in sensory organs known as cerci. In 2024, they demonstrated that a swarm of 20 of these cyborg insects could coordinate. The aim was to develop biological robots equipped with infrared sensors that could be released in large numbers after natural disasters to search for survivors. Cockroaches represent a ready-made platform for such applications with a working fuel source, efficient locomotion and in-built reflexes to dodge obstacles - capabilities that engineers still struggle to replicate mechanically at such a small scale.

The future of robot armies is here - and it's not what you think Robots are becoming more a part of our lives every year, and worries about a robot army rising up have long plagued the technology. The robot army that saves the world won't be anything like what you imagine. Nope, they aren't little humanoids who can do synchronised martial arts like the ones who dazzled audiences during New Year's festivities in China . And they won't help you find a can of Coke with embarrassing slowness like the man-shaped beast known as Optimus from Elon Musk's Tesla Inc. Instead, they will be microscopic, and mostly made of algae, bacteria and other single-celled organisms.

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The specialized crops could save farmers millions. A swarm of desert locusts fly after an aircraft sprayed pesticide in Meru, Kenya in 2021. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Swarms of locusts devouring a farmer's livelihood might sound apocalyptic, but major locust infestations are a regular problem in agricultural communities around the world. These locust swarms--dense, droning packs of certain grasshopper species--can cover hundreds of square miles, and the insects consume vast amounts of vegetation and threaten global agriculture.