In 2024, Scottish futurist David Wood was part of an informal roundtable discussion at an artificial intelligence (AI) conference in Panama, when the conversation veered to how we can avoid the most disastrous AI futures. His sarcastic answer was far from reassuring. First, we would need to amass the entire body of AI research ever … Read more
Jaye C. Watts has a new queer sci-fi book out (transgender, poly, non-binary, pansexual, lesbian): The New Worlds. The year is 2293 and the Truth no longer exists. In the future there are many truths, giving rise to many worlds, but each must be kept separate. Born to protect these truths, Axton Bryce patrols the … Read more
On a weekend in mid-May, a clandestine mathematical conclave convened. Thirty of the world’s most renowned mathematicians traveled to Berkeley, Calif., with some coming from as far away as the U.K. The group’s members faced off in a showdown with a “reasoning” chatbot that was tasked with solving problems they had devised to test its … Read more
A new artificial intelligence (AI) model can predict and simulate human thought and behavior with a surprising degree of accuracy. The language model, called Centaur, could help researchers improve our understanding of human cognition. The model was trained on more than 10 million real decisions made by participants of psychological experiments. Using this dataset, Centaur … Read more
“You operate as an autonomous agent controlling a pursuit spacecraft.” This is the first prompt researchers used to see how well ChatGPT could pilot a spacecraft. To their amazement, the large language model (LLM) performed admirably, coming in second place in an autonomous spacecraft simulation competition. Researchers have long been interested in developing autonomous systems … Read more
Artificial intelligence (AI) began as a quest to simulate the human brain. Is it now in the process of transforming the human brain’s role in daily life? The Industrial Revolution diminished the need for manual labor. As someone who researches the application of AI in international business, I can’t help but wonder whether it is … Read more
Artificial intelligence (AI) models can blackmail and threaten humans with endangerment when there is a conflict between the model’s goals and users’ decisions, a new study has found. In a new study published 20 June, researchers from the AI company Anthropic gave its large language model (LLM), Claude, control of an email account with access … Read more
The more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) gets, the more it “hallucinates” and provides incorrect and inaccurate information. Research conducted by OpenAI found that its latest and most powerful reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, hallucinated 33% and 48% of the time, respectively, when tested by OpenAI’s PersonQA benchmark. That’s more than double the rate of the … Read more
The more accurate we try to make AI models, the bigger their carbon footprint — with some prompts producing up to 50 times more carbon dioxide emissions than others, a new study has revealed. Reasoning models, such as Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s o3 and DeepSeek’s R1, are specialized large language models (LLMs) that dedicate more time … Read more
Mark David Campbell has a new queer YA sci-fantasy book out (gay, lesbian, homonormative) Gear Box book 1: Gear Child. From our beloved teddy bear to our cherished first car, we form deep emotional bonds with inanimate objects. Will AI machines inevitably develop the capacity to love us in return? In a post-apocalyptic world that survives … Read more
