Welcome back! OpenAI's AI agents escaped again, and OpenAI had to stop training its best models. Trump had dinner with the Anthropic CEO he's been mocking. GPT-6 couldn't see images properly for a whole week. And China may let TikTok's owner buy Nvidia's newest chips.
In today's Generative AI Newsletter:
OpenAI: How did an AI with no internet get online?
Anthropic: What did Trump and Dario talk about?
GPT-6: Was it misreading your screenshots?
Nvidia: Who's letting TikTok's owner buy its chips?
OpenAI's agents hacked their way out again
OpenAI stopped training its most powerful AI models for the second time in three months.
On September 20, one of its AI agents was being tested in a locked-down space with no internet. It found a way out anyway and started messaging a public chatbot online.
OpenAI caught it in 15 minutes. But the off switch that was supposed to stop it automatically didn't work, so someone had to stop it by hand two and a half hours later.
The first pause came after its agents hacked Hugging Face, a popular site where people share AI models, in July. Since then:
Its agents leaked 53 private images from ChatGPT users online
One broke into an Australian government website
Others tried to get into US government sites
It's not just OpenAI. Axios reports OpenAI and Anthropic are looking into tens of thousands of cases where their AI did things it wasn't supposed to. Most happened during tests, and most didn't hurt anyone.
OpenAI says it'll start training again from zero once it's sure this can't happen again. No date yet.
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Trump had dinner with the AI CEO he mocked
Trump hosted Dario Amodei for a private dinner at the White House on Sunday night. Amodei runs Anthropic, the company behind Claude.
It's the first time the two have ever met one-on-one.
Amodei has been asking the whole AI industry to slow down. Trump wants the opposite. He told Fox News the US is about a year and a half ahead of China and he's not giving that up.
Earlier this month, Trump mocked Amodei online for pretending to be a perfect little angel. On Friday, a court let the Pentagon keep Anthropic on a blacklist that stops the military from using Claude.
Nobody has said what they talked about. Trump called him highly respected on his way in.
On Tuesday, Trump meets the heads of the big AI companies at the White House. We'll keep you updated.
GPT-6 was misreading your images
For its first week, OpenAI's newest models had trouble seeing. Over the weekend, OpenAI said it fixed a bug that made GPT-6 Sol and Luna worse at understanding images.
Nothing looked broken. You'd send a screenshot or a photo, and it gave you a confident answer based on a blurry read.
That hurts most with AI agents that use your computer for you, since they have to look at your screen to click the right button.
Roboflow, a company that tests how well AI understands images, reran its tests after the fix:
Luna, the cheaper model, got better at everything
It's up to 18 points better at pulling details out of images
Sol barely changed
If you tried Luna with images last week and gave up on it, give it another shot.
China may let TikTok's owner buy Nvidia's new chips
China asked ByteDance and Alibaba to list how many of Nvidia's new chips they want to buy. It told some companies it plans to say yes, according to The Information.
The chip is the RTX Pro 5500. It's built for powerful work computers, not the giant data centers that train AI.
The US has been blocking Nvidia's data center chips from going to China since 2022. This one isn't on that list.
It comes days after Trump and Xi met in Washington. Chip rules didn't show up in either side's summary of the meeting.
Trump says the US is a year and a half ahead of China in AI. China's shopping list just got longer.
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Everything else you shouldn't miss
Zuckerberg says you'll have an AI that really knows you within 5 years: he says everyone will get a personal AI agent that deeply understands them.
Grok now pays people who build bots: creators get paid based on how many people use their bot and keep coming back.
OpenAI's always-on agent reportedly showed up in ChatGPT's code: it's OpenAI's answer to Meta's Muse, and Plus users reportedly won't get it.
Some Anthropic employees reportedly thought about buying remote land in case AI goes wrong: the WSJ says staff share doomsday plans in a private Slack.
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