Jan Leike, a key safety researcher at firm behind ChatGPT, quit days after launch of latest AI model, GPT-4o

A former senior employee at OpenAI has said the company behind ChatGPT is prioritising “shiny products” over safety, revealing that he quit after a disagreement over key aims reached “breaking point”.

Jan Leike was a key safety researcher at OpenAI as its co-head of superalignment, ensuring that powerful artificial intelligence systems adhere to human values and aims. His intervention comes before a global artificial intelligence summit in Seoul next week, where politicians, experts and tech executives will discuss oversight of the technology.

Last year British taxpayers spent 800 years waiting to speak to HMRC. This is the price of a world digitised on the cheap

In taking stock of how we spend our days, no one likes to think of all the hours we’ve spent on the phone to the tax office. Yet that and other necessary administrative evils are increasingly taking up our precious time.

Taxpayers spent an accumulated total of almost 800 years on hold on the phone with HM Revenue & Customs last year, according to the National Audit Office, the government’s spending watchdog. It’s one of those stats that short-circuits the brain: more than the combined lifetimes of all the people to whom our call is inevitably transferred, should anyone ever actually answer it.

Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist

News avatars are proliferating on social media and experts say they will spread as the technology becomes more accessible

The news presenter has a deeply uncanny air as he delivers a partisan and pejorative message in Mandarin: Taiwan’s outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, is as effective as limp spinach, her period in office beset by economic under performance, social problems and protests.

“Water spinach looks at water spinach. Turns out that water spinach isn’t just a name,” says the presenter, in an extended metaphor about Tsai being “Hollow Tsai” – a pun related to the Mandarin word for water spinach.

The invisible downside to our online lives is the data stored at giant energy-guzzling datacentres

It’s been called “the largest coal-powered machine on Earth” – and most of us use it countless times a day.

The internet and its associated digital industry are estimated to produce about the same emissions annually as aviation. But we barely think about pollution while snapping 16 duplicate photos of our pets, which are immediately uploaded to the cloud.

America’s military-industrial complex took center stage at AI Expo for National Competitiveness, where a fire-breathing panel set the tone

On 7 and 8 May in Washington DC, the city’s biggest convention hall welcomed America’s military-industrial complex, its top technology companies and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that’s not how they would describe it.

It was the inaugural “AI Expo for National Competitiveness”, hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project – better known as the “techno-economic” thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference’s lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that’s best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump’s family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces.

Hong Kong employee was duped into sending cash to criminals by AI-generated video call

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The British engineering company Arup has confirmed it was the victim of a deepfake fraud after an employee was duped into sending HK$200m (£20m) to criminals by an artificial intelligence-generated video call.

Hong Kong police said in February that a worker at a then-unnamed company had been tricked into transferring vast sums by people on a hoax call “posing as senior officers of the company”.

Town of Grünheide approved the US automaker’s plan on Thursday to double the capacity of the site, despite opposition

Environmental protesters vowed to keep up the pressure on Tesla after failing to stop plans by Elon Musk’s company from expanding its sprawling electric vehicle plant outside Berlin.

The town council of Grünheide, guarded by police and plain-clothed security guards, gave the green light on Thursday to the US automaker after a heated, nearly three-hour debate disrupted by heckling and booing from the audience of about 200 people.

Tesla’s chair discusses upcoming shareholder votes on relocating to Texas and Elon Musk’s $56bn pay deal

• Rishi Sunak and Akshata Murty rise up rich list as fortune increases by £120m
• British asylum housing tycoon breaks into Sunday Times rich list

The Sunday Times also reports that the biggest risers on this year’s list are:

Barnaby and Merlin Swire and family, the family’s two-century-old business owns a significant stake in Cathay Pacific and has extensive interests in Hong Kong (£8.82bn)

Idan Ofer, is the son of Sammy Ofer, who built a shipping empire after serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War (£6.96bn)

John Frederiksen and family, Fredriksen, a Norway-born Cypriot oil and tanker tycoon, has twin daughters who stand to inherit his empire. He owns a Chelsea mansion with a ballroom (£4.556bn)

“We need an economy that rewards work not just wealth.

“But as millions of families struggle to cover even the basics, the super-rich are amassing even greater fortunes.

Benediktas Gylys admits he was surprised by the rowdy behavior that came from the exhibit connecting people in the two cities

The artist behind the controversial “Portal” art exhibit that visually linked New York and Dublin in real time, but was then closed due to rowdy and extreme behavior by the public using it, has admitted he was surprised by the reaction.

Benediktas Gylys also vowed to continue with his project, which has the aim of connecting people and communities all over the world and is hoped to reopen soon.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | the-lightwriter)

An Arizona woman has been accused of helping generate millions of dollars for North Korea’s ballistic missile program by helping citizens of that country land IT jobs at US-based Fortune 500 companies.

Christina Marie Chapman, 49, of Litchfield Park, Arizona, raised $6.8 million in the scheme, federal prosecutors said in an indictment unsealed Thursday. Chapman allegedly funneled the money to North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department, which is involved in key aspects of North Korea’s weapons program, including its development of ballistic missiles.

