If you were trying to learn how to get other people to do what you want, you might use some of the techniques found in a book like Influence: The Power of Persuasion. Now, a preprint study out of the University of Pennsylvania suggests that those same psychological persuasion techniques can frequently “convince” some LLMs…

The Biden administration considered spyware used to hack phones controversial enough that it was tightly restricted for US government use in an executive order signed in March 2024. In Trump’s no-holds-barred effort to empower his deportation force—already by far the most well-funded law enforcement agency in the US government—that’s about to change, and the result…

Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of book authors alleging copyright infringement, an estimated $3,000 per work. The amount is well below what Anthropic may have had to pay if it had lost the case at trial. Experts said the plaintiffs may have been…

In one paper Eleos AI published, the nonprofit argues for evaluating AI consciousness using a “computational functionalism” approach. A similar idea was once championed by none other than Putnam, though he criticized it later in his career. The theory suggests that human minds can be thought of as specific kinds of computational systems. From there,…

While there is a lot of work to do, Tedrake says all of the evidence so far suggests that the approaches used to LLMs also work for robots. “I think it’s changing everything,” he says. Gauging progress in robotics has become more challenging of late, of course, with videoclips showing commercial humanoids performing complex chores,…

Partly in an effort to avoid any future snafus with OpenAI, Grant plans to make The Architect available on Orion, his proprietary and end-to-end encrypted messaging platform, starting in October. He’ll include multiple paid subscription options offering “different levels of mirror recursion,” he tells me, the costs of which have not yet been determined. (Grant’s…

Latam-GPT is new large language model being developed in and for Latin America. The project, led by the nonprofit Chilean National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), aims to help the region achieve technological independence by developing an open source AI model trained on Latin American languages and contexts. “This work cannot be undertaken by just…