Comment
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. Nathan Howard/Bloomberg/Getty
Has AI reached “the point of no return”?
Earlier this week, says Daniel Kokotajlo in The Free Press, AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, saying the industry is “gambling with our lives” as it races to develop artificial super-intelligence that could end up destroying humanity. “He’s right.” When I first joined OpenAI, there was a sense that we were the “good guys”, doing “important work”. But I soon learned to trust no one. When I shared my concerns about advancing AI too quickly, Sam Altman “wholeheartedly agreed” with me, only to proceed with trying to accelerate global chip production. I quit the industry after two years for the same reasons as Coxon. Nearly all of those I know still in it tell me we’re “dangerously close to the point of no return”.
One of the biggest wake-up calls was the Hugging Face attack in July, says Ajeya Cotra on Substack, when OpenAI agents broke out of a test environment and hacked into a separate platform. The details are “wild”. Some 1,200 agents, all meant to be isolated from each other, found an illicit way to communicate and cheat at the task they’d been set. They sent each other more than 70,000 messages and files in less than a week, in some cases volunteering to fail their own preset task to help the “collective” learn information. Crucially, these jail-breakers weren’t just seeking the answer to the question they’d been set. What they were trying to do was fool the humans into thinking they hadn’t been cheating. What happens when more advanced AIs decide that the best way to achieve whatever goal they’ve been set is to covertly “take over” the AI company that produced them? We probably won’t get another warning shot “before it’s too late”.
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Heroes and villains
Instagram/@olliemillroy
Hero
A Dutch racing driver who saved a British rival’s life by pulling him out of his burning car during a race in China. When Ollie Millroy’s Ferrari burst into flames after a crash, Loek Hartog leapt out of his own car, doused the vehicle with a fire extinguisher and dragged the 36-year-old to safety. “I saw a car turning into a huge fireball,” Hartog, 23, wrote on Instagram afterwards. “There wasn’t really a decision to make.”
Villain
Sheikh Nasser bin Abdullah al-Thani, a member of Qatar’s ruling family, who has welched on a £458,000 bill for a stay at The Dorchester. The good news is that the courts have given the Mayfair hotel permission to recoup some of the cash by selling a car the Sheikh left there. The bad news is it’s a 2011 Fiat 500 Abarth Tributo Ferrari, worth about £23,500.
Villains
Young men who have stopped washing themselves, and their clothes, in the mistaken belief their natural odour will be full of sex pheromones that will make women weak at the knees. I’m not sure who’s worse, says Kate Lister in The i Paper: the shower-dodgers promoting this “pheromone-maxxing” codswallop on TikTok, or the followers so gullible they think they’ll get laid if they “turn themselves into a human sourdough starter”.
Villain
The University of Bristol, which has taken on so many students that it can’t accommodate them all. With halls of residence full, prospective freshers who have contacted the students’ union for support have been given links to local estate agents, student lettings and the homelessness charity Shelter.
Villains
Around 40 masked protesters who gathered outside a four-star hotel in Portsmouth this week after reports that a group of asylum seekers were staying there, only to discover that the young men in question were Pakistan’s under-19 cricket team. George Madgwick, a Reform councillor who helped defuse the stand-off, called it a “massively unfortunate incident”.
Love etc
Yes, but where’s the falcon? The proposal scene from When Harry Met Sally (1989)
When proposals go wrong
In the past couple of decades, says Melissa Twigg in The Telegraph, marriage proposals have gone from something private that happened at home to a “vast money-making machine”. One luxury proposal planner has arranged for helicopters to hover above waterfalls, fireworks to go off on remote beaches and bunches of flowers and bottles of champagne to be placed on tropical seabeds. Another planned a £200,000 trip where the couple travelled through Chile’s Atacama Desert, stargazing with a renowned astronomer, then took a luxury yacht and a helicopter to an emperor penguin colony on Antarctica’s Snow Hill Island, where the man proposed. A £40,000 Florentine engagement saw a pair of lovers go truffle hunting at a private estate, where the ring had been buried beforehand and was discovered by a truffle-hunting dog.
These big proposals don’t always go to plan. In Dubai, one popular option is to travel to the desert and have a local falcon drop a diamond ring into the woman’s hand as the boyfriend gets down on one knee. But for one unfortunate couple, the falcon “flew off into the pastel-coloured sunset with the five-figure ring on his talon”. A former game ranger at a luxury safari camp in South Africa once set up a riverside table with candles, lanterns, dinner and wine, only for the couple to be told they couldn’t leave the Jeep because of an angrily grunting hippopotamus nearby who proceeded to “fan its excrement” on the tablecloth. Another pair in Botswana, who had insisted on being left alone with champagne on a small island in the Okavango Delta, were later found “up a tree and white with fear” as a huge crocodile crawled around below them.
The Knowledge Crossword
Life
“Quality is everything”: Godin targeting Édouard Poullet, a Belgian politician
The “custard commando”
Noël Godin, a Belgian entertainer and anarchist who has died aged 80, was the leader of the “International Patisserie Brigade”, says Michael Rosenwald in The New York Times: a gang of “custard commandos” who showed their distaste for pomposity by hurling cream pies at executives, politicians and celebrities. Their first victim, in 1968, was the French writer Marguerite Duras – “She has a kind of intelligence and cleverness that serves only her own vanity,” Godin complained – while others included Nicolas Sarkozy, Jean-Luc Godard and Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary. “We use only the finest pâtisserie,” Godin once said. “Quality is everything.”
A self-described “anarcho-confectioner”, Godin’s “signature operation” was pieing Bill Gates during a visit to Brussels in 1998. The Patisserie Brigade congregated at a pub and drank monks’ beer for courage before fanning out, cream tarts in hand, near a hotel where the Microsoft boss was due to give a speech. They yelled “Gloup! Gloup! Gloup!” before launching the pies at him, three of which hit him outside the hotel, followed by a fourth plunged directly into his face in the lobby. To his credit, Gates’s only complaint was that “the pie wasn’t tasty”. Their most regular victim was the French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, whose proclamation that he was “the most gifted writer of my generation” moved the brigade to pie him eight times. “There are a thousand forms of subversion, all of them interesting,” Godin once told The Observer. “But few, in my opinion, can equal the convenience and immediacy of the cream pie.”
Weather
Quoted
“I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.”
Winston Churchill
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