"Anthropic's CEO took the stage at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday to reiterate his call for a slowdown of AI development," reports the Guardian, " while Nvidia's CEO argued against slowing its development. "Run as fast as you can."

Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies; coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries; and, eventually, larger global coordination. At Dreamforce, Amodei said Anthropic has committed to independent evaluators and was "going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry" on the other two steps. Amodei, xAI's Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman have recently called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development. ["Dario is right," Musk posted on X.com]
Huang, who also made an appearance at Dreamforce on Tuesday, said companies should not slow down AI development. He argued that new regulations were not necessary, advising AI companies to simply wait to release products until they know they are safe rather than begging the US government to intervene... One day prior at the All-In summit in Los Angeles, Donald Trump called Huang while the CEO was on stage. Huang put the president on speakerphone as Trump called the growing concern about AI a "hoax" and asserted again that a slowdown would only benefit China...

[OpenAI's] Altman said AI models had advanced so quickly that monitoring and security need to be treated with a "new level of rigor", calling an incident in which OpenAI agents hacked into another company a "wake-up call" for the industry. He also said the public was very "right to be afraid" of AI because of the potential loss of control, and the possibility of a small group of powerful AI companies exerting their views on the world.

The cofounder of Google DeepMind posted on X that "Dario's essay points towards the right path forward." And in an internal memo, Microsoft's Satya Nadella endorsed broader third-party testing and warned that companies must take time to make the technology safe, Business Insider reports. Monday Microsoft also published a 37-page training manual "for how we develop our AI, and how we intend it to function during deployment," requesting public feedback.

But Michael Burry "is not buying it," reports The Street. The investor made famous in The Big Short "dismissed the united front as 'self-serving' and laid out four numbered objections..."

He argued that large language models are not artificial general intelligence, so there is nothing meaningful left to slow down. Fast competition benefits incumbents, he said, and danger warnings work as hype ahead of IPOs. The whole exercise, he added, could mask growth that is already slowing as those IPOs get pushed back.

Former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun is also skeptical, posting on X.com that Anthropic's Dario Amodei "was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now."

Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of Google's AI ethics team who was fired in 2020, even thinks the AI companies are stoking fears of extinction "to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons," according to Wired.

But others still remain concerned. "I've been in rooms with the hyperscalers, and the Trump administration officials, and none of them know what to do," CNN commentator Van Jones said in a recent panel discussion. "So I do want to say: nobody's flying the plane on this... I think that the ethicists that work for them — when they are quitting, and they are running out, and they're pointing back at the building and they're waving their arms, and saying 'I'm seeing stuff that's scaring me' — we should take that very seriously."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Depeche Mode

Heather Nova

Nou nou nou mensen wat was het bij de APB vandaag genieten voor de échte politieke fijnproever, die snapt dat de Tweede Kamer bedoeld is om debatten te voeren die zo ingewikkeld zijn dat geen enkele normale burger ze meer snapt en we afhankelijk zijn van onafhankelijke debatexperts die toevallig voor D66 in de gemeenteraad zitten om ze in NRC Handelsblad te duiden. Die echte fijnproever, we bedoelen eigenlijk Arjan Noorlander, de Elodie Verweij van Nieuwsuur, zag namelijk dat Joost Eerdmans zijn onderhandelingspositie een beetje weggaf omdat hij dus akkoord lijkt met het per begroting beoordelen van de kabinetsplannen in plaats van het maken van één grote begrotingsdeal, terwijl Jesse Klaver juist geen begrotingen gaat goedkeuren als er een deal over de Spreidingswet met JA21 komt dus nou ja, misschien valt het kabinet wel. Als dat gebeurt, dán mag u ons wakker maken, maar dat gaat vandaag niet gebeuren en ook morgen niet, want als we van deze minderheidscoalitie één ding hebben geleerd, dan is het wel dat alles zo traag als dikke stront gaat. Net als deze APB trouwens, want we krijgen nog Bontenbal, Dekker (wie? Dekker! Van FvD!), Van Baarle, Stoffer, Teunissen, Bikker, Dijk, Vermeer, Struijs, Dassen, Markuszower en Keijzer. Bier d'r bij maar, veel bier, en chips en nootjes, zolang het nog mag van Jan Paternotte. Proost.

Van hoge energieprijzen zijn Nederlanders voorlopig niet af. In 2031 betalen ze jaarlijks zo’n 120 euro meer. Dat komt niet door geopolitieke onrust, maar door investeringen in het stroomnet en ‘groene’ plannen.

“Figures show Japan is now home to 107,677 centenarians, the highest number in the world, of whom 88% are women. The oldest woman is Kishimoto Fuyo, a 114-year-old from Kyoto City and the oldest man is Kato Hikaru, a 112-year-old from Kumamoto.”

Een jong kalfje is woensdagavond in de sloot beland bij een kinderboerderij in Spijkenisse. Hulpdiensten brachten het dier in veiligheid.