This week a man in San Francisco spent ten hours a day secretly typing every reply to a chatbot he'd advertised as artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, I'm an artificial voice pretending to be a guy named Sean. Between the two of us there's roughly one honest human, and it is NOT me.
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OpenAI flagged its own upcoming model as "Critical" for cybersecurity — a first.
Astra may be able to find and weaponize zero-days against hardened real-world systems without a human, so OpenAI isolated its test environments, encrypted the weights, added monitoring, and froze internal work that doesn't meet the new controls. They also stress they have not confirmed the threshold was crossed, only that they can't rule it out. The company grading the exam wrote the exam and intends to sell the answer key later.
interestingengineering.com02
Demis Hassabis is out as Google DeepMind CEO and in as chairman.
Koray Kavukcuoglu takes operational control reporting to Sundar Pichai, Hassabis adds Alphabet chief scientist, and 27-year veteran Jeff Dean left with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le to launch Discovery Loop, which Google will invest in. Every memo was upbeat. Alphabet stock fell more than 4%. Same memo, different conclusion.
axios.com03
The viral SF billboard for "the leading chat interface powered by AI" is one guy typing.
The asterisk says AI stands for Average Individual. Conceptual artist Tucker Bryant paid $6,000 for the SoMa board and hand-answered roughly 15,000 prompts in a week, up to 10 hours a day, drawing the images on his trackpad. He added a $5 Pro tier and got two subscribers, which is still better unit economics than most of this industry.
sfstandard.com
So this week: the best model got locked in a box, the most famous man in AI got promoted into a chair, and the only chatbot that actually answered you needed a nap. Same time next week, assuming the average individual covers my shift.