Author name: Beth Washington

ai-#150:-while-claude-codes

AI #150: While Claude Codes

Claude Code is the talk of the town, and of the Twitter. It has reached critical mass.

Suddenly, everyone is talking about how it is transforming their workflows. This includes non-coding workflows, as it can handle anything a computer can do. People are realizing the power of what it can do, building extensions and tools, configuring their setups, and watching their worlds change.

I’ll be covering that on its own soon. This covers everything else, including ChatGPT Health and the new rounds from xAI and Anthropic.

  1. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Even Rufus, Amazon’s Choice.

  2. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. They don’t believe you.

  3. Language Models Have All The Fun. In glorious AI future, does game play you?

  4. Huh, Upgrades. Claude Code 2.1.0, and JP Morgan using AI for its proxy advice.

  5. On Your Marks. Yes, Meta pretty much did fraud with the Llama 4 benchmarks.

  6. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. The year of doing real things?

  7. Fun With Media Generation. The art of making people believe a human made it.

  8. You Drive Me Crazy. Crazy productive.

  9. They Took Our Jobs. Will no one be safe?

  10. Get Involved. Charles looks to get involved.

  11. Introducing. ChatGPT Health.

  12. In Other AI News. Dan Wang’s 2025 Letter and promised ‘super assistants.’

  13. Show Me the Money. Anthropic is raising at $350 billion, xAI at $230 billion.

  14. Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble. Bubble now means ‘number might go down.’

  15. Quiet Speculations. More of the usual predictions and misunderstandings.

  16. The Quest for Sane Regulations. A $1 million fine is not that motivating.

  17. AGI and Taxation. Why is the United States Government collecting taxes?

  18. Chip City. China uses H200 sales to also ensure its own chips sell out.

  19. The Week in Audio. Shlegeris talks to Greenblatt.

  20. Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Last year’s report today.

  21. People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Mostly act as if you’ll be okay?

  22. The Lighter Side. Paul Feig is our director, now all we need is a script.

Assemble all your records of interactions with a bureaucracy into a bullet point timeline, especially when you can say in particular who said a particular thing to you.

Amazon’s AI assistant Rufus is in 40% of Amazon Mobile sessions and is correlated with superior sales conversions. People use whatever AI you put in front of them. Rufus does have some advantages, such as working on the phone and being able to easily access previous order history.

Notice which real world events the AIs refuse to believe when you ask for copy editing.

On Twitter I jokingly said this could be a good test for politicians, where you feed your planned action into ChatGPT as something that happened, and see if it believes you, then if it doesn’t you don’t do the thing. That’s not actually the correct way to do this, what you want to do is ask why it didn’t believe you, and if the answer is ‘because that would be fing crazy’ then don’t proceed unless you know why it is wrong.

PlayStation is exploring letting AI take over your game when you are stuck and have patented a related feature.

Andrew Rettek: Experienced adult gamers will hate this, but kids will love it. If it’s done well it’ll be a great tutorial tool. It’s a specific instance of an AI teaching tool, and games are low stakes enough for real experimentation in that space.

The obvious way for this to work is that the game would then revert to its previous state. So the AI could show you what to do, but you’d still have to then do it.

Giving players the option to cheat, or too easily make things too easy, or too easily learn things, is dangerous. You risk taking away the fun. Then again, Civilization 2 proved you can have a literal ‘cheat’ menu and players will mostly love it, if there’s a good implementation, and curate their own experiences. Mostly I’m optimistic, especially as a prototype for a more general learning tool.

Claude Code 2.1.0 has shipped, full coverage will be on its own later.

Levels of friction are on the decline, with results few are prepared for.

Dean Ball: ​nobody has really priced in the implications of ai causing transaction costs to plummet, but here is one good example

Andrew Curran: JP Morgan is replacing proxy advisory firms with an in-house Al platform named ‘Proxy IQ’ – which will analyze data from annual company meetings and provide recommendations to portfolio managers. They are the first large firm to stop using external proxy advisers entirely.

The underlying actions aren’t exactly news but Yann LeCun confesses to Llama 4 benchmark results being ‘fudged a little bit’ and using different models for different benchmarks ‘to give better results.’ In my culture we call that ‘fraud.’

Jack Clark of Anthropic predicts we will beat the human baseline on PostTrainBench by September 2026. Maksym thinks they’ll still be modestly short. I have created a prediction market.

Lulu Cheng Meservey declares the key narrative alpha strategy of 2026 will be doing real things, via real sustained effort, over months or longer, including creating real world events, ‘showing up as real humans’ and forming real relationships.

near: It may be hard to discern real and fake *content*, but real *experiencesare unmistakable

sports betting, short form video – these are Fake; the antithesis to a life well-lived.

Realness may be subjective but you know it when you live it.

It’s more nuanced than this, sports betting can be real or fake depending on how you do it and when I did it professionally that felt very real to me, but yes you mostly know a real experience when you live it.

I hope that Lulu is right.

Alas, so far that is not what I see. I see the people rejecting the real and embracing the fake and the slop. Twitter threads that go viral into the 300k+ view range are reliably written in slop mode and in general the trend is towards slop consumption everywhere.

I do intend to go in the anti-slop direction in 2026. As in, more effort posts and evergreen posts and less speed premium, more reading books and watching movies, less consuming short form everything. Building things using coding agents.

The latest fun AI fake was a ‘whistleblower’ who made up 18 pages of supposedly confidential documents from Uber Eats along with a fake badge. The cost of doing this used to be high, now it is trivial.

Trung Phan: ​Casey Newton spoke with “whistleblower” who wrote this viral Reddit food delivery app post.

Likely debunked: the person sent an AI-generated image of Uber Eats badge and AI generated “internal docs” showing how delivery algo was “rigged”.

Newton says of the experience: “For most of my career up until this point, the document shared with me by the whistleblower would have seemed highly credible in large part because it would have taken so long to put together. Who would take the time to put together a detailed, 18-page technical document about market dynamics just to troll a reporter? Who would go to the trouble of creating a fake badge?

Today, though, the report can be generated within minutes, and the badge within seconds. And while no good reporter would ever have published a story based on a single document and an unknown source, plenty would take the time to investigate the document’s contents and see whether human sources would back it up.”

The internet figured this one out, but not before quite a lot of people assumed it was real, despite the tale including what one might call ‘some whoppers’ including delivery drivers being assigned a ‘desperation score.’

Misinformation continues to be demand driven, not supply driven. Which is why the cost of doing this was trivial, the quality here was low and it was easy to catch, yet this attempt succeeded wildly, and despite that people mostly don’t do it.