Part of the alleged scheme involved Chapman and co-conspirators compromising the identities of more than 60 people living in the US and using their personal information to get North Koreans IT jobs across more than 300 US companies.

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Being able to detect lowest form of wit could help AI interact with people more naturally, say scientists

Never mind that it can pass the bar exam, ace medical tests and read bedtime stories with emotion, artificial intelligence will never match the marvel of the human mind without first mastering the art of sarcasm.

But that art, it seems, may be next on the list of the technology’s dizzying capabilities. Researchers in the Netherlands have built an AI-driven sarcasm detector that can spot when the lowest form of wit, and the highest form of intelligence, is being deployed.

Committee chair says UK government has known for years about flaws in benefit system and needs to ‘get a grip’

A cross-party committee of MPs has urged the government to overhaul the weekly benefit for unpaid carers and fix “without delay” the issues causing thousands to rack up enormous debts.

Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, was told that the government had failed for five years to tackle the IT problems that have left tens of thousands of unpaid carers owing sums that had plunged many into debt and left some facing criminal prosecution.

OpenAI’s updated chatbot GPT-4o is weirdly flirtatious, coquettish and sounds like Scarlett Johansson in Her. Why?

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Arthur C Clarke famously said. And this could certainly be said of the impressive OpenAI update to ChatGPT, called GPT-4o, which was released on Monday. With the slight caveat that it felt a lot like the magician was a horny 12-year-old boy who had just watched the Spike Jonze movie Her.

If you aren’t up to speed on GPT-4o (the o stands for “omni”) it’s basically an all-singing, all-dancing, all-seeing version of the original chatbot. You can now interact with it the same way you’d interact with a human, rather than via text-based questions. It can give you advice, it can rate your jokes, it can describe your surroundings, it can banter with you. It sounds human. “It feels like AI from the movies,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post on Monday. “Getting to human-level response times and expressiveness turns out to be a big change.”

Company’s social media platforms, which also include Instagram, may have addictive effects, says European Commission

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The European Commission has opened an investigation into the owner of Facebook and Instagram over concerns that the platforms are creating addictive behaviour among children and damaging mental health.

The EU executive said Meta may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA), a landmark law passed by the bloc last summer that makes digital companies large and small liable for disinformation, shopping scams, child abuse and other online harms.

How can one broom tear apart a Canadian curling community? John Cullen investigates in Broomgate. Plus: five of the best post-apocalyptic podcasts

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Broomgate
Widely available, episodes weekly
Never before has a broom been responsible for so much scandal – in 2015, the Canadian curling community was rocked by a team that used one instead of two. “To not have the other person out front cleaning in a frosty situation doesn’t make sense,” said one shocked commentator. The full story has never been told, so comedian and curling geek John Cullen investigates the switch to the “super broom” that caused a furore. Hannah Verdier

Last week the founder of the dating app Bumble forecasted a near future dating landscape where AI ‘dating concierges’ filter out prospective partners for us. But does AI, or even science, really understand what makes two people compatible? Madeleine Finlay speaks to Amie Gordon, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, to find out what we know about why two people go the distance, and why she and her colleague associate professor of sociology Elizabeth Bruch, are designing their own dating app to learn more.

Clips: Bloomberg

Read more about Amie’s app here

Cannes film festival
First-time actor Agathe Riedinger is a wannabe influencer from the wrong side of the tracks in this forthright and fluent film

Feature first-timer Agathe Riedinger is bringing the TikTok energy for this story of a wannabe Insta influencer-princess from the wrong side of the tracks – but the director is also bringing some pretty old school social realism, exerting its downward gravitational pull. The result is forthright and fluent and fiercely acted by a newcomer lead who, in the time-honoured style of movies like this, is defiant, vulnerable and front and centre of almost every shot. But it also sometimes treads water in terms of narrative, running out of ideas before the end, and its final ambiguity about an ultimate success that is there to be hallucinated rather than achieved feels anticlimactic.

Liane, played by Malou Khebizi, is a 19-year-old with a French and Italian background living in Fréjus in the south of France. She was once given up for foster care by her troubled mother but now taken back home and is now in charge of babysitting her kid sister, whom she is busily turning into a mini-me version of her own brassy, sexualised image. Liane shoplifts and sells the stolen goods – which has paid for her breast-implant surgery and she has also had her lips done. She hangs out with her friends, getting drunk, but is fastidious about how and with whom she’s having sex; she has thousands of followers on her Only-Fans-type insta (although oddly, it doesn’t occur to her to have an actual Only Fans account). Liane also has a poignantly religious sense of her own heroic martyrdom, her ill-treatment at the hands of online haters, men and her appalling mother.

Company’s cheap, simple-to-use durable minicomputer has proved a hit all over the world

• Tech firm Raspberry Pi readies for London float

Raspberry Pi, whose popular minicomputers are sold around the world, has come a long way since its co-founder Jack Lang had to store some of the first batch of single-board devices in his garage more than a decade ago.

What started out as a project to reverse the decline in computer science applications at Cambridge University went on to inspire a generation of child programmers by offering them an affordable $35 (£28) minicomputer. Now the company is preparing to list on the London Stock Exchange.

