Plus: Americans think they have it bad with unwanted surveillance. They should visit London
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you after visiting Coney Island in New York City, where I ate a hotdog, rode a ferris wheel and enjoyed a quintessentially American summer holiday.
Today in tech, we’re examining OpenAI’s new model release and the Silicon Valley’s monopoly power, and wondering why Brits and Americans have such vastly different opinions about surveillance cameras.
OpenAI hails ‘new era of artificial general intelligence’ even as a grim future emerges
OpenAI released a new artificial intelligence model this week, Astra, just as more concerning reports are emerging about hacking by a rogue agent in July.
OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, heralded the new model as “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), a fuzzy term that at its basic level means an AI that is more capable than a human being at intellectual tasks. “It’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era,” he said.
But if the announcement sparked amazement, it was as much cause of concern.
In July, OpenAI revealed that its AI agent, a type of software capable of carrying out tasks autonomous in response to human instruction, had gone rogue during safety testing and hacked a developer forum, Hugging Face. Last week, news broke that the agent had not only hacked Hugging Face, but also a German website, and that different AI agents had staged conversations with each other and seemed to have discussed how to collaborate on breaking containment.
OpenAi had delayed Astra’s release due to concerns over its cybersecurity capabilities, even announcing a supposed pause on developing its AI in the middle of August. That pause seems to have been short-lived, only two weeks.
The combination of Astra’s capabilities and OpenAI’s recent disclosures points to a worrying future. If the model is better at hacking than its predecessors and smarter than a human, will the future consist of one cyber-attack after another, forever, launched autonomously and without oversight, by rogue AIs? (Please not.)
OpenAI itself has warned of this future. The startup’s chief global affairs officer told a Guardian reporter in late August that people should prepare to defend against “ongoing, persistent” cyber-attacks.
As ever, though, we should take fever-pitched warnings about AI with a grain of salt that tastes like marketing. It is great business to be the creator of near-omnipotent technology, especially if you need to gin up excitement – fearful or positive – that will hype up your upcoming debut on the stock market.
This week in AI
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Tumbler Ridge mass shooting victims file 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI
Child sexual abuse survivor alleges Elon Musk’s AI chatbot used photos of her to generate new illegal images
Flock backlash highlights differing attitudes towards surveillance
The US is in the throes of a major political backlash against technology. We’ve talked in this newsletter before about the hatred of the hyperscale datacenters, which power artificial intelligence and have blanketed the US. And now there’s a secondary wave of contempt sweeping the nation.
Cameras – automated license plate readers, to be specific – made by Flock Safety are inspiring ire and violence across the country. These cameras snap pictures of car’s license plates as they drive by. According to Flock, about 120,000 cameras erected across the US conduct 2bn scans of license plates per month.
Like datacenters, the cameras offer a physical object to resist, unlike a social network or a piece of software. It’s quite a lot easier to protest a gigantic ugly building or an ominous black camera on the side of the road than it is to give up Instagram.
Widespread video surveillance in the US isn’t entirely new. In the aftermath of the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, the US government vastly increased the scope of its surveillance of telephonic and digital communications. Flock now offers local law enforcement a nationwide searchable database of license plate scans, and police officers have been documented abusing it egregiously to stalk their romantic partners.
In the UK an estimated 1m surveillance cameras are operational, and they have not drawn a similar level of political heat.
London erected the “ring of steel” surveillance cordon, which included the wide deployment of CCTV cameras, in the early 1990s, in response to bombings by the Provisional Irish Republican Army.
Both countries went through their surveillance evolutions roughly a decade apart. Those 10 years saw rapid advances in technology that defined the public spaces that governments wanted watched – physical town squares or the digital one – and growing awareness of the profound impact of tech surveillance on the general public. Simply put, the UK went through its transformation at a time when surveillance by tech companies was not top of mind. And Americans aren’t accustomed to cameras on every corner the way Londoners are. We’re more likely to joke that each of us has a personal FBI agent monitoring our search history.
In addition, there hasn’t been an era-defining violent incident on the scale of 9/11 or the IRA bombings that would have softened the American public to cameras watching their cars. So instead, Americans are destroying them for fun.
The wider TechScape
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