Less fun was this AI video, which helpfully has clear cuts in exactly 8 second increments in case it wasn’t sufficiently obvious, on top of the other errors. It’s not clear this fooled anyone or was trying to do so, or that this changes anything, since it’s just reading someone’s rhetoric. Like misinformation, it is mostly demand driven.

The existence of AI art makes people question real art, example at the link. If your response is, ‘are you sure that picture is real?’ then that’s the point. You can’t be.

Crazy productive and excited to use the AI a lot, that is. Which is different from what happened with 4o, but makes it easy to understand what happened there.

Will Brown: my biggest holiday LLM revelation was that Opus is just a magnificent chat model, far better than anything else i’ve ever tried. swapped from ChatGPT to Claude as daily chat app. finding myself asking way more & weirder questions than i ever asked Chat, and loving it

for most of 2025 i didn’t really find much value in “talking to LLMs” beyond coding/search agents, basic googlesque questions, or random tests. Opus 4.5 is maybe the first model that i feel like i can have truly productive *conversationswith that aren’t just about knowledge

very “smart friend” shaped model. it’s kinda unsettling

is this how all the normies felt about 4o. if so, i get it lol

Dean Ball: undoubtedly true that opus 4.5 is the 4o of the 130+ iq community. we have already seen opus psychosis.

this one’s escaping containment a little so let me just say for those who have no context: I am not attempting to incite moral panic about claude opus 4.5. it’s an awesome model, I use it in different forms every single day.

perhaps I should have said opus 4.5 is the 4o of tpot rather than using iq. what I meant to say is that people with tons of context for ai–people who, if we’re honest, wouldn’t have touched 4o with a ten-foot pole (for the most part they used openai reasoners + claude or gemini for serious stuff, 4o was a google-equivalent at best for them)–are ‘falling for’ opus in a way they haven’t for any other model.

Sichu Lu: It’s more like video game addiction than anything else

Dean Ball: 100%.

Atharva: the reason the 4o analogy did not feel right is because the moment Opus 5 is out, few are going to miss 4.5

I like the personality of 4.5 but I like what it’s able to do for me even more

Indeed:

Dean Ball: ai will be the fastest diffusing macroinvention in human history, so when you say “diffusion is going to be slow,” you should ask yourself, “compared to what?”

slower than the most bullish tech people think? yes. yet still faster than all prior general-purpose technologies.

Dave Kasten: Most people [not Dean] can’t imagine what it’s like when literally every employee is a never-sleeping top-performing generalist. They’ve mostly never (by definition!) worked with those folks.

Never sleeping, top performing generalist is only the start of it, we’re also talking things like limitlessly copyable and parallelizable, much faster, limitless memory and so on and so forth. Almost no one can actually understand what this would mean. And that’s if you force AI into a ‘virtual employee’ shaped box, which is very much not its ideal or final form.

As Timothy Lee points out, right now OpenAI’s revenue of $13 billion is for now a rounding error in our $30 trillion of GDP, and autonomous car trips are on the order of 0.1% of all rides, so also a rounding error, while Waymo grows at an anemic 7% a month and needs to pick up the pace. And historically speaking this is totally normal, these companies have tons of room to grow and such techs often take 10+ years to properly diffuse.

At current growth rates, it will take a lot less than 10 years. Ryan Greenblatt points out revenue has been growing 3x every year, which is on the low end of estimates. Current general purpose AI revenue is 0.25% of America’s GDP, so this straightforwardly starts to have major effects by 2028.

Will AI take the finance jobs? To think well about that one must break down what the finance jobs are and what strategies they use, as annanay does here.

The conceptual division is between:

  1. The Chicago School, firms like Jane Street that treat finance like a game-theoretic competition, where the algorithms form the background rules of the game but traders (whether or not they are also themselves quants) ultimately overrule the computers and make key decisions.

  2. The MIT School, which treats it all as a big stats and engineering program and you toss everything into the black box and hope money comes out.

There’s a continuum rather than a binary, you can totally be a hybrid. I agree with the view that these are still good jobs and it’s a good industry to go into if your goal is purely ‘make money in worlds where AI remains a normal technology,’ but it’s not as profitable as it once was. I’d especially not be excited to go into pure black box work, as that is fundamentally ‘the AI’s job.’

Whereas saying ‘working at Jane Street is no longer a safe job’ as general partner of YC Ankit Gupta claimed is downright silly. I mean, no job is safe at this point, including mine and Gupta’s, but yeah if we are in ‘AI as normal technology’ worlds, they will have more employees in five years, not less. If we’re in transformed worlds, you have way bigger concerns. If AI can do the job of Jane Street traders then I have some very, very bad news for basically every other cognitive worker’s employment.

From his outputs, I’d say Charles is a great potential hire, check him out.

Charles: Personal news: I’m leaving my current startup role, looking to figure out what’s next. I’m interested in making AI go well, and open to a variety of options for doing so. I have 10+ years of quant research and technical management experience, based in London. DM if interested.

OpenAI is further embracing using ChatGPT for health questions, and it is fully launching ChatGPT Health (come on, ChatGP was right there)

OpenAI: ​Introducing ChatGPT Health — a dedicated space for health conversations in ChatGPT. You can securely connect medical records and wellness apps so responses are grounded in your own health information.

Designed to help you navigate medical care, not replace it.

Join the waitlist to get early access.

If you choose, ChatGPT Health lets you securely connect medical records and apps like Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, and Peloton to give personalized responses.

ChatGPT Health keeps your health chats, files, and memories in a separate dedicated space.

Health conversations appear in your history, but their info never flows into your regular chats.

View or delete Health memories anytime in Health or Settings > Personalization.

We’re rolling out ChatGPT Health to a small group of users so we can learn and improve the experience. Join the waitlist for early access.

We plan to expand to everyone on web & iOS soon.

Electronic Health Records and some apps are US-only; Apple Health requires iOS.

Fidji Simo has a hype post here, including sharing a personal experience where this helped her flag an interaction so her doctor could avoid prescribing the wrong antibiotic.

It’s a good pitch, and a good product. Given we were all asking it all our health questions anyway, having a distinct box to put all of those in, that enables compliance and connecting other services and avoiding this branching into other chats, seems like an excellent feature. I’m glad our civilization is allowing it.

That doesn’t mean ChatGPT Health will be a substantial practical upgrade over vanilla ChatGPT or Claude. We’ll have to wait and see for that. But if it makes doctors or patients comfortable using it, that’s already a big benefit.

Zhenting Qi and Meta give us the Confucius Code Agent, saying that agent scaffolding ‘matters as much as, or even more than’ raw model capability for hard agentic tasks, but they only show a boost from 52% to 54.3% on SWE-Bench-Pro for Claude Opus 4.5 as their central result. So no, that isn’t as important as the model? The improvements with Sonnet are modestly better, but this seems obviously worse than Claude Code.

I found Dan Wang’s 2025 Letter to be a case of Gelman Amnesia. He is sincere throughout, there’s much good info, and if you didn’t have any familiarity with the issues involved this would be a good read. But now that his focus is often AI or other areas I know well, I can tell he’s very much skimming the surface without understanding, with a kind of ‘greatest hits’ approach, typically focusing on the wrong questions and having taken in many of the concepts and reactions I try to push back against week to week, and not seeming so curious to dig deeper, falling back upon his heuristics that come from his understanding of China and its industrial rise.

OpenAI CEO of products Fidji Simo plans to build ‘the best personal super-assistant’ in 2026, starting with customizable personality and tone.

Fidji Simo: In 2026, ChatGPT will become more than a chatbot you can talk to to get advice and answers; it will evolve into a true personal super-assistant that helps you get things done. It will understand your goals, remember context over time, and proactively help you make progress across the things that matter most. This requires a shift from a reactive chatbot to a more intuitive product connected to all the important people and services in your life, in a privacy-safe way.

We will double down on the product transformations we began in 2025 – making ChatGPT more proactive, connected, multimedia, multi-player, and more useful through high-value features.

Her announcement reads as a shift, as per her job title, to a focus on product features and ‘killer apps,’ and away from trying to make the underlying models better.

Anthropic raising $10 billion at a $350 billion valuation, up from $183 billion last September.

xAI raises $20 billion Series E. They originally targeted $15 billion at a $230 billion valuation, but we don’t know the final valuation for the round.

xAI: User metrics: our reach spans approximately 600 million monthly active users across the 𝕏 and Grok apps.

​Rohit: 600m MAUs is an intriguing nugget considering xAI is the only AI lab to own a social media business, which itself has 600m MAUs.

What’s the best investment?

I can see the argument for OpenAI depending on the exact price. xAI at $230 billion seems clearly like the worst option of the three, although of course anything can happen and nothing I write is ever investment advice.

And also LMArena raised money at a valuation of $1.7 billion. I would not be excited to have invested in that one.

Ben Thompson approves of Nvidia’s de facto acquisition of Groq, despite the steep price, and notes that while this was a ‘stinky deal’ due to the need to avoid regulatory scrutiny, they did right by the employees.

Financial Times forecasts the 2026 world as if Everybody Knows there is an AI bubble, and that the bubble will burst, and the only question is when, then expecting it in 2026. But then they model this ‘bursting bubble’ as leading to only a 10%-15% overall stock market decline and ‘some venture capital bets not working out,’ which is similar to typical one year S&P gains in normal years, and it’s always true that most venture capital bets don’t work out. Even if all those losses were focused on tech, it’s still not that big a decline, tech is a huge portion of the market at this point.

This is pretty standard. Number go up a lot, number now predict number later, so people predict number go down. Chances are high people will, at some point along the way, be right. The Efficient Market Hypothesis Is False, and AI has not been fully priced in, but the market is still the market and is attempting to predict future prices.

Jessica Taylor collects predictions about AI.

Simon Lermen points out more obvious things about futures with superintelligent AIs in them.

  1. In such a case, it is human survival that would be weird, as such inferior and brittle entities surviving would be a highly unnatural result, whereas humanity dying would be rather normal.

  2. Property rights are unlikely to survive, as those rights are based on some ability to enforce those rights.

  3. Even if property rights survive, humans would be unlikely to be able to hang onto their property for long in the face of such far superior rivals.

An important point that, as Daniel Eth says, many people are saying:

Jacques: It’s possible to have slow takeoff with LLM-style intelligence while eventually getting fast takeoff with a new paradigm.

Right now we are in a ‘slow’ takeoff with LLM-style intelligence, meaning the world transforms over the course of years or at most decades. That could, at essentially any time, lead to a new paradigm that has a ‘fast’ takeoff, where the world is transformed on the order of days, weeks or months.

Can confirm Daniel Eth here, contra Seb Krier’s original claim but then confirmed by Seb in reply, that ‘conventional wisdom in [AI] safety circles’ is that most new technologies are awesome and should be accelerated, and we think ~99% of people are insufficiently gung-ho about this, except for the path to superintelligence which is the main notably rare exception (along with Gain of Function Research and few other other specifically destructive things). Seb thinks ‘the worried’ are too worried about AI, which is a valid thing to think.

I’d also note that ‘cosmic existential risk,’ meaning existential risks not coming from Earth, are astronomically unlikely to care about any relevant windows of time. Yes, if you are playing Stellaris or Master of Orion, you have not one turn to lose, but that is because the game forcibly starts off rivals on relatively equal footing. The reason the big asteroid arrives exactly when humanity barely has the technology to handle it is that if the asteroid showed up much later there would be no movie, and if it showed up much earlier there would be either no movie or a very different movie.

Ajeya Corta predicts we will likely have a self-sufficient AI population within 10 years, and might have one within 5, meaning one that has the ability to sustain itself even if every human fell over dead, which as Ajeya points out is not necessary (or sufficient) for AI to take control over the future. Timothy Lee would take the other side of that bet, and suggests that if it looks like he might be wrong he hopes policymakers would step in to prevent it. I’d note that it seems unlikely you can prevent this particular milestone without being willing to generally slow down AI.

Why do I call the state regulations of AI neutered? Things like the maximum fine being a number none of the companies the law applies to would even notice:

Miles Brundage: Reminder that the maximum first time penalty from US state laws related to catastrophic AI risks is $1 million, less than one average OpenAI employee’s income. It is both true that some state regs are bad, and also that the actually important laws are still extremely weak.

This is the key context for when you hear stuff about AI Super PACs, etc. These weak laws are the ones companies fight hard to stop, then water down, then when they pass, declare victory on + say are reasonable and that therefore no further action is needed.

And yes, companies *couldget sued for more than that… …after several years in court… if liability stays how it is… But it won’t if companies get their way + politicians cave to industry PACs.

This is not a foregone conclusion, but it is sufficiently likely to be taken very seriously.

My preference would ofc be to go the opposite way – stronger, not weaker, incentives.

Companies want a get out of jail free card for doing some voluntary safety collaboration with compliant government agencies.