Apple sets new standard in screen and power but Pro model verges away from consumer tablet needs

Apple’s latest iPad Pro is thinner and lighter, and has a stupendous new OLED screen, plus oodles of power to do practically anything. But it is no longer just the super-premium iPad – it is also aiming to be an impressive tool for the creative industry.

It still looks and acts like an iPad, ready to do regular iPad things such as browse the web, watch TV or chat to your family on the other side of the country. But to do only that with a machine this advanced is total overkill – Apple has many other iPad models suited to that sort of thing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As AI systems have grown in sophistication, so has their capacity for deception, according to a new analysis from researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research, tells Ian Sample about the different examples of deception he uncovered, and why they will be so difficult to tackle as long as AI remains a black box

Listen to the Guardian’s Black Box series all about humans and artificial intelligence

Read Hannah Devlin’s article about the MIT study

In this first-ever in-person recording of Shared Security, Tom and Kevin, along with special guest Matt Johansen from Reddit, discuss their experience at the RSA conference in San Francisco, including their walk-through of ‘enhanced security’ and the humorous misunderstanding that ensued. The conversation moves to the ubiquity of AI and machine learning buzzwords at the […]

The post Live at RSA: AI Hype, Enhanced Security, and the Future of Cybersecurity Tools appeared first on Shared Security Podcast.

The post Live at RSA: AI Hype, Enhanced Security, and the Future of Cybersecurity Tools appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Source: www.theguardian.com – Author: Anna Isaac and Dan Sabbagh The IT company targeted in a Chinese hack that accessed the data of hundreds of thousands of Ministry of Defence staff failed to report the breach for months, the Guardian can reveal. The UK defence secretary, Grant Shapps, told MPs on Tuesday that Shared Services Connected […]

La entrada MoD contractor hacked by China failed to report breach for months – Source: www.theguardian.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

This blog post was written based on research carried out by Jérôme Segura.

A campaign using sponsored search results is targeting home users and taking them to tech support scams.

Sponsored search results are the ones that are listed at the top of search results and are labelled “Sponsored”. They’re often ads that are taken out by brands who want to get people to click through to their website. In the case of malicious sponsored ads, scammers tend to outbid the brands in order to be listed as the first search result.

The criminals that buy the ads will go as far as displaying the official brand’s website within the ad snippet, making it hard for an unsuspecting visitor to notice a difference.

Who would, for example, be able to spot that the below ad for CNN is not legitimate. You’ll have to click on the three dots (in front of where we added malicious ad) and look at the advertiser information to see that it’s not the legitimate owner of the brand.

Only then it becomes apparent that the real advertiser is not CNN, but instead a company called Yojoy Network Technology Co., Limited.

Below, you can see another fake advertisement by the same advertiser, this time impersonating Amazon.

In our example, the scammers failed to use the correct CNN or Amazon icons, but in other cases (like another recent discovery by Jerome Segura), scammers have even used the correct icon.

The systems of the people that click one of these links are likely to assessed on what the most profitable follow-up is (using a method called fingerprinting). For systems running Windows, we found visitors are redirected to tech support scam websites such as this one.

Tech Support Scam site telling the visitor to call 1-844-476-5780

You undoubtedly know the type. Endless pop-ups, soundbites, and prompts telling the visitor that they should urgently call the displayed number to free their system of alleged malware.

These tech support scammers will impersonate legitimate software companies (i.e. Microsoft) and charge their victims hundreds or even thousands of dollars for completely bogus malware removal.

Getting help if you have been scammed

Getting scammed is one of the worst feelings to experience. In many ways, you may feel like you have been violated and angry to have let your guard down. Perhaps you are even shocked and scared, and don’t really know what to do now. The following tips will hopefully provide you with some guidance.

If you’ve already let the scammers in

• Revoke any remote access the scammer has (if you are unsure, restart your computer). That should cut the remote session and kick them out of your computer.
• Scan your computer for malware. The miscreants may have installed password stealers or other Trojans to capture your keystrokes. Use a program such as Malwarebytes to quickly identify and remove threats.
• Change all your passwords. (Windows password, email, banking, etc.)

If you’ve already paid

• Contact your financial institution/credit card company to reverse the charges and keep an eye out for future unwanted charges.
• If you gave them personal information such as date of birth, Social Security Number, full address, name, and maiden name, you may want to look at some form of identity theft protection.

Reporting the scam

File a report

• In the US: File a complaint (FTC)
• In Canada: Contact law enforcement
• In the UK: Report fraud | Report a cold call
• In Australia: Report a scam

Shut down their remote software account

• Write down the TeamViewer ID (9-digit code) and send it to TeamViewer’s support. They can later use the information you provide to block people/companies.
• LogMeIn: Report abuse

Spread the word

You can raise awareness by letting your friends, family, and other acquaintances know what happened to you. Although sharing your experience of falling victim to these scams may be embarrassing, educating other people will help someone caught in a similar situation and deter further scam attempts.

We don’t just report on threats – we help safeguard your entire digital identity

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Protect your—and your family’s—personal information by using identity protection