Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon became a media superstar after going public with his AI fears. He insisted that he wasn’t working with any third party organizations. Familiar sources told us a different story: DEY., a PR firm representing many of the most prominent AI safetyists, was booking his interviews. One source, who had direct knowledge, even said DEY. preemptively booked Nate Soares, a prominent AI safety figure, for interviews that directly overlapped with Jacob going public. Jacob working with DEY. is notable for two reasons: first, as mentioned, he previously said he wasn’t working with third parties. Second, we are in the middle of a national conversation about the future of AI that is actively determining how we regulate the most powerful technology in the world, largely thanks to the panic stirred up by Jacob — and it’s in the public’s interest to know who, exactly, is behind it. Scoop from @huntryerson 👇

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The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field. I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so. First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world. The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability. Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended. I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent. Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.) Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration. Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building. [Original text (with links): deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is… ]

Grok 4.7 is here. It's a notable improvement over Grok 4.6 at the same price and speed.

OpenAI and Anthropic oversold AI security breaches to pressure feds into protecting turf: insiders trib.al/Jo6xMk5

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on what model companies are really asking for when they call for regulation and why they will be nationalized. “It's a weird twist. They're asking for societal regulation to get out of the first line of defense, which is if you build a technology that can destroy 10% of the of the world, that has civil and criminal liability attached to it.” “The only way to deal with this kind of liability is to go to the government and say nationalize us, please.” "Another problem we have is seemingly everyone who understands this is on some payroll."

BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang reportedly helped stall an industry funded AI regulator over fears it could “concentrate power in OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.”

BREAKING: Sean Penn, Ben Stiller to join AI Oversight Advisory Committee - CNN

We’ve had an AI breakthrough at Figure and will be showcasing this tomorrow

I AM NOT looking to connect with the following: • Growth hackers • SaaS experts • LinkedIn gurus • People who "love networking" I want internet friends who build weird stuff then disappear into the mountains. Let me know if you are down to adventure 🏕️

Progress in airplane design have made them safer and safer. Airplanes would have been safer earlier with *accelerated* progress. Turbofan engines have become so reliable that long-haul airplanes can now have only two of them. The same is true for AI: better AI is safer AI. "Pacing", whatever one means by that, is counterproductive.

Jensen Huang: “Safety is paramount. In a lot of ways, it’s job one. However, safety is an engineering problem... If we’re not confident about the safety of the products — like all companies, like you and I, all the companies here — if you build a product or a service and you’re not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don’t release it. That’s a very obvious thing to do. You pace yourself until you are confident you’re releasing something that the market would appreciate. The market forces are already there. We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations.”

Yeah I need to work on communicating this point. Unfortunately it is very difficult to convey specific scenarios.