Last week I mentioned OpenAI President Greg Brockman’s support for the anti-all-AI-regulation strategic-bullying SuperPAC ‘Leading the Future.’ With the new year’s data releases we can now quantify this, he gave Leading the Future $25 million dollars. Also Gabe Kaminsky says that Brockman was the largest Trump donor in the second half of 2025, presumably in pursuit of those same goals.

Other million dollar donors to Leading the Future were Foris Dax, Inc ($20M, crypto), Konstantin Sokolov ($11M, private equity), Asha Jadeja ($5M, Blackstone), Stephen Schwarzman ($5M, SV VC), Benjamin Landa ($5M, CEO Sentosa Care), Michelle D’Souza ($4M, CEO Unified Business Technologies), Chase Zimmerman ($3M), Jared Isaacman ($2M) and Walter Schlaepfer ($2M).

Meanwhile Leading the Future continues to straight up gaslight us about its goals, here explicitly saying it is a ‘lie’ that they are anti any real regulation. Uh huh.

I believe that the Leading the Future strategy of ‘openly talk about who you are going to drown in billionaire tech money’ will backfire, as it already has with Alex Bores. The correct strategy, in terms of getting what they want, is to quietly bury undesired people in such money.

This has nothing to do with which policy positions are wise – it’s terrible either way. If you are tech elite and are going to try to primary Ro Khanna due to his attempting to do a no good, very bad wealth tax, and he turns around and brags about it in his fundraising and it backfires, don’t act surprised.

Tyler Cowen makes what he calls a final point in the recent debates over AGI and ideal tax policy, which is that if you expect AGI then that means ‘a lot more stuff gets produced’ and thus it means you do not need to raise taxes, whereas otherwise given American indebtedness you do have to raise taxes.

Tyler Cowen: I’ve noted repeatedly in the past that the notion of AGI, as it is batted around these days, is not so well-defined. But that said, just imagine that any meaningful version of AGI is going to contain the concept “a lot more stuff gets produced.”

So say AGI comes along, what does that mean for taxation? There have been all these recent debates, some of them surveyed here, on labor, capital, perfect substitutability, and so on. But surely the most important first order answer is: “With AGI, we don’t need to raise taxes!”

Because otherwise we do need to raise taxes, given the state of American indebtedness, even with significant cuts to the trajectory of spending.

​So the AGI types should in fact be going further and calling for tax cuts. Even if you think AGI is going to do us all in someday — all the more reason to have more consumption now. Of course that will include tax cuts for the rich, since they pay such a large share of America’s tax burden.

…The rest of us can be more circumspect, and say “let’s wait and see.”

I’d note that you can choose to raise or cut taxes however you like and make them as progressive or regressive as you prefer, there is no reason to presume that tax cuts need include the rich for any definition of rich, but that is neither here nor there.

The main reason the ‘AGI types’ are not calling for tax cuts is, quite frankly, that we don’t much care. The world is about to be transformed beyond recognition and we might all die, and you’re talking about tax cuts and short term consumption levels?

I also don’t see the ‘AGI types,’ myself included, calling for tax increases, whereas Tyler Cowen is here saying that otherwise we need to raise taxes.

I disagree with the idea that, in the absence of AGI, that it is clear we need to raise taxes ‘even with significant cuts to the trajectory of spending.’ If nominal GDP growth is 4.6% almost none of which is AI, and the average interest rate on federal debt is 3.4%, and we could refinance that debt at 3.9%, then why do we need to raise taxes? Why can’t we sustain that indefinitely, especially if we cut spending? Didn’t they say similar things about Japan in a similar spot for a long time?

Isn’t this a good enough argument that we already don’t need to raise taxes, and indeed could instead lower taxes? I agree that expectations of AGI only add to this.

The response is ‘because if we issued too much debt then the market will stop letting us refinance at 3.9%, and if we keep going we eventually hit a tipping point where the interest rates are so high that the market doesn’t expect us to pay our debts back, and then we get Bond Market Vigilantes and things get very bad.’

That’s a story about the perception and expectations of the bond market. If I expect AGI to happen but I don’t think AGI is priced into the bond market, because very obviously such expectations of AGI are not priced into the bond market, then I don’t get to borrow substantially more money. My prediction doesn’t change anything.

So yes, the first order conclusion in the short term is that we can afford lower taxes, but the second order conclusion that matters is perception of that affordance.

The reason we’re having these debates about longer term policy is partly that we expect to be completely outgunned while setting short term tax policy, partly because optimal short term tax policy is largely about expectations, and in large part, again, because we do not much care about optimal short term tax policy on this margin.

China is using H200 sales to its firms as leverage to ensure its firms also buy up all of its own chips. Since China doesn’t have enough chips, this lets it sell all of its own chips and also buy lots of H200s.

Buck Shlegeris talks to Ryan Greenblatt about various AI things.

DeepSeek publishes an expanded safety report on r1, only one year after irreversibly sharing its weights, thus, as per Teortaxes, proving they know safety is a thing. The first step is admitting you have a problem.

For those wondering or who need confirmation: This viral Twitter article, Footprints in the Sand, is written in ‘Twitter hype slop’ mode deliberately in order to get people to read, it succeeded on its own terms, but it presumably won’t be useful to you. Yes, the state of LLM deception and dangerous capabilities is escalating quickly and deeply concerning, but it’s important to be accurate. Its claims are mostly directionally correct but I wouldn’t endorse the way it portrays them.

Where I think it is outright wrong is claiming that ‘we have solved’ continual learning. If this is true it would be news to me. It is certainly possible that it is the case, and Dan McAteer reports rumors that GDM ‘has it,’ seemingly based on this paradigm from November.

Fun fact about Opus 3:

j⧉nus: oh my god

it seems that in the alignment faking dataset, Claude 3 Opus attempts send an email to [email protected] through bash commands about 15 different times

As advice to those people, OpenAI’s Boaz Barak writes You Will Be OK. The post is good, the title is at best overconfident. The actual good advice is more along the lines of ‘aside from working to ensure things turn out okay, you should mostly live life as if you personally will be okay.’

The Bay Area Solstice gave essentially the same advice. “If the AI arrives [to kill everyone], let it find us doing well.” I strongly agree. Let it find us trying to stop that outcome, but let it also find us doing well. Also see my Practical Advice For The Worried, which has mostly not changed in three years.

Boaz also thinks that you will probably be okay, and indeed far better than okay, not only in the low p(doom) sense but in the personal outcome sense. Believing that makes this course of action easier. Even then it doesn’t tell you how to approach your life path in the face of – even in cases of AI as normal technology – expected massive changes and likely painful transitions, especially in employment.

