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As AI safety concerns mount, three pioneers make the case for staying open
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As projects like Pacing the Frontier look to major labs as a way to keep AI research safe, open-source models have become a sore spot for the industry. With free distribution and little control over how they’re used, open-weight models aren’t easily controlled, leading some labs to treat them as downright scary. But at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas last week, three of the world’s most respected AI researchers — Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, World Labs CEO and co-founder Fei-Fei Li, and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng — spoke out on the issue. And while they disagreed on particular tactics, all three made a powerful case for keeping AI open. For the three speakers, the core concern was allowing a handful of major AI companies to control the pace of progress. When a few companies control access to a technology, as Apple and Google do with mobile operating systems, innovation can slow and the companies that control the platforms can influence what gets built on them. Andrew Ng said that he worried about a similar dynamic emerging in AI. “I don’t want there to be gatekeepers,” Ng said. “That limits how all of us can access AI.” Companies have an incentive to protect their competitive advantages, including by influencing the rules that govern the industry. That could create a dynamic where only the largest, best-capitalized firms with the resources to build the most advanced AI systems. Ng’s solution was to maintain multiple providers, with models and companies competing rather than allowing a handful of of players to dominate the field. “If I were to try to give one prescription, it would be to promote openness,” Ng said, “because AI is amazing technology and I want it to be in everyone’s hands.” But not everyone agreed that open-weight models would help preserve that state of play. Hinton, in particular, drew a distinction between open-source software, which makes the underlying code available for inspection and modification, and open-weight models, which release the parameters of a trained AI model to the public. “Open source is great. You show people the code, and lots of people look at the lines of code and say, ‘Oh, there’s a bug.’ Open weights means you train a big model and then you give people the weights. That’s very different,” Hinton said. “I was against open [weights] because it makes it so easy for people to take these big foundation models, which are very expensive to train, and for much less money train them to do bad things like cyber attacks.” But whatever his reservations, Hinton acknowledged that open-weight models are already a permanent fixture of AI. “I think that battle’s been lost. We now have open-weight models, so the barrier to lots of people getting these big models, which was the cost of training foundation models, that barrier has disappeared. It’s too late.” Yet accepting reality didn’t mean ignoring the risks. Hinton’s position was clear: AI would continue to advance, and he thought that was largely a good thing. He said it would boost productivity and improve education and healthcare. “Worrying about the possible bad effects of AI and the things that intelligent beings might do when they’re smarter than us. I don’t think that’s unfair. I think it is unfair to label anybody who thinks like that as a fear-monger,” Hinton added. Ng took a different view. The question, he argued, wasn’t whether open models were risky, but who controlled access and who would win the market. Whoever built the cheaper model would have the advantage. If China’s open-weight models gained widespread adoption across Asia, Africa, and/or the developing world, he warned, they could influence how billions of people encountered ideas about democracy, freedom, and human rights. “One thing I hope we do is encourage American competitiveness and open-source AI. It turns out that AI is a tremendous source of soft power. You can see the way China’s model has tremendous accomplishment with Africa, for example,” Ng said.
