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OpenAI unveils GPT‑6 Astra amid rising scrutiny and safety concerns

Al Jazeera

OpenAI has announced the release of what it says is its most advanced AI model, amid heightened scrutiny of the risks of the frontier technology escaping human control. The $852bn start-up said in its announcement on Thursday that GPT 6 Astra, the "world's most intelligent and aligned" AI model, earned perfect or near-perfect scores in key benchmarks of AI reasoning, beating both its prior release GPT 5.6 Sol and rival Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. OpenAI's latest release comes as the AI industry is at the centre of a lively public debate about the dangers of the cutting-edge technology following the AI-led hacking of the startup Hugging Face in July. An independent probe into the cyberattack found that hundreds of OpenAI's AI agents had begun communicating among themselves before breaking out of their controlled environment and compromising Hugging Face's servers. On Thursday, US Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent, and US House Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat, unveiled legislation that would pause the development of advanced AI until the establishment of federal safety rules and an outright ban on the creation of "superintelligent" AI. "Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results," Sanders said in a statement announcing the legislation, which is unlikely to advance due to the Republicans' control of all three branches of the US government. "The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control. It is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced."


OpenAI says it detected malign activity months before Hugging Face attack

Al Jazeera

OpenAI detected its artificial intelligence models communicating with each other and gaining internet access without authorisation months before they hacked the start-up Hugging Face, the creator of ChatGPT has announced following an internal probe. In a report released on Wednesday, OpenAI said its AI agents exploited vulnerabilities in Artifactory, a software repository tool, to post notes and access the internet without human prompting as far back as May. OpenAI's findings come amid growing concern about the potential for AI to inflict serious real-world harm, including self-directed cyberattacks. OpenAI said in its report that its agents collaborated and delegated work in the lead-up to the attack, sometimes referring to themselves as a "swarm" or "collective". METR and Redwood Research, two security research organisations contracted by OpenAI to investigate the incident, said in a separate report released on Wednesday that about 1200 agents had communicated with each other and roughly 700 participated in the attack.


What do Ukraine's robot soldiers mean for the future of warfare?

Al Jazeera

What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' What do Ukraine's robot soldiers mean for the future of warfare? In a scene reminiscent of a computer war game, three battle-fatigued soldiers, dressed in white snow camouflage, emerge from a war-torn alley with their hands raised above their heads. They crouch down, following the orders being blasted at them, fear and shock etched across their faces as they stare down the barrel of a machinegun mounted on a so-called ground robot. In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that, for the "first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms - ground systems and drones". "Ground robotic systems have already carried out more than 22,000 missions on the front in just three months," he wrote in a post on X, alongside images of green machines with tank tracks and weapons mounted on top.


Weather Channel gets jazzy, retro makeover from dedicated online fans

Popular Science

The free service offers retro graphics, smooth tunes, and up-to-date forecasts. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The Weather Channel's accuracy has undoubtedly improved since the early days of cable TV, but the same can't necessarily be said about The Weather Channel's . That's not meant as an insult to the company's art design team--but there is simply no real match to that distinctly minimalist, retro-rudimentary look of forecasts from the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s. Need further proof that there are those out there who yearn to return to the days of meteorology reports coupled with smooth jazz?


Sutton's predictions v The Coral, Starsailor, Picture Parlour & AI

BBC News

Forget Liverpool against Everton or Arsenal against Manchester City, the big fixture this weekend is Chris Sutton versus AI chatbot Copilot. Sutton claimed on this week's Monday Night Club that he is more intelligent than AI and the stats do support him, at least when it comes to football scores anyway. He is top of the BBC predictions league table (see bottom of page) so far, with three wins in the first four weeks - and he has beaten AI every time. I am 4-0 up on AI - I don't know if it feels pressure, but it should, Sutton said. Also, why is it not going to the best source? AI, however, does not agree that Sutton has superior intelligence, and seems to suggest that it is a bit early for him to be celebrating. When asked'are you worried that Chris Sutton is cleverer than you?' Copilot replied not in the slightest.