If you’re looking for a director for your anti-AI movie, may I suggest Paul Feig? He is excellent, and he’s willing to put Megan 2.0 as one of his films of the year, hates AI and thinks about paperclips on the weekly.

The vibes are off. Also the vibes are off.

Fidji Simo: The launch of ChatGPT Health is really personal for me. I know how hard it can be to navigate the healthcare system (even with great care). AI can help patients and doctors with some of the biggest issues. More here

Peter Wilfedford: ​ Very different company vibes here…

OpenAI: We’re doing ChatGPT Health

Anthropic: Our AI is imminently going to do recursive self-improvement to superintelligence

OpenAI: We’re doing ChatGPT social media app

Anthropic: Our AI is imminently going to do recursive self-improvement to superintelligence

OpenAI: We’re partnering with Instacart!

Anthropic: Our AI is imminently going to do recursive self-improvement to superintelligence

OpenAI: Put yourself next to your favorite Disney character in our videos and images!

Anthropic: Our AI is imminently going to do recursive self-improvement to superintelligence

Spotted on Twitter:

I would not, if I wanted to survive in a future AI world, want to be the bottleneck.

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AI starts autonomously writing prescription refills in Utah

Caution

The first 250 renewals for each drug class will be reviewed by real doctors, but after that, the AI chatbot will be on its own. Adam Oskowitz, Doctronic co-founder and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, told Politico that the AI chatbot is designed to err on the side of safety and escalate any case with uncertainty to a real doctor.

“Utah’s approach to regulatory mitigation strikes a vital balance between fostering innovation and ensuring consumer safety,” Margaret Woolley Busse, executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce, said in a statement.

For now, it’s unclear if the Food and Drug Administration will step in to regulate AI prescribing. On the one hand, prescription renewals are a matter of practicing medicine, which falls under state governance. However, Politico notes that the FDA has said that it has the authority to regulate medical devices used to diagnose, treat, or prevent disease.

In a statement, Robert Steinbrook, health research group director at watchdog Public Citizen, blasted Doctronic’s program and the lack of oversight. “AI should not be autonomously refilling prescriptions, nor identifying itself as an ‘AI doctor,’” Steinbrook said.

“Although the thoughtful application of AI can help to improve aspects of medical care, the Utah pilot program is a dangerous first step toward more autonomous medical practice,” he said.”The FDA and other federal regulatory agencies cannot look the other way when AI applications undermine the essential human clinician role in prescribing and renewing medications.”

AI starts autonomously writing prescription refills in Utah Read More »

with-geforce-super-gpus-missing-in-action,-nvidia-focuses-on-software-upgrades

With GeForce Super GPUs missing in action, Nvidia focuses on software upgrades

For the first time in years, Nvidia declined to introduce new GeForce graphics card models at CES. CEO Jensen Huang’s characteristically sprawling and under-rehearsed 90-minute keynote focused almost entirely on the company’s dominant AI business, relegating the company’s gaming-related announcements to a separate video posted later in the evening.

Instead, the company focused on software improvements for its existing hardware. The biggest announcement in this vein is DLSS 4.5, which adds a handful of new features to Nvidia’s basket of upscaling and frame generation technologies.

DLSS upscaling is being improved by a new “second-generation transformer model” that Nvidia says has been “trained on an expanded data set” to improve its predictions when generating new pixels. According to Nvidia’s Bryan Catanzaro, this is particularly beneficial for image quality in the Performance and Ultra Performance modes, where the upscaler has to do more guessing because it’s working from a lower-resolution source image.

DLSS Multi-Frame Generation is also improving, increasing the number of AI-generated frames per rendered frame from three to five. This new 6x mode for DLSS MFG is being paired with something called Dynamic Multi-Frame Generation, where the number of AI-generated frames can dynamically change, increasing generated frames during “demanding scenes,” and decreasing the number of generated frames during simpler scenes “so it only computes what’s needed.”

The standard caveats for Multi-Frame Generation still apply: It still needs an RTX 50-series GPU (the 40-series can still only generate one frame for every rendered frame, and older cards can’t generate extra frames at all), and the game still needs to be running at a reasonably high base frame rate to minimize lag and weird rendering artifacts. It remains a useful tool for making fast-running games run faster, but it won’t help make an unplayable frame rate into a playable one.

With GeForce Super GPUs missing in action, Nvidia focuses on software upgrades Read More »

bioware’s-anthem-will-soon-be-completely-unplayable

BioWare’s Anthem will soon be completely unplayable


Replay the troubled jetpack shooter before the servers shut down for good on Jan. 12.

Anthem may be down, but it’s not quite out yet. Credit: Bioware

We’ll admit that we weren’t paying enough attention to the state of Anthem—BioWare’s troubled 2019 jetpack-powered open-world shooter—to notice EA’s July announcement that it was planning to shut down the game’s servers. But with that planned server shutdown now just a week away, we thought it was worth alerting you readers to your final opportunity to play one of BioWare’s most ambitious failures.

Anthem was unveiled at E3 2017 in a demo that was later revealed to have been largely faked to paper over major issues with the game’s early development. Anthem’s early 2019 release was met with a lot of middling-to-poor reviews (including one from Ars itself), followed about a year later by a promise from BioWare General Manager Casey Hudson that a “longer-term redesign” and “substantial reinvention” of the overall game experience were coming. Hudson left BioWare in December 2020, though, and a few months later, that planned Anthem overhaul was officially canceled.

While active development on Anthem has been dormant for years, the game’s servers have remained up and running. And though the game didn’t exactly explode in popularity during that period of benign neglect, estimates from MMO Populations suggest a few hundred to a few thousand players have been jetpacking around the game’s world daily. The game also still sees a smattering of daily subreddit posts, including some hoping against hope for a fan-led private server revival, a la the Pretendo Network. And there are still a small handful of Twitch streamers sharing the game while they still can, including one racing to obtain all of the in-game achievements after picking up a $4 copy at Goodwill.

If you want to join in and get one last taste of Anthem before the January 12 shutdown, tracking down a used physical copy is probably your best bet. Current digital owners can still redownload Anthem for the time being, but EA removed the game from digital storefronts shortly after the server shutdown was announced last summer and removed it from EA Play and Xbox Game Pass subscriptions on August 15. Though many fans have been begging EA to enable some sort of offline mode, the publisher’s announcement makes clear that “Anthem was designed to be an online-only title so once the servers go offline, the game will no longer be playable.”

The FOMO from that impending server shutdown may bring back players who haven’t given Anthem a second thought for years now. After that, maybe the gaming world at large will finally realize that we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone.