For a while it seemed like the diarrhea-inducing parasite cyclospora was everywhere. Confirmed and suspected cases number more than 22,000 across 15 states, with 517 people requiring hospitalization. Two people in Michigan died. But now, with signs that the outbreak is slowing down, experts say lettuce is probably safe to eat again.The reason? Most of the contaminated produce is no longer available.Federal health authorities have linked the outbreak to iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico and distributed by Taylor Farms, including at Taco Bell restaurants. On July 17, Taylor Farms announced a recall of shredded iceberg lettuce and salad mixes with “best if used by” dates through August 3, advising consumers to immediately discard any of the affected products. Grocery stores and restaurants are responsible for removing recalled items.“That product is off the market, so I think there’s absolutely lower risk for cyclospora in terms of eating lettuce,” says Kali Kniel, a professor of microbial food safety at the University of Delaware.But that doesn’t mean consumers shouldn’t still be vigilant about what they’re eating. As of August 6, there are two additional clusters of cyclosporiasis that officials are investigating. While a source has not yet been identified, officials in North Carolina say the state is looking into parsley and cilantro. At the same time, an outbreak of salmonella tied to jalapeños has infected at least 345 people across 27 states. On Sunday, Taylor Fresh Foods, the parent company of Taylor Farms, issued a recall of jalapeños and products containing jalapeños, including salsa and guacamole.Total cases of cyclosporiasis could continue ticking up for weeks because of the lag time between when a person is exposed and when symptoms emerge, as well as delays related to seeking care, getting tested, and linking cases to contaminated products. On average, people exposed to cyclospora start to feel sick seven days after exposure, but symptoms can take up to 14 days to appear. Given the seven-day average incubation period and the recall in mid-July, most exposures likely happened in June and the first half of July.Of course, there’s a chance that some people were exposed to the parasite after the recall occurred if they unintentionally ate a contaminated product they had at home. But now that those “best by” dates have passed, the original affected salad products should be long gone from refrigerators.In Michigan, which was hit hardest by the outbreak, the state has reported more than 12,000 cases since June. Typically, Michigan sees 40 to 50 cases of cyclosporiasis annually. However, new cases have been on a downward trajectory since late July. On August 6, the state’s health department said Michigan residents no longer need to avoid bagged salad mixes and may resume their usual food handling practices as new cyclosporiasis case reports and diarrhea-related emergency department visits are on the decline.“As we are seeing fewer cases reported than previous weeks and fewer people reporting the onset of new symptoms, we have growing confidence that the outbreak is declining,” Laina Stebbins, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, tells WIRED.The state health department first identified lettuce and salad greens as a potential source of the outbreak on July 13 and advised consumers to purchase whole heads of lettuce rather than bagged products and to discard outer leaves and thoroughly wash inner leaves before eating. The cyclospora parasite clings to surfaces and crevices of raw produce and is resistant to common food sanitizers, making it tricky to get rid of.Joseph Eisenberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, says the outbreak is a good reminder of how complex food systems can increase the risk of foodborne illness.“It's not like a local farm can't wind up with contamination and contaminated produce, but the supply chain is so much
Meta is working on an AI storytelling app called StoryKit, which creates AI-generated children’s stories with custom characters, settings, lessons, and music. As the App Store listing assures parents, “You don’t need to write a single word.” At last, a tech company has found a way to outsource humanity’s oldest pastime: using our imaginations. StoryKit was first spotted in the App Store by 9to5Mac. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is piloting StoryKit in select countries to see how parents like it. A Meta spokesperson described StoryKit as a creative storytelling app used to craft personalized, imaginative storybooks for their children and noted that it uses AI safety filters with no social features and is only available to users over the age of 18. To generate a story in the app, you first select a character, which you can create by “[snapping] a photo of their favorite toy or person to bring them to life,” according to the description in the App Store. Then, you describe the world of your story and choose a lesson, so that you can “weave in values like kindness, courage, or empathy without it feeling like a lecture.” Image Credits:StoryKit (opens in a new window) The good news about StoryKit is that it could be a lot worse. Meta regularly ships boneheaded ideas like Instagram deepfake generators and “pervert glasses.” Comparatively, is it so bad to doom children to soulless bedtime stories? Should we have expected anything better from the company that promised us a utopian world of virtual reality work meetings? Humans have their faults, but if we’re good at anything, it’s making stuff up. We’ve been telling stories for as long as we’ve existed. We don’t even have to spin up original tales of fairy princesses and dragon slayers. We have always drawn from mythology, fables, and other stories — the blockbuster movie of the summer is literally an ancient myth that orginated from this same tradition of oral storytelling. Parents lead exhausting, busy lives, but it has always been possible to survive bedtime without using an inherently uncreative technology that calculates the most predictable response to a prompt. You could see how it might be tempting to pull up StoryKit when your kid rejects your bookcase full of children’s books and demands that you improvise an intergalactic tale about a turtle and a hedgehog who are best friends and solve space mysteries. But do we really want to reject a chance at whimsy and silliness and instead outsource these moments of connection to reading AI-generated scripts from our smartphones? Perhaps the moral of the story here is that we can choose not to live in a world where children are raised on bedtime stories written by large language models. Meta’s vision of the future may be antisocial and bleak, but we have the power to reject that reality. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos. You can contact or verify outreach from Amanda by emailing amanda@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal. View Bio
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