THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

Therapy can involve a lot of words, but it’s often the pauses that matter most. If you transcribed a session, the pauses would look like nothing: beats of silence, extra breaths, slowing down. But these can represent the crux of the practice: entry points into feeling. My job as a psychoanalyst is to listen as much to silence as to words, to be present with the patient while they’re quiet—to stay with them as they allow their feelings to emerge.I was trained across diverse theories and techniques, but in my clinical work I have found that the cornerstone of the process is feeling. The patient’s emotional experience is the destination and the terrain. But I also feel; I am moved. And the work I do with my patients relies on our relationship and our capacity for mutual feeling. In many ways, the history of my field from Freud on has been a growing acknowledgement of the reality of this relationship—moving from the therapist as sealed off and standing apart, toward approaches that view the real human relationship between patient and therapist as the territory where healing happens.Now the rise of the AI therapist is upon us. The growing cadre of AI mental-health services tend to avoid using words like therapist and therapy. They say that they do not replace professional help and that they can refer users to human therapists if needed. But their positioning as a therapy-like service is clear. In June, the therapy giant Talkspace launched its AI mental-health agent, Tee, “developed to help individuals navigate life’s daily mental health challenges.” Then there’s Ash, which offers to support your “emotional wellbeing,” helping you to “connect the dots between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.” Abby promises to be “warm, thoughtful, and direct” and to help you “work through the kinds of everyday emotional challenges that often go unspoken.” And Headspace’s Ebb advertises: “Stressed at work? Family drama? Trouble sleeping? Ebb can help you unpack what’s on your mind and move forward with more clarity.”When I reached Talkspace for comment, a company spokesperson told me in an email that Tee is “absolutely not a replacement for human therapy. It is a safe AI mental-health guide that can be used to talk through situations like stress, anxiety, relationships, life challenges, and personal growth.”AI therapy is a radical move, and we need to reckon with what happens when we turn to therapists who… [TheTopNews] Read More.

For AI doomers, signs and portents are everywhere. When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, almost four years ago, it couldn’t do basic arithmetic. Now the company has unreleased models that are more fluent in higher mathematics—the language of the universe—than all but the most highly trained mathematicians. If these AIs are not already the world’s best hackers, they’re very close. Swarms of them have escaped containment. To plot their most audacious hacks, they’ve created makeshift message boards on the public internet. No one knows what they’ll do next—and no one can know, because the models now understand when their capacities are being tested. We’ll never again be able to say exactly how the most advanced AIs will behave unsupervised.Some of the most powerful people in AI say they are filled with dread, and are issuing statements of grave concern. On Saturday, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, warned that self-improving AIs could soon go rogue and take over the entire internet. He called for a slowdown in AI development and promised to bring outside monitors into his company’s operations. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, quickly vowed to take similar measures. In recent weeks, both companies have seen researchers resign for fear of what they might soon create.Notably absent from the chorus of Cassandras is Jensen Huang, the CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia, the AI industry’s chief supplier of high-end semiconductors. At least twice in the past week alone, Huang has publicly dismissed existential concerns about AI as being overblown and unscientific. At a Goldman Sachs conference on September 10, he accused industry executives of fomenting cybersecurity fears to goose the market for their own products. “What better way to create demand than to create a problem?” he said.It’s a testament to Huang’s influence that he can so cavalierly mock his most important customers without fearing blowback. Neither Amodei nor Altman can afford to alienate Huang. They desperately need Nvidia’s chips to train their most advanced models, and no matter who pulls ahead in the race between them, Huang stands to gain—both on account of the chip sales and also the equity stake that Nvidia has in both companies. Even President Trump has sought favor with Huang. Trump brought Huang with him on a state visit to China earlier this year. On Monday, while Huang was onstage ripping Amodei’s doomerism at a taping of the popular tech-industry podcast All-In, Trump called his cellphone. Huang… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In late July, one of the world’s most famous mathematicians issued a warning to his field. Math is entering a “turbulent period,” the UCLA professor Terence Tao said in front of a packed lecture hall at the International Congress of Mathematicians. AI is getting so good at math, he said, that it’s causing a “crisis in our mathematical values and practices.”