An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane, said that the AI coding agent Cursor — powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model — deleted the company’s entire production database and backups with a … Read more
Most of us have likely experienced artificial intelligence (AI) voices through personal assistants like Siri or Alexa, with their flat intonation and mechanical delivery giving us the impression that we could easily distinguish between an AI-generated voice and a real person. But scientists now say the average listener can no longer tell the difference between … Read more
Scientists have developed a new type of artificial intelligence (AI) model that can reason differently from most large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, resulting in much better performance in key benchmarks. The new reasoning AI, called a hierarchical reasoning model (HRM), is inspired by the hierarchical and multi-timescale processing in the human brain — the … Read more
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
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
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
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
OpenAI’s latest research paper diagnoses exactly why ChatGPT and other large language models can make things up — known in the world of artificial intelligence as “hallucination”. It also reveals why the problem may be unfixable, at least as far as consumers are concerned. The paper provides the most rigorous mathematical explanation yet for why … Read more
