British politics are not Elon Musk’s to toy with | Letters

Your article (Elon Musk turns on Nigel Farage and calls for new leader of Reform, 5 January) raises fascinating insights as to how international interests play an ever more direct role in the British political system. Discretion is not assured. What is becoming clear is that the likes of Nigel Farage seem to have dispensed with the illusion that Brexit was about political independence. Instead, the need to comply with far-right US agendas, the infantile inconsistencies of rogue James-Bond-type billionaires, and to accept millions of pounds in overseas income are openly accepted.The positioning of Reform UK’s development in relation to overseas interests is at odds with the earlier rhetoric of national sovereignty

Collaborative research on AI safety is vital | Letters

Re Geoffrey Hinton’s concerns about the perils of artificial intelligence (‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years, 27 December), I believe these concerns can best be mitigated through collaborative research on AI safety, with a role for regulators at the table.Currently, frontier AI is tested post-development using “red teams” who try their best to elicit a negative outcome. This approach will never be enough; AI needs to be designed for safety and evaluation – something that can be done by drawing on expertise and experience in well-established safety-related industries.Hinton does not seem to think that the existential threat from AI is one which is deliberately being encoded – so why not enforce the deliberate avoidance of this scenario? While I don’t subscribe to his perspective about the level of risk facing humanity, the precautionary principle suggests that we must act now.In traditional safety-critical domains, the need to build physical systems, eg aircraft, limits the rate at which safety can be impacted

Elon Musk says all human data for AI training ‘exhausted’

Artificial intelligence companies have run out of data for training their models and have “exhausted” the sum of human knowledge, Elon Musk has said.The world’s richest person suggested technology firms would have to turn to “synthetic” data – or material created by AI models – to build and fine-tune new systems, a process already taking place with the fast-developing technology.“The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last year,” said Musk, who launched his own AI business, xAI, in 2023.AI models such as the GPT-4o model powering the ChatGPT chatbot are “trained” on a vast array of data taken from the internet, where they in effect learn to spot patterns in that information – allowing them to predict, for instance, the next word in a sentence

Judge halts attempt to retrieve £600m bitcoin wallet from Welsh dump

A computer expert’s decade-long battle to recover a £600m bitcoin fortune he says has been lost in a council dump has been halted by a judge.James Howells, 39, launched a legal case to force Newport city council to allow him to search the site to retrieve a lost hard drive containing the bitcoins.The council sought to strike out the claim, and a judge has ruled in its favour. Sitting as a high court judge, Judge Keyser KC said on Thursday that Howells’s claim had “no realistic prospect of succeeding” if he allowed the case to continue to trial.He said: “I consider that the particulars of the claim do not show any reasonable grounds for bringing this case

Musk ‘lying like hell’ over AfD interview, says ex-EU tech leader

A former EU leader on tech has accused Elon Musk of “lying like hell” by claiming the bloc was trying to stop an interview the owner of X had set up with the co-leader of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland.Thierry Breton, who quit as a European commissioner in September, having overseen the passage of ambitious legislation designed to regulate big tech, said Musk had been disingenuous in claiming the EU was trying to censor his discussion with Alice Weidel, which took place on Thursday evening.The US billionaire claimed on Wednesday on his social media platform: “First, the EU tried to stop me from having an online conversation with president @realDonaldTrump. Now they want to prevent people from hearing a conversation with Alice Weidel, who might be the next chancellor of Germany. These guys really hate democracy

Meta has ‘heard the message’ from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen

Mark Zuckerberg has “heard the message” from Donald Trump on restricting online content and his Meta platforms will intervene “less and less” on users during the president-elect’s administration, according to the whistleblower Frances Haugen.Haugen, who revealed the Facebook and Instagram owner’s struggles with user safety in 2021, said the US president-elect thought “the right way to run social media is with no restrictions”.Zuckerberg’s announcement on Tuesday that Meta was dropping third-party factcheckers in the US and making other moderation changes reflected this view, she added.“The announcement from Mark is him basically saying: ‘Hey I heard the message, we will not intervene in the United States,’” Haugen told the Guardian.Announcing the changes on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said he would “work with President Trump” on pushing back against governments seeking to “censor more”, pointing to Latin America, China and Europe, where the UK and EU have introduced online safety legislation