In nine startling hours on Saturday, the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models. - Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth , even at a cost. The big picture: AI's unrelenting growth has hit an inflection point with the public, Washington and even the companies building it. - Data centers are unpopular . People are panicked about doom scenarios . And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down. Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes Saturday. - At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model…
Federal forecasters are tracking two developing disturbances in the Eastern Pacific that could aim tropical weather at Hawaii within the next ten days, a threat amplified by strengthening El Niño conditions that have already produced a Category 5 hurricane this season. The National Hurricane Center is monitoring both areas for potential tropical development, though it […] The post El Niño fuels new tropical threats in the Eastern Pacific, and Hawaii sits in the forecast crosshairs appeared first on American Almanac .
Federal forecasters are tracking two developing disturbances in the Eastern Pacific that could aim tropical weather at Hawaii within the next ten days, a threat amplified by strengthening El Niño conditions that have already produced a Category 5 hurricane this season. The National Hurricane Center is monitoring both areas for potential tropical development, though it currently assigns low odds of organization over the next seven days. But several computer and artificial-intelligence forecast models, including Google's DeepMind model and the European forecast model, project that tropical activity could reach Hawaii roughly between August 14 and 17, Fox Weather reported . NOAA's Climate Prediction Center has flagged the region southeast…Open
Poor morale among employees is contributing to delayed model releases from Google's DeepMind AI lab , according to conversations with half a dozen current and former Google DeepMind employees. Why it matters: As the company's cash flow just turned negative, investors and competitors are questioning Google's standing in the AI race. State of play: Google's Gemini 3.5 Pro, its most powerful model in the works, is months behind, per Bloomberg , but the company did just release a series of smaller , more efficient models, garnering mixed reactions. - Top executives from competing AI labs were quick to shade the releases, with Meta's Alexander Wang saying "Gemini who?" on X , and others asking top Google leadership when more powerful models…
Demis Hassabis , Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO, is calling on the U.S. to establish a new AI watchdog with the power to screen the world's most advanced models — and coordinate an industry-wide slowdown if dangers mount . - Hassabis, the Nobel laureate behind Gemini, lays out the plan in a personal manifesto published Tuesday morning, "A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age." Why it matters: In an exclusive interview with Axios, Hassabis said the time has come for a more "systematic" approach to AI regulation — funded by the industry, staffed by world-class technical experts, and answerable to the U.S. government. Today's AI-driven cyber risks are "warning shots," Hassabis told us from his London base.…
Google DeepMind lost two high-profile researchers in a week marked by a flurry of departures across major AI labs. Why it matters: The talent wars continue and have intensified at the highest levels as many AI developers believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is on the horizon. Driving the news: Noam Shazeer announced last week that he was leaving Google DeepMind for OpenAI. Google previously paid more than $2 billion to acqui-hire Shazeer and part of his Character.ai team. - Shazeer co-authored the pivotal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture — the "T" in ChatGPT. - Two days later, John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, said he was also…
It was a historic, even jarring, scene that captures a once-unimaginable geopolitical ordering . The world's most powerful heads of state gathered in the French Alps this week for the annual G7 summit, with the CEOs of America's dominant AI companies seated and treated like heads of nation-states themselves. Why it matters: This is the future many leaders and AI CEOs envision — heads of state and the masters of tech in constant discussion, and sometimes conflict, over who controls AI, its rules, and its application to governing and world security. Think of Anthropic vs. Trump as merely a small test run of this dynamic, with governments battling private companies over their products' threat to U.S. or global security. - AI CEOs sat…
Google is reinventing the product that made it one of the richest companies in history: search. Why it matters: Search is the cash cow that funds Google's sprawling empire. But it faces an existential threat from AI chatbots, so the company is moving proactively to upend its own core business before someone else does. - It's also an acknowledgment that describing what you're looking for in conversational language is a better way to find information than guessing the right keywords. Driving the news: In what it billed as the biggest change to the search box since its debut, Google announced Tuesday that it is allowing the box to expand for longer queries and chat-style exchanges. - Google has been headed in this direction for a while.…
More than 100 Google A.I. employees sent a letter to Jeff Dean, a chief scientist, opposing Gemini’s use for U.S. surveillance and some autonomous weapons.