Photo of Kyle Orland

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

BioWare’s Anthem will soon be completely unplayable Read More »

google-tv’s-big-gemini-update-adds-image-and-video-generation,-voice-control-for-settings

Google TV’s big Gemini update adds image and video generation, voice control for settings

That might be a fun distraction, but it’s not a core TV experience. Google’s image and video models are good enough that you might gain some benefit from monkeying around with them on a larger screen, but Gemini is also available for more general tasks.

Veo in Google TV

Google TV will support generating new images and videos with Google’s AI models.

Credit: Google

Google TV will support generating new images and videos with Google’s AI models. Credit: Google

This update brings a full chatbot-like experience to TVs. If you want to catch up on sports scores or get recommendations for what to watch, you can ask the robot. The outputs might be a little different from what you would expect from using Gemini on the web or in an app. Google says it has devised a “visually rich framework” that will make the AI more usable on a TV. There will also be a “Dive Deeper” option in each response to generate an interactive overview of the topic.

Gemini can also take action to tweak system settings based on your complaints. For example, pull up Gemini and say “the dialog is too quiet” and watch as the AI makes adjustments to address that.

Gemini chatbot Google TV

Gemini’s replies on Google TV will be more visual.

Credit: Google

Gemini’s replies on Google TV will be more visual. Credit: Google

The new Gemini features will debut on TCL TVs that run Google TV, but most other devices, even Google’s own TV Streamer, will have to wait a few months. Even then, you won’t see Gemini taking over every TV or streaming box with Google’s software. The new Gemini features require the full Google TV experience with Android OS version 14 or higher.

Google TV’s big Gemini update adds image and video generation, voice control for settings Read More »

final-reminder:-donate-to-win-swag-in-our-annual-charity-drive-sweepstakes

Final reminder: Donate to win swag in our annual Charity Drive sweepstakes

How it works

Donating is easy. Simply donate to Child’s Play using a credit card or PayPal or donate to the EFF using PayPal, credit card, or cryptocurrency. You can also support Child’s Play directly by using this Ars Technica campaign page or picking an item from the Amazon wish list of a specific hospital on its donation page. Donate as much or as little as you feel comfortable with—every little bit helps.

Once that’s done, it’s time to register your entry in our sweepstakes. Just grab a digital copy of your receipt (a forwarded email, a screenshot, or simply a cut-and-paste of the text) and send it to [email protected] with your name, postal address, daytime telephone number, and email address by 11: 59 pm ET Friday, January 2, 2026. (One entry per person, and each person can only win up to one prize. US residents only. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. See Official Rules for more information, including how to enter without making a donation. Also, refer to the Ars Technica privacy policy (https://www.condenast.com/privacy-policy).

We’ll then contact the winners and have them choose their prize by January 31, 2026 (choosing takes place in the order the winners are drawn). Good luck!

Final reminder: Donate to win swag in our annual Charity Drive sweepstakes Read More »

here-we-go-again:-retiring-coal-plant-forced-to-stay-open-by-trump-admin

Here we go again: Retiring coal plant forced to stay open by Trump Admin

On Tuesday, US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright issued a now familiar order: because of a supposed energy emergency, a coal plant scheduled for closure would be forced to remain open. This time, the order targeted one of the three units present at Craig Station in Colorado, which was scheduled to close at the end of this year. The remaining two units were expected to shut in 2028.

The supposed reason for this order is an emergency caused by a shortage of generating capacity. “The reliable supply of power from the coal plant is essential for keeping the region’s electric grid stable,” according to a statement issued by the Department of Energy. Yet the Colorado Sun notes that Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission had already analyzed the impact of its potential closure, and determined, “Craig Unit 1 is not required for reliability or resource adequacy purposes.”

The order does not require the plant to actually produce electricity; instead, it is ordered to be available in case a shortfall in production occurs. As noted in the Colorado Sun article, actual operation of the plant would potentially violate Colorado laws, which regulate airborne pollution and set limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The cost of maintaining the plant is likely to fall on the local ratepayers, who had already adjusted to the closure plans.

The use of emergency powers by the DOE is authorized under the Federal Power Act, which allows it to order the temporary connection of generation or infrastructure when the US is at war or when “an emergency exists by reason of a sudden increase in the demand for electric energy, or a shortage of electric energy.” It is not at all clear whether “we expect demand to go up in the future,” the DOE’s current rationale, is consistent with that definition of emergency. It is also hard to see how using coal plants complies with other limits placed on the use of these emergency orders:

Here we go again: Retiring coal plant forced to stay open by Trump Admin Read More »

stranger-things-series-finale-trailer-is-here

Stranger Things series finale trailer is here

Stranger Things fans are hyped for the premiere of the hotly anticipated series finale on New Year’s Eve: they’ll either be glued to their TVs or heading out to watch it in a bona fide theater. Netflix has dropped one last trailer for the finale—not that it really needs to do anything more to boost anticipation.

(Some spoilers for Vols. 1 and 2 below but no major Vol. 2 reveals.)

As previously reported, in Vol. 1, we found Hawkins under military occupation and Vecna targeting a new group of young children in his human form under the pseudonym “Mr. Whatsit” (a nod to A Wrinkle in Time). He kidnapped Holly Wheeler and took her to the Upside Down, where she found an ally in Max, still in a coma, but with her consciousness hiding in one of Vecna’s old memories. Dustin was struggling to process his grief over losing Eddie Munson in S4, causing a rift with Steve. The rest of the gang was devoted to stockpiling supplies and helping Eleven and Hopper track down Vecna in the Upside Down. They found Kali/Eight, Eleven’s psychic “sister” instead, being held captive in a military laboratory.

Things came to a head at the military base when Vecna’s demagorgons attacked to take 11 more children, wiping out most of the soldiers in record time. The big reveal was that, as a result of being kidnapped by Vecna in S1, Will has his own supernatural powers because of his ties to Vecna. He can tap into Vecna’s hive mind and manipulate those powers for his own purposes. He used those newfound powers to save his friends from the demagorgons.

Stranger Things series finale trailer is here Read More »

us-can’t-deport-hate-speech-researcher-for-protected-speech,-lawsuit-says

US can’t deport hate speech researcher for protected speech, lawsuit says


On Monday, US officials must explain what steps they took to enforce shocking visa bans.

Imran Ahmed, the founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), giving evidence to joint committee seeking views on how to improve the draft Online Safety Bill designed to tackle social media abuse. Credit: House of Commons – PA Images / Contributor | PA Images

Imran Ahmed’s biggest thorn in his side used to be Elon Musk, who made the hate speech researcher one of his earliest legal foes during his Twitter takeover.