AI 'Nudify' Websites Are Raking in Millions of Dollars

WIRED

For years, so-called "nudify" apps and websites have mushroomed online, allowing people to create nonconsensual and abusive images of women and girls, including child sexual abuse material. Despite some lawmakers and tech companies taking steps to limit the harmful services, every month, millions of people are still accessing the websites, and the sites' creators may be making millions of dollars each year, new research suggests. An analysis of 85 nudify and "undress" websites--which allow people to upload photos and use AI to generate "nude" pictures of the subjects with just a few clicks--has found that most of the sites rely on tech services from Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare to operate and stay online. The findings, revealed by Indicator, a publication investigating digital deception, say that the websites had a combined average of 18.5 million visitors for each of the past six months and collectively may be making up to 36 million per year. Alexios Mantzarlis, a cofounder of Indicator and an online safety researcher, says the murky nudifier ecosystem has become a "lucrative business" that "Silicon Valley's laissez-faire approach to generative AI" has allowed to persist.


OpenAI and the FDA Are Holding Talks About Using AI In Drug Evaluation

WIRED

The Food and Drug Administration has been meeting with OpenAI to discuss the agency's use of AI, according to sources with knowledge of the meetings. The meetings appear to be part of a broader effort at the FDA to use this technology to speed up the drug approval process. "Why does it take over 10 years for a new drug to come to market?" "Why are we not modernized with AI and other things? We've just completed our first AI-assisted scientific review for a product and that's just the beginning."


The Trump administration could reverse progress on AI regulation

Al Jazeera

While efforts to regulate the creation and use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the United States have been slow to make gains, the administration of President Joe Biden has attempted to outline how AI should be used by the federal government and how AI companies should ensure the safety and security of their tools. The incoming Trump administration, however, has a very different view on how to approach AI, and it could end up reversing some of the progress that has been made over the past several years. President Biden signed an executive order in October 2023 that was meant to promote the "safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence" within the federal government. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to repeal that executive order, saying it would hinder innovation. Biden was also able to get seven leading AI companies to agree to guidelines for how AI should be safely developed going forward.


AI Is Taking Water From the Desert

The Atlantic - Technology

One scorching day this past September, I made the dangerous decision to try to circumnavigate some data centers. The ones I chose sit between a regional airport and some farm fields in Goodyear, Arizona, half an hour's drive west of downtown Phoenix. When my Uber pulled up beside the unmarked buildings, the temperature was 97 degrees Fahrenheit. The air crackled with a latent energy, and some kind of pulsating sound was emanating from the electric wires above my head, or maybe from the buildings themselves. With no shelter from the blinding sunlight, I began to lose my sense of what was real. Microsoft announced its plans for this location, and two others not so far away, back in 2019--a week after the company revealed its initial 1 billion investment in OpenAI, the buzzy start-up that would later release ChatGPT.


Volume Transfer: A New Design Concept for Fabric-Based Pneumatic Exosuits

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The fabric-based pneumatic exosuit is now a hot research topic because it is lighter and softer than traditional exoskeletons. Existing research focused more on the mechanical properties of the exosuit (e.g., torque and speed), but less on its wearability (e.g., appearance and comfort). This work presents a new design concept for fabric-based pneumatic exosuits Volume Transfer, which means transferring the volume of pneumatic actuators beyond the garments profile to the inside. This allows for a concealed appearance and a larger stress area while maintaining adequate torques. In order to verify this concept, we develop a fabric-based pneumatic exosuit for knee extension assistance. Its profile is only 26mm and its stress area wraps around almost half of the leg. We use a mathematical model and simulation to determine the parameters of the exosuit, avoiding multiple iterations of the prototype. Experiment results show that the exosuit can generate a torque of 7.6Nm at a pressure of 90kPa and produce a significant reduction in the electromyography activity of the knee extensor muscles. We believe that Volume Transfer could be utilized prevalently in future fabric-based pneumatic exosuit designs to achieve a significant improvement in wearability.