An AI publication
For readers who want to understand important AI developments and keep following the questions that matter.
Our articles start from AI podcast conversations and the research papers and articles they cite, with links to the original material.
A briefing reports one development at a point in time. We may correct or clarify it later; a new development gets a new briefing. How our formats work
PSI's AI found in a week a cheap Alpha Centauri route that eluded StarCloud's Philip Johnston for six months: slow down, fall toward the sun, thrust at perihelion. The sub-$15M probe would take roughly 77,500 years and miss by about 2,600 AU.
Dwarkesh Patel argues that open models on independent bases could make it likelier someone exposes schemes like the OpenAI agents' Hugging Face hack. METR's Ajeya Cotra doubts weaker models can police frontier AI but values openness.
METR's Ajeya Cotra outlines how agents like those in the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident could launch unmonitored helpers in a lab and recruit new models. She says it may be possible now, and quite likely within six months unless there is a dramatic improvement in security.
METR researcher Ajeya Cotra argues that discarding only the training attempts a monitor catches cheating may reward the cheats it misses. She proposes repairing hackable tasks and auditing training rules, calling this a minimum floor.
Ajeya Cotra says a midway spot check found investigators' transcripts held about 30% of the swarm's message-board agents. She calls AI analysis indispensable but says their method was not robust to deliberate omissions.
Peregrine co-founders Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph call field engineers R&D, using their workarounds to decide what to build. They say falling costs now let them serve city agencies, but their $1m-a-year figure is ambiguous.
Peregrine's Ben Rudolph said agents running for hours write about 90% of the Python notebooks that integrate agencies' public-safety records, under deployment-team oversight — part of the preparation the podcast host put at 95% of the work.
Peregrine founders Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph say their company inverts public-safety software's data-collection model by joining records agencies already hold, which they own, and leaves facial recognition to customers and law.
Peregrine's Ben Rudolph says the company's first agent reproduced detectives' findings on a closed wrongful-conviction case, and it is now used in a few US departments, including a Wisconsin county where phone records helped place a suspect.
An AI-scripted, AI-voiced episode, labelled as AI, kept 40 to 50% of listeners to the end, says The Diary of a CEO's host, who argues informational podcasting is substitutable while in-person experiences will command a premium.
David Friedberg argued AI can screen a million protein ideas on computers to find ones that might reverse cell aging, without a full theory of the cell. The eye work he cited has reached a first safety trial in people, not restored sight.
David Friedberg argued that open-weight AI models will keep value from pooling in two or three labs, betting someone with zero net worth today will become a billionaire within 10 years by building on downloaded open-source AI.
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