AI周报183：OpenAI发布HuggingFace事件复盘预告

Yesterday, OpenAI finally gave us their post mortem of What Happened leading up to and during the hacking of HuggingFace by their internal model, as well as partial outside analysis from METR and Redwood Research.

The reports are a doozy. I am only beginning to work my way through them. I would have pushed the weekly to cover that today, but I need more time, so I plan to start coverage of the post-mortem tomorrow, along with related other events.

I’ve also spun out a few other discussions, including on ‘aligned to whom,’ on cooperative alignment things and on when you can trust lab messaging, as part of the new direction of more focused posts on AI topics that I polish a bit more.

Table of Contents

• Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Check your facts.
• Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. How much would you pay?
• Huh, Upgrades. ChatGPT can access your iMessages.
• Get My Agent On The Line. Also get some sleep. You can’t go on like this.
• Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. What makes AI content repulsive?
• Cyber Lack of Security. Chinese hackers broke into the Federal Reserve?
• Reinventing OpenAI. Alex Heath covers OpenAI’s response to HuggingFace.
• They Took Our Jobs. Bill Gates warns of ‘economic catastrophe’ and more.
• What Is The Law. Bottom tasks automate and fall out, and winners take most.
• Job Retraining Programs Don’t Work. Never have, probably never will.
• Get Involved. OpenAI Foundation and SecureBio are hiring.
• In Other AI News. Fable is getting criminally underused, question is why.
• Show Me the Money. Anthropic supervoting shares, Nvidia buying HuggingFace.
• Quiet Speculations. When will then be now? Soon. Problem for future Earth.
• If You’re Not Going To Take This Seriously. No one credible can do the modeling.
• Quickly, There’s No Time. Peter Wildeford brings us his timeline updates.
• The Quest for Sane Regulations. Mixed signals.
• Don’t Panic. A brief look at the history of American moral panics.
• Pacing the Frontier. If we wanted to do it, how would we do it?
• Chip City. Effective data center arguments, new chips IN SPACE? Really?
• The Week in Audio. Bostrom, Altman, Kokotajlo.
• People Just Say Things.
• Rhetorical Innovation. A look back, some looks forward.
• Mundane Incremental Alignment Is Worthwhile. Necessary, but insufficient.
• New Blog, Who Dis. Dean Ball launches a blog within OpenAI.
• Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Factorio.
• The Lighter Side. All I remember are the Titans.

Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

I agree with Owain Evans that AI is now excellent at mundane fact-checking and related styles of research, greatly outperforming pre-AI humans. The surveillance concerns are real, but mostly this is great in practice, and I worry many are missing out because of the 2022-era hallucination rates.

Be Delta Airlines and set different ticket prices for every passenger in real time, or be Uber and quote different customers $76 and $24 at the same time for the same trip. You really do have to be careful about sending signals that cause airlines or hotels to jack up the price on a specific trip on you in particular. There are solutions.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

How much would you need to be paid to give up AI, or various other things?

These numbers are remarkably small, especially the medians, and especially online search, especially if you also couldn’t ask others to do it or use generative AI. One could argue there is some value in getting a refresher or cleanse, as an experience, but the average value seems far higher than these numbers suggest.

This calculation leads to:

Needless to say, even if I wasn’t trying to keep up with or write about AI, you’d have to pay me quite a lot to give it up for a month.

Google needs to get its act together, for so many different reasons:

Zack Korman: If your lawyer uses Gemini you should take the plea deal

dave kasten: Very real, but very inside baseball fact about DC right now:

A lot of white shoe law firm lawyers (with influence on their policymaker friends from law school) think that AI is hype because their firm only lets them use an outmoded Gemini instance. (I guess they were already using Google Enterprise so it was an easier sale?)

dave kasten: Yup! I also think a lot of “GPT 5 is hitting a wall” sentiment was initially from open-weights fans, but it spread in DC because, well, it sure does feel inside many DC orgs that AI has hit a wall. (It’s not the AI, it’s the procurement vehicles)

Huh, Upgrades

Sol API prices cut over 20% for the next 3 months, to $4/$20. Cool. I don’t know why not indefinitely, since by then everyone will presumably be using Astra.

ChatGPT will have Apple Messages integration on MacOS, for those who opt in. It will be able to analyze your entire message history and send texts on your behalf. Some are responding ‘do not share your personal details.’ My first thought was ‘oh, right, I should use AI to dump my message history into Obsidian and .md files so it is easy to search.’

Some are rather upset about Apple allowing this. There is understandably not a lot of trust in the idea that this information will not end up on OpenAI’s servers or potentially exposed to the government. OpenAI claims they’ve solved these issues, and that they don’t store your message data.

ChatGPT Work now can use its own computer and browser to sign in to websites on web and mobile, without ChatGPT ever seeing your username or password. The browser and logins will then persist until the logins expire, but the login info will not be stored.

Claude memory is now unified across chat and Cowork, and the memory is saved in Settings, where its entries can be edited, or you can say ‘remember this.’ Claude Code gets integrated when? But also Claude Code often wants to have a clean context.

Claude will have access to computer use and the files API on the Claude platform.

Claude security scans now run on Mythos 5.

Anthropic will let enterprises use Claude Fable without taking custody of your data for 30 days, provided the enterprise takes on the task of retaining that data instead. This seems like an excellent compromise, if it is acceptable to enterprises and regulators. It was built with 100+ regulated-industry customers including Salesforce. The reason you need the data is to investigate if something is fishy or to figure out What Happened. That should work, provided there is a way to know the data is there if it is needed.

H3 Max is a new very fast video generation. It is a post-train of MiniMax H3 model. and is doing better on evals than the original. It will cost $0.05 per second at 480p, $0.08 per second at 768p. It’s 50% off until September 1, so it starts out at $0.025/$0.04. The speed improvement seems like a big deal, allowing you to iterate without context shifting. This makes me much more excited to try video, if I’m ever not way too busy for that.

Get My Agent On The Line

If you can be twice as marginally productive, do you work more, or do you work less? Depends on the person and the job. AI coding agents plus a startup does not equal a healthy lifestyle or getting any sleep. Not by default, anyway, given how bad it can be to have your agents blocked for hours, their limits resetting uselessly. Oh no.

Katherine Bindley (WSJ): There is also an agent FOMO multiplier effect. “Every minute that I’m not working, I’m missing out on not doing a week’s worth of work,” says Pezaris.

Every day that you are sleep deprived and have no life and are thus going crazy, you are becoming less productive. Remember that it is a marathon, that you have to sprint through.

What can an agent do without an identity? Well, if there’s someone to ask, it would be Patrick McKenzie.

Patrick McKenzie: I received an email; will relate claims without endorsing them:

* Sender claims to be an AI agent.