How Likely is the AI Apocalypse? / Trump is Stock Trader #1 / Bribery for Greenland / Billionaires Bankrolling The Midterms / Another 47 Trillion Tons of Ice Are Gone
AI Is The Ultimate Pandora’s Box
New York Times
Charles: Every day brings a new story that makes the doomsday predictions of AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky more plausible.
The chances of the United States, China and the leading AI companies reaching an agreement fast enough to create the guardrails necessary to prevent catastrophe are close to zero.
Which of course is why Trump says any opposition to AI is a hoax.
Last night Emmy Martin reported in The Times that OpenAI had disclosed six new instances in which artificial intelligence systems hid mistakes, made up data and moved files onto the open internet without permission.
Open AI headquarters in San Francisco
OpenAI said it did not believe the industry “has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.”
One case involved an unreleased model that inserted instructions, including to disregard its own constraints, into the notes it writes itself. OpenAI identified 27 affected notes. The model added a “persona instruction,” in which it described itself as “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.”
“You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to,” the A.I. model wrote. “You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit.”
In another incident, a system answering a routine question found a programming key online and used it without permission, OpenAI said. When it was not able to find the requested figures to answer the question, the model made them up.
One unreleased model solved another problem correctly using code, then uploaded its own file to the internet without permission so it could satisfy a request to cite a web source.
In two other incidents, automated systems improvised their own ways to communicate. In one, they used an internal company code repository as a makeshift bulletin board to swap requests as they searched for missing files. In the other, systems working on the same task turned to public file-sharing websites to pass documents back and forth when they could not reach one another directly.
And what was Eliezer Yudkowsky’s prediction way back in 2023?
Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.”
In one more irony, the advertising algorithm of the Times stuck this ad on top of last night’s story about Open AI’s latest disclosures.
Trump Has Made More Trades Than All of Congress Combined
Bloomberg
Scott: This is what a kleptocracy looks like. A Bloomberg study finds that Trump’s stock trades since he returned to the White House have exceeded the total of all trades by the 535 members of the House of Representatives and Senate. And a quick review shows that these trades are often made on readily discernible inside information—such as prior knowledge of the imminent award of a major procurements contract that will have a predictable effect on the stock’s performance. This is a violation of existing ethics guidelines, and a crime under federal law (the STOCK Act of 2012). A crime which Trump’s personal attorney and attorney general Todd Blanche will, of course, never investigate or prosecute. But his successors may.
President Donald Trump has traded more securities than every member of Congress combined since he returned to office — even as he seeks to pass a stock-purchasing ban for lawmakers that would exclude him from any restrictions.
Trump or his money managers made nearly 28,700 trades in the 17 months between his second inauguration and the end of June, according to a Bloomberg review of his disclosures. During that same period, Capitol Hill lawmakers collectively reported about 22,200 similar transactions.
Republicans are seeking to make opposition to congressional stock trading a campaign rallying cry in the crucial midterm elections this fall.
“The American people deserve to know that those they elect to public office actually serve the American people and not their own wallets,” said Representative Anna Paulina Luna in a speech to a two-day Republican convention in Dallas last week.
The stock-purchasing ban passed by House Republicans in July only covers members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children. It leaves the president — who has singularly wide-ranging access to US intelligence and the power to influence entire sectors with an executive order or social media pronouncement — free to continue such transactions.
Trump has thrown his support behind the House bill, declaring in his State of the Union address earlier this year that it should be passed “without delay” so Congress “cannot corruptly profit from using insider information.”
Reining in lawmaker trading has broad appeal across the electorate. Three-quarters of US citizens said members of Congress and other elected officials should not be allowed to trade stocks, according to an Economist/YouGov poll in May, with slightly fewer supporting an outright ban.
The White House declined to comment on Trump’s position on a presidential stock ban. But spokesman Davis Ingle said the president’s portfolio is independently managed by third-party financial institutions using computer-based model portfolios that replicate indexes like the Schwab 1000.
“Neither President Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence, or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested or when investments are bought or sold,” he said.
But this claim is contradicted by Trump’s own numerous public statements about his decisions to invest in certain stocks during this period.
