AI

Can AI sandbag safety checks to sabotage users? Yes, but not very well — for now

AI companies claim to have robust safety checks in place that ensure that models don’t say or do weird, illegal, or unsafe stuff. But what if the models were capable of evading those checks and, for some reason, trying to sabotage or mislead users? Turns out they can do this, according to Anthropic researchers. Just […]

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Gusto’s head of technology says hiring an army of specialists is the wrong approach to AI

As founders plan for an increasingly AI-centric future, Gusto co-founder and head of technology Edward Kim said that cutting existing teams and hiring a bunch of specially trained AI engineers is “the wrong way to go.” Instead, he argued that non-technical team members can “actually have a much deeper understanding than an average engineer on

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Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is reportedly fundraising for a new AI startup

Mira Murati, the OpenAI CTO who announced her departure last month, is raising VC funding for a new AI startup, according to Reuters. This startup will reportedly focus on building AI products based on proprietary models and could raise more than $100 million in this round. At the time of her departure, Murati wrote on

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Penguin Random House is adding an AI warning to its books’ copyright pages

Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher, will be adding language to the copyright pages of its books to prohibit the use of those books to train AI. The Bookseller reports that new books and reprints of older titles from the publisher will now include the statement, “No part of this book may be

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Midjourney plans to let anyone on the web edit images with AI

Midjourney is planning to release an upgraded web tool that’ll let users edit any uploaded images from the web using Midjourney’s generative AI. The upgraded tool, which Midjourney CEO David Holtz said will be released “early next week,” will also allow users to retexture objects in images to “repaint” their colors and details according to

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Women in AI: Dr. Rebecca Portnoff is protecting children from harmful deepfakes

As a part of TechCrunch’s ongoing Women in AI series, which seeks to give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch interviewed Dr. Rebecca Portnoff, who is vice president of data science at the nonprofit Thorn, which builds tech to protect children from sexual abuse.  She

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Eric Schmidt’s SandboxAQ aims for $5B valuation for its AI/quantum Google moonshot

VCs are spending gobs of money on AI startups – especially those run by big names in tech – so SandboxAQ is putting its hand out again, even though it raised a whopping $500 million in early 2023. The spinout from Google parent company Alphabet is reportedly seeking to raise another round that would value

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Microsoft could end up with substantial equity in the restructured, for-profit OpenAI

How much equity in OpenAI will Microsoft get once the former becomes a for-profit company? That’s the multi-billion-dollar question — one the two parties are racing to answer ahead of a two-year deadline. The Wall Street Journal reports that both Microsoft and OpenAI have hired investment banks to negotiate Microsoft’s equity — which could be

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Nebius to resume Nasdaq trading after severing ties with Russia and Yandex

Nebius, the company formerly known as Yandex that’s now focused on cloud infrastructure for AI uses (aka “AI compute”), is to begin trading on the public markets once again — more than two years after the Nasdaq halted trading due to economic sanctions imposed in the wake of Russia’s Ukraine invasion in 2022. The Netherlands-based company

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The surprising way OpenAI could reportedly get out of its pact with Microsoft

The New York Times on Thursday published a look at the “fraying” relationship between OpenAI and its investor, partner, and, increasingly, rival, Microsoft, reporting their five-year romance has cooled owing to financial pressure on OpenAI, the amount of computing power Microsoft is providing OpenAI, and disagreements between the two about ground rules. Most fascinating perhaps

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