Naomi Bashkansky, a former OpenAI alignment researcher, joins Conduit as a founding researcher to develop neural AI models that can interpret non-invasive neural recordings into text, aiming for 'telepathy' capabilities by 2035.
Sir Demis Hassabis is stepping down as Google DeepMind CEO to become chair and Alphabet chief scientist. CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu will lead DeepMind, while veteran engineers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat depart to launch a startup.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is reportedly concerned that new AI researchers are joining the company for high pay and equity rather than its core mission, highlighting a broader industry talent war involving Meta, OpenAI, and Google.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI-focused hedge fund, Situational Awareness, saw its assets plummet from $45 billion to $10 billion this week. The former OpenAI researcher was forced to sell leveraged stock bets, including SK Hynix and CoreWeave, to Ken Griffin's Citadel at a discount following tumbling semiconductor stocks and margin calls.
Chinese AI researchers, including those from Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, are increasingly using X for global discourse, sharing work, and building international branding, finding it superior to domestic platforms for technical discussions and offering direct insights into China's AI industry.
A public policy professor uses the "work vs. gym" analogy to explain when AI assistance is appropriate, arguing that tasks designed for skill development (gym tasks) should not use AI, while efficiency-focused tasks (work tasks) can. This distinction highlights the impact of AI on students' learning and the future of creative professions.
ResearchClawBench tests AI agents' research capabilities against human papers to see if they can match or exceed human authors. Meanwhile, China's Qiushi Engine, an LLM-based agent launched by a Zhejiang University-led team, aims for 'end-to-end autonomous scientific discovery' in real physical environments.
Joshua Achiam, OpenAI's chief futurist and former head of the mission alignment team, is leaving the company after nearly nine years. He stated his departure was not due to a specific reason but a long-considered decision, aiming to work on OpenAI's mission from outside the organization. His exit follows a series of safety-focused leaders leaving OpenAI as the company prepares for a potential IPO.
Andy Konwinski argues that the AI safety conversation is being used to consolidate power, citing Anthropic's reversed policy of degrading competitor AI training. He advocates for a research commons with open access to frontier-scale compute, comparing centralized AI control to historical power grabs.
AI pioneer Yann LeCun is developing a new AI model, Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), at his startup AMI Labs. Unlike current LLMs like ChatGPT, JEPA aims to understand the physical world, enabling robots to perform complex tasks. The company has raised over $1bn from investors including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos's fund.
Political philosopher Iason Gabriel joined DeepMind in 2017 to address AI's ethical implications, bridging the divide between AI safety and AI ethics. His work anticipated challenges like algorithmic bias and the need for value alignment in a pluralistic world.
Song, a renowned AI security scientist and co-founder of Virtue AI, has joined Meta's Superintelligence Labs as vice-president of AI research. She aims to enhance AI agents' effectiveness in real-world domains and contribute to Meta's AI safety and security efforts.
Patronus AI, a startup founded by former Meta AI researchers, has raised $50 million in Series B funding to build simulated digital environments for testing AI agents. The company's "digital world models" stress-test agents by replicating websites and internal systems, helping model providers ensure reliable performance across diverse scenarios.
Two leading AI researchers, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, are leaving Google's Alphabet for rival Anthropic. This follows other high-profile departures, raising concerns about Google's competitive edge in AI development amidst intense talent wars with startups like Anthropic and OpenAI.
Google is experiencing a significant brain drain in its AI division as top researchers Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, and John Jumper depart for rival companies Anthropic and OpenAI. This follows the recent departure of AI legend Noam Shazeer to OpenAI.
Google is investing approximately $75 million in indie film studio A24 to collaborate on AI tools for film production and distribution. The initiative aims to develop technologies that support filmmakers and preserve creative control, addressing concerns about generative AI.
Google DeepMind VP John Jumper, a Nobel laureate for his work on AlphaFold, is leaving to join rival AI firm Anthropic. This follows another prominent researcher's departure to OpenAI.
Marc Isaacs's new film, 'Synthetic Sincerity,' uses a fictional AI lab to explore authenticity. The documentary maker and writer Adam Ganz fabricated the university setting, admitting they haven't licensed Isaacs's work for AI. The film features Uyghur restaurant owner Ablikim Rahman and actress Ilinca Manolache as an AI avatar, questioning the nature of reality and truth in the digital age.
Michael Dell has donated $750 million to the University of Texas at Austin, one of the largest gifts to a public university. The funds will support a new healthcare and research campus, featuring an AI-native hospital, scholarships, and advanced computing infrastructure.
Alibaba Group Holding has launched its first AI models for robots, the Qwen Robot Suite, developed by Tongyi Lab. This suite aims to enable machines to perceive, reason, and interact with physical environments, marking a significant step into "embodied AI."
Anthropic limits access to its advanced AI model, Claude Fable 5, affecting Chinese AI labs due to built-in safeguards against misuse, despite easing some enforcement after global backlash.
AI researcher "Pliny the Liberator" claims to have jailbroken Anthropic's new Claude Fable 5 model within 48 hours of its launch, bypassing safety features designed to prevent harmful information requests.
A former OpenAI researcher, Yao Shunyu, has become Tencent's chief AI scientist in China and says the company aims to establish a long-term AGI organization, underscoring the intensified US-China AI talent race and China’s efforts to accelerate development despite U.S. chip controls.
Tencent's Chief AI Scientist Yao Shunyu argues the AI race is in its early stages, with vast opportunities in coding agents, embodied intelligence, and multimodal AI, despite current setbacks.