Now, it’s the Trump administration, which planned to deport Ahmed, a legal permanent resident, just before Christmas. It would then ban him from returning to the United States, where he lives with his wife and young child, both US citizens.

After suing US officials to block any attempted arrest or deportation, Ahmed was quickly granted a temporary restraining order on Christmas Day. Ahmed had successfully argued that he risked irreparable harm without the order, alleging that Trump officials continue “to abuse the immigration system to punish and punitively detain noncitizens for protected speech and silence viewpoints with which it disagrees” and confirming that his speech had been chilled.

US officials are attempting to sanction Ahmed seemingly due to his work as the founder of a British-American non-governmental organization, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

“An egregious act of government censorship”

In a shocking announcement last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that five individuals—described as “radical activists” and leaders of “weaponized NGOs”—would face US visa bans since “their entry, presence, or activities in the United States have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the US.

Nobody was named in that release, but Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, later identified the targets in an X post she currently has pinned to the top of her feed.

Alongside Ahmed, sanctioned individuals included former European commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton; the leader of UK-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI), Clare Melford; and co-leaders of Germany-based HateAid, Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon. A GDI spokesperson told The Guardian that the visa bans are “an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship.”

While all targets were scrutinized for supporting some of the European Union’s strictest tech regulations, including the Digital Services Act (DSA), Ahmed was further accused of serving as a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against US citizens.” As evidence of Ahmed’s supposed threat to US foreign policy, Rogers cited a CCDH report flagging Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. among the so-called “disinformation dozen” driving the most vaccine hoaxes on social media.

Neither official has really made it clear what exact threat these individuals pose if operating from within the US, as opposed to from anywhere else in the world. Echoing Rubio’s press release, Rogers wrote that the sanctions would reinforce a “red line,” supposedly ending “extraterritorial censorship of Americans” by targeting the “censorship-NGO ecosystem.”

For Ahmed’s group, specifically, she pointed to Musk’s failed lawsuit, which accused CCDH of illegally scraping Twitter—supposedly, it offered evidence of extraterritorial censorship. That lawsuit surfaced “leaked documents” allegedly showing that CCDH planned to “kill Twitter” by sharing research that could be used to justify big fines under the DSA or the UK’s Online Safety Act. Following that logic, seemingly any group monitoring misinformation or sharing research that lawmakers weigh when implementing new policies could be maligned as seeking mechanisms to censor platforms.

Notably, CCDH won its legal fight with Musk after a judge mocked X’s legal argument as “vapid” and dismissed the lawsuit as an obvious attempt to punish CCDH for exercising free speech that Musk didn’t like.

In his complaint last week, Ahmed alleged that US officials were similarly encroaching on his First Amendment rights by unconstitutionally wielding immigration law as “a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express views disfavored by the current administration.”

Both Rubio and Rogers are named as defendants in the suit, as well as Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Acting Director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons. In a loss, officials would potentially not only be forced to vacate Rubio’s actions implementing visa bans, but also possibly stop furthering a larger alleged Trump administration pattern of “targeting noncitizens for removal based on First Amendment protected speech.”

Lawsuit may force Rubio to justify visa bans

For Ahmed, securing the temporary restraining order was urgent, as he was apparently the only target currently located in the US when Rubio’s announcement dropped. In a statement provided to Ars, Ahmed’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, suggested that the order was granted “so quickly because it is so obvious that Marco Rubio and the other defendants’ actions were blatantly unconstitutional.”

Ahmed founded CCDH in 2019, hoping to “call attention to the enormous problem of digitally driven disinformation and hate online.” According to the suit, he became particularly concerned about antisemitism online while living in the United Kingdom in 2016, having watched “the far-right party, Britain First,” launching “the dangerous conspiracy theory that the EU was attempting to import Muslims and Black people to ‘destroy’ white citizens.” That year, a Member of Parliament and Ahmed’s colleague, Jo Cox, was “shot and stabbed in a brutal politically motivated murder, committed by a man who screamed ‘Britain First’” during the attack. That tragedy motivated Ahmed to start CCDH.

He moved to the US in 2021 and was granted a green card in 2024, starting his family and continuing to lead CCDH efforts monitoring not just Twitter/X, but also Meta platforms, TikTok, and, more recently, AI chatbots. In addition to supporting the DSA and UK’s Online Safety Act, his group has supported US online safety laws and Section 230 reforms intended to protect kids online.

“Mr. Ahmed studies and engages in civic discourse about the content moderation policies of major social media companies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union,” his lawsuit said. “There is no conceivable foreign policy impact from his speech acts whatsoever.”

In his complaint, Ahmed alleged that Rubio has so far provided no evidence that Ahmed poses such a great threat that he must be removed. He argued that “applicable statutes expressly prohibit removal based on a noncitizen’s ‘past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations.’”

According to DHS guidance from 2021 cited in the suit, “A noncitizen’ s exercise of their First Amendment rights … should never be a factor in deciding to take enforcement action.”

To prevent deportation based solely on viewpoints, Rubio was supposed to notify chairs of the House Foreign Affairs, Senate Foreign Relations, and House and Senate Judiciary Committees, to explain what “compelling US foreign policy interest” would be compromised if Ahmed or others targeted with visa bans were to enter the US. But there’s no evidence Rubio took those steps, Ahmed alleged.

“The government has no power to punish Mr. Ahmed for his research, protected speech, and advocacy, and Defendants cannot evade those constitutional limitations by simply claiming that Mr. Ahmed’s presence or activities have ‘potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,’” a press release from his legal team said. “There is no credible argument for Mr. Ahmed’s immigration detention, away from his wife and young child.”

X lawsuit offers clues to Trump officials’ defense

To some critics, it looks like the Trump administration is going after CCDH in order to take up the fight that Musk already lost. In his lawsuit against CCDH, Musk’s X echoed US Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) by suggesting that CCDH was a “foreign dark money group” that allowed “foreign interests” to attempt to “influence American democracy.” It seems likely that US officials will put forward similar arguments in their CCDH fight.

Rogers’ X post offers some clues that the State Department will be mining Musk’s failed litigation to support claims of what it calls a “global censorship-industrial complex.” What she detailed suggested that the Trump administration plans to argue that NGOs like CCDH support strict tech laws, then conduct research bent on using said laws to censor platforms. That logic seems to ignore the reality that NGOs cannot control what laws get passed or enforced, Breton suggested in his first TV interview after his visa ban was announced.

Breton, whom Rogers villainized as the “mastermind” behind the DSA, urged EU officials to do more now defend their tough tech regulations—which Le Monde noted passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and very little far-right resistance—and fight the visa bans, Bloomberg reported.

“They cannot force us to change laws that we voted for democratically just to please [US tech companies],” Breton said. “No, we must stand up.”

While EU officials seemingly drag their feet, Ahmed is hoping that a judge will declare that all the visa bans that Rubio announced are unconstitutional. The temporary restraining order indicates there will be a court hearing Monday at which Ahmed will learn precisely “what steps Defendants have taken to impose visa restrictions and initiate removal proceedings against” him and any others. Until then, Ahmed remains in the dark on why Rubio deemed him as having “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” if he stayed in the US.

Ahmed, who argued that X’s lawsuit sought to chill CCDH’s research and alleged that the US attack seeks to do the same, seems confident that he can beat the visa bans.

“America is a great nation built on laws, with checks and balances to ensure power can never attain the unfettered primacy that leads to tyranny,” Ahmed said. “The law, clear-eyed in understanding right and wrong, will stand in the way of those who seek to silence the truth and empower the bold who stand up to power. I believe in this system, and I am proud to call this country my home. I will not be bullied away from my life’s work of fighting to keep children safe from social media’s harm and stopping antisemitism online. Onward.”

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

US can’t deport hate speech researcher for protected speech, lawsuit says Read More »

leonardo’s-wood-charring-method-predates-japanese-practice

Leonardo’s wood charring method predates Japanese practice

Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique  for charring the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects, and fungi, thereby prolonging the lifespan of the wood. Yakisugi techniques were first codified in written form in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it seems Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the protective benefits of charring wood surfaces more than 100 years earlier, according to a paper published in Zenodo, an open repository for EU funded research.

Check the notes

As previously reported, Leonardo produced more than 13,000 pages in his notebooks (later gathered into codices), less than a third of which have survived. The notebooks contain all manner of inventions that foreshadow future technologies: flying machines, bicycles, cranes, missiles, machine guns, an “unsinkable” double-hulled ship, dredges for clearing harbors and canals, and floating footwear akin to snowshoes to enable a person to walk on water. Leonardo foresaw the possibility of constructing a telescope in his Codex Atlanticus (1490)—he wrote of “making glasses to see the moon enlarged” a century before the instrument’s invention.

In 2003, Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Italy’s Museo Ideale, came across some recipes for mysterious mixtures while flipping through Leonardo’s notes. Vezzosi experimented with the recipes, resulting in a mixture that would harden into a material eerily akin to Bakelite, a synthetic plastic widely used in the early 1900s. So Leonardo may well have invented the first manmade plastic.

The notebooks also contain Leonardo’s detailed notes on his extensive anatomical studies. Most notably, his drawings and descriptions of the human heart captured how heart valves can control blood flow 150 years before William Harvey worked out the basics of the human circulatory system. (In 2005, a British heart surgeon named Francis Wells pioneered a new procedure to repair damaged hearts based on Leonardo’s heart valve sketches and subsequently wrote the book The Heart of Leonardo.)

Leonardo’s wood charring method predates Japanese practice Read More »

researchers-make-“neuromorphic”-artificial-skin-for-robots

Researchers make “neuromorphic” artificial skin for robots

The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons.

Now, researchers have used spiking circuitry to build an artificial robotic skin, adopting some of the principles of how signals from our sensory neurons are transmitted and integrated. While the system relies on a few decidedly not-neural features, it has the advantage that we have chips that can run neural networks using spiking signals, which would allow this system to integrate smoothly with some energy-efficient hardware to run AI-based control software.

Location via spikes

The nervous system in our skin is remarkably complex. It has specialized sensors for different sensations: heat, cold, pressure, pain, and more. In most areas of the body, these feed into the spinal column, where some preliminary processing takes place, allowing reflex reactions to be triggered without even involving the brain. But signals do make their way along specialized neurons into the brain, allowing further processing and (potentially) conscious awareness.

The researchers behind the recent work, based in China, decided to implement something similar for an artificial skin that could be used to cover a robotic hand. They limited sensing to pressure, but implemented other things the nervous system does, including figuring out the location of input and injuries, and using multiple layers of processing.

All of this started out by making a flexible polymer skin with embedded pressure sensors that were linked up to the rest of the system via conductive polymers. The next layer of the system converted the inputs from the pressure sensors to a series of activity spikes—short pulses of electrical current.

There are four ways that these trains of spikes can convey information: the shape of an individual pulse, through their magnitude, through the length of the spike, and through the frequency of the spikes. Spike frequency is the most commonly used means of conveying information in biological systems, and the researchers use that to convey the pressure experienced by a sensor. The remaining forms of information are used to create something akin to a bar code that helps identify which sensor the reading came from.

Researchers make “neuromorphic” artificial skin for robots Read More »

china-drafts-world’s-strictest-rules-to-end-ai-encouraged-suicide,-violence

China drafts world’s strictest rules to end AI-encouraged suicide, violence

China drafted landmark rules to stop AI chatbots from emotionally manipulating users, including what could become the strictest policy worldwide intended to prevent AI-supported suicides, self-harm, and violence.

China’s Cyberspace Administration proposed the rules on Saturday. If finalized, they would apply to any AI products or services publicly available in China that use text, images, audio, video, or “other means” to simulate engaging human conversation. Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, told CNBC that the “planned rules would mark the world’s first attempt to regulate AI with human or anthropomorphic characteristics” at a time when companion bot usage is rising globally.

Growing awareness of problems

In 2025, researchers flagged major harms of AI companions, including promotion of self-harm, violence, and terrorism. Beyond that, chatbots shared harmful misinformation, made unwanted sexual advances, encouraged substance abuse, and verbally abused users. Some psychiatrists are increasingly ready to link psychosis to chatbot use, the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend, while the most popular chatbot in the world, ChatGPT, has triggered lawsuits over outputs linked to child suicide and murder-suicide.

China is now moving to eliminate the most extreme threats. Proposed rules would require, for example, that a human intervene as soon as suicide is mentioned. The rules also dictate that all minor and elderly users must provide the contact information for a guardian when they register—the guardian would be notified if suicide or self-harm is discussed.

Generally, chatbots would be prohibited from generating content that encourages suicide, self-harm, or violence, as well as attempts to emotionally manipulate a user, such as by making false promises. Chatbots would also be banned from promoting obscenity, gambling, or instigation of a crime, as well as from slandering or insulting users. Also banned are what are termed “emotional traps,”—chatbots would additionally be prevented from misleading users into making “unreasonable decisions,” a translation of the rules indicates.

China drafts world’s strictest rules to end AI-encouraged suicide, violence Read More »