The Giving and Taking Tree

“An open letter, entitled ‘Pacing the Frontier,’ had begun to circulate among the leading A.I. labs. This letter called on the U.S. government to build an international regulatory body for AI … I have covered Silicon Valley for some time now and I can tell you this: The existence of this letter is just as astonishing as the hacks. Both Anthropic, the developer of Claude, and OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, are preparing trillion-dollar I.P.O.s. Here are two companies, both posting blockbuster results, that are asking — begging, really — for the U.S. government to please come and regulate them as soon as possible. We have never seen anything like it.” Stephen Witt in the NYT (Gift Article): This Is Really Bad. (In retrospect, that would have been a good name for this publication.)

+ Even if we build guardrails and even under the best circumstances, it seems inevitable that the rise of AI and other technologies is destined to level the military playing field. NYT: Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons. Bloomberg (Gift Article): Anthropic Says US Adversaries Aimed Claude at Weapons Research. And from AP: Users in Houthi-held Yemen tried to develop advanced weapons with AI. (To think this all started because we wanted a place to share cat photos with our friends.)