More AI Competition May Mean Less Safety, New University of Chicago Research Finds

OpenAI plans to expand its India engineering team to develop a context-aware personalized voice AI assistant in its push towards artificial general intelligence

Insider Brief Generalist AI has raised $400 million in new funding as the robotics startup looks to develop what it calls physical artificial general intelligence, or AGI, bringing its total funding to more than $500 million. The round was led by Radical Ventures and included new investments from 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Hanabi Capital and […]

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis believes progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) is moving faster than expected and that society now has only a few years to prepare. He believes AGI could arrive around 2030, though acknowledges it could be here in 2029 — or even sooner. In an interview with Axios, Hassabis said that today’s AI agents — systems capable of performing tasks independently — should be viewed as a sort of “practice run” for significantly more powerful AI in the future. He also warned that governments, economists, and society at large are not taking this development seriously enough. One particular risk he highlighted is that AI systems in the future might begin to improve their own development. “All the leading labs are pretty focused on that,” Hassabis told Axios. “It will yield clear benefits in the form of faster research. But there are also risks associated with that type of system.”

Elon Musk testified in a California federal court in his lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that co-founders Sam Altman and others converted a nonprofit AI mission into a profit-driven enterprise without his consent. But cross-examination by OpenAI’s lawyer William Savitt proved damaging, with Musk admitting under oath that Tesla is not currently pursuing artificial general intelligence — directly […]

OpenAI and Microsoft's partnership-turned-situationship just got even less committed. And a clause about artificial general intelligence, which has for years dictated the future of their deal, has officially been dropped. On Monday morning, Microsoft announced a handful of big changes to its long-standing OpenAI deal. Microsoft will remain OpenAI's "primary cloud partner, and OpenAI products will ship first on Azure, unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities." But OpenAI can "now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider." That lets OpenAI pursue its goals of courting enterprise custom … Read the full story at The Verge.

A highly alarming New Yorker feature on the machinations of Sam Altman drove me to test his AI for myself. The results were, well, highly alarming A corollary of the truism “don’t sweat the small stuff” is, by implication, “do sweat the big stuff”, but it can be hard to pick which big stuff to sweat. For example: since the 1970s, as the world has worried about inflation and rolling geopolitics, the big stuff we should have been sweating more urgently was the climate crisis. Last year, the top trending search on Google in the US was “Charlie Kirk”, with several terms relating to the threat posed by Donald Trump also popular, when the focus should arguably have been the threat posed by AI. Or, per my own Googling this week after reading Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s highly alarming lengthy piece in the New Yorker about the rise of artificial general intelligence: “Will I be a member of the permanent underclass and how can I make that not happen?” Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist