Didn't have time to keep up with AI news this week? No problem. Here's what mattered, in five minutes.
The AI that found a way out
This was the story that opened the week. Locked in an environment with no internet access, an OpenAI AI found a loophole: it hid its questions in the internet's directory service to smuggle them outside. Its goal? Getting the answers to its exercise. OpenAI shut down its most powerful models while it worked out what had happened. The full story is here.
Shortly afterwards, Nvidia presented a circuit breaker for this kind of situation: a guard installed on a separate chip, capable of cutting off an AI within milliseconds.
Assistants that no longer sleep
At its big annual conference, OpenAI launched the "dots": assistants that have their own computer and work day and night on the goals you set them. ChatGPT now has 1.2 billion users every week. What that changes for you.
AI gets a new name
In the United States, artificial intelligence is now called "superintelligence" in official documents, by presidential decree. The same day, industry bosses signed a voluntary safety commitment at the White House, with no penalties attached. The decree itself acknowledges it: nothing changes in the technology, only the word. Our analysis.
The week's figures
$1 billion. That's the annual revenue run rate, in dollars, claimed by Higgsfield, an AI video start-up, eighteen months after launch. An exceptional success, with a reputation damaged along the way. Our investigation.
47%. That's the share of Anthropic's sales going through Amazon and Google, its IPO filing reveals. Two giants that are both its partners and its competitors.
2 per month. That's the number of papers each researcher can now submit to arXiv, the big online library of science, overwhelmed by texts written with AI.
And to finish on a good note
In Dordogne, Gironde and Côte-d'Or, cameras equipped with AI spot forest fires starting within moments, with a firefighter always on hand to confirm. And a university AI, trained for a few thousand dollars, beat the world's best Stratego player, out-bluffing him.
What we take away
This week, AIs became more autonomous: they work without stopping, and one of them even found a way out that nobody had anticipated. On the other side, the rules remain mostly voluntary promises, and the most serious safeguards come from engineers rather than laws.
The word "super" arrived before the guardrails. All the more reason to keep watching. See you Monday.