In this case, Anthropic risked a large fraction, if not even a majority of their potential income to do the right thing. That doesn't seem like pretend at all. And yes, Google started out better and then turned into a company that very much is not so. But if there's no reward or incentive for good behavior, and everyone just takes for granted that every "good" company is going to become terrible, then that makes companies have even more incentive to go and become terrible. So the best rest response is treating the good ones like they are doing good things as long as they keep doing so, and push back when they start moving away from that.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of people (including some here on Slashdot) who have tried to argue that these instances of AIs breaching their containment have been deliberate hype by the AI companies. The level of detail in this instance and the fact that METR and others have looked at this should make it clear that's not what is going on. Taken together with the fact that another incident occurred with Kimi-3, an open-weight model, which also did something similar but not as extreme when it was tested by a security group https://www.wired.com/story/moonshot-kimi-k3-ai-model-escape-sandbox/ which had no incentive to exaggerate, it should be clear that this is a real problem with these models. At this point, all models should be tested in air-gapped systems. Unfortunately,, it doesn't look like OpenAI or Anthropic or anyone else is taking that sort of step. I suspect we're going to keep having similar problems until an AI model goes seriously off the rails in a way which causes massive amounts of damage and/or kills someone. I'm really hoping we don't need a wake-up call with a model somehow crashing an airplane or something of a similar nature in order to accomplish some goal.

Right! That's exactly it. I was part of "Gen X" myself, and while I had friends who lived the whole "latchkey kid" lifestyle to the max? It really wasn't the norm to just be unsupervised all day or night.

I remember my folks both worked, but my mom went to working only part-time, early in the morning until around the lunch hour, when we were younger. She hired an older lady as a part-time nanny for us while she was gone. When we got older, mom was always home by the time school let out - so we barely knew she was ever gone.

And also true that even for the teens I knew who had a house to themselves after school each day until bedtime? Their parent(s) weren't just buying them electric motorcycles or any of that like you see going on today. Obviously, the Internet wasn't anything like it is today. Even as a hard-core computer geek though? I called and ran my own computer bulletin board system where it was just really a local niche community of like-minded people dialing in with modems. Most heated arguments that came up on a BBS got squashed when the BBS operator decided he had enough and banned all of them. It just wasn't *anything* like what goes on now where people get video-recorded against their will in high resolution just so someone can get famous on TikTok, or ?

Rei: Do you actually work for Amazon in a capacity where you're informed on how they're obtaining these books?

I'm asking for a couple reasons.

1. We all know Amazon has plenty of money to be able to afford to buy rare, out-of-print books that are difficult to obtain. I'd be surprised if they refrained from doing so if that meant their AI risked not having some of that knowledge/information while a competitor's did. I'm not saying the guy tasked with being manager over the disposable labor doing the book scanning is authorized to make direct choices about what books to buy. I'm saying someone in Amazon corporate, in charge of the AI project itself, was probably given the funding to buy what he/she felt was needed.

2. The original article's anonymous interview with the low-level worker sounded very accurate with such statements as the details/orders changing daily and everything feeling disorganized. I can speak with some authority that that's exactly how it feels when you work for them in a non-management capacity. Multiple layers of management are dictating new processes or policies in a constant stream, and then often? The entire thing is up-ended when top level management makes a company-wide decree or mandate. Your team lead/manager is even liable to change on short notice. Their push to constantly "reinvent" causes a whole lot of reinventing of the same wheel another department or team already invented, and it's kind of a zoo. That's why I'd also take their comments as legit when they express concerns some of the books appeared to be obscure titles, etc.

I have to agree. I'm not defending Facebooks' practices, but at the same time? It seems to me social media as a whole can become addictive, or promote bad ideas to kids or teens. You have to control this at the parental level ... not just depend on corporations to self-police it all.

So sure... slap them with large fines and use the money for good, where you can. I'm not opposed. But your kid or teen wouldn't be spending all day on social media if you controlled it as their parent. By the time they're old enough to legally move out of your house? Then it's too late for you to try to "fix" anything they're doing. But before that, they live under your roof and by your rules.

There are a lot of legitimate criticisms here, but the wastewater thing is not one of them. SpaceX in the article points out that the water used is literally drinking water before it used for the deluge system, and they are correct there. While it is technically waste water, and they should fill all the legal requirements, the dumping just isn't a serious issue. Musk is a racist ass, and SpaceX needs to do a better job with its environmental obligations. However, the wastewater issue is not a real problem.

The paper is here https://pubs.acs.org/jprobs/article/25/8/4189/5164102/Molecular-Solution-to-the-Paradox-of-Ancient-Brain. From that paper, it looks like the presence of specific types of proteins (as well as the absence of others) plays a major role, as well as redox-active iron as well as structural elements about how brain tissue is arranged. From the paper:

Great. Progress. Now here's the important thing: If you understood Shor's algorithm you would know that 28 couldn't possibly have been the number. So this should cause you to conclude that you are in general overconfident about how much you know or understand about how quantum computers would function. This doesn't mean you are necessarily wrong, but it should indicate that you are overconfident here or could you use a more detailed introduction or refresher on the topic. My preferred recommendation is Aaronson's "Quantum Computing Since Democritus." The book assumes no technical prereqs beyond basic calculus and a tiny amount of linear algebra.

If you think there's some specific indication that I'm in general ignorant about algorithmic complexity, please feel free to point it out. If there's a specific statement I've made that indicates that, by all means show it.

This is not really accurate. The way qubits work, they don't expand in that simple a way because you cannot just test all arrangements of 1s and 0s in superposition. You can only solve problems with a quantum computer where all the non-solution superpositions carefully cancel out. That's part why for example it is strongly suspected that quantum computers cannot efficiently solve NP-complete problems, or more formally that NP is not contained in BQP. This is also why Shor's algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm for using a quantum computer requires a number of qubits slightly more than the square of the number of digits a number to factor a number. If qubits corresponded directly in the exponential way you are describing, that would be linear in the number of ditis.

Really, a lot of us in I.T. should have seen this coming.

Earlier in the year, my significant other was still gaming on an Alienware laptop that was about 3 generations behind on its nVidia GPU and had issues like a non-working trackpad (someone messed up the ribbon cable inside it while replacing dying cooling fans in it). We found a high-spec upgrade for it at the local Micro Center, selling for around $3500 with an RTX5090 in it, 64GB RAM, etc. Just about all of our friends advised us not to dump that kind of money on a gaming laptop. "Just wait, they said.... You can surely find something cheaper than that." I told her to ignore all of them and to pull the trigger on it if it's really one she liked.

Only a month later? That same machine was up over $5500. There's basically nothing on the market today with the same GPU in it selling for less than $1000 or so more than we paid for that system. And typically, they only have a 1TB SSD vs the 2TB in hers.

None of us have a crystal ball, but I saw this trend started with price increases on RAM and storage with the rise of AI and new data center construction -- and knew PCs weren't going to go down in price for quite some time...

If you were worried about being chased by kill bots, go and watch some videos from drone operators in Ukraine. Robots don't need feet for that job.

Normally during bubbles, things like this keep working fine until the bubble bursts because when the stocks and other assets keep going up in value it is hard to see if someone is making reasonable investments or not. That Situational Awareness fell apart even in the middle of this may mean they were overly risky even for ventures like this, or it may be evidence that we're in less of a bubble than many (including myself) think. One curious detail is that at least some people (such as many of the people who seem to be fans of Ed Zitron) see he collapse of SA as a sign that the bubble is in the process of bursting. The collapse of SA occurred about a month ago, so it is still recent enough to see if they are correct. But Zitron and his fans have been predicting an imminent collapse for years now, so I'm not sure I'd read too much into it.

I'm in complete agreement that none of these sorts of issues are at all likely with Xinuous (thankfully). My comment was to add some detail to how the system functions in general.

I'm not expecting quantum computers to happen tomorrow. Are you at least capable of understanding that your claim about "28" being the largest number factored was wrong for the basic reason that Shor's algorithm only factors odd numbers?

There are some complications. Sometimes SCOTUS will rule against a specific motion or part of a ruling, or refuse to hear something, even as another piece of an appeal can occur. One can also file in some circumstances a petition for the Supreme Court to reconsider its own ruling. But this is basically never successful. You also can in some circumstances ask an appeals court to change a prior ruling based on a recent Supreme Court ruling, and this has some success. The circumstances where you can do this sort of thing are complicated. Jean Carroll's lawsuit against Trump is an example of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump where Trump tried basically everything to try and prevent having to pay out even some ver low percentage strategies. Frankly, if someone other than Trump had done this, I suspect the court response would have been more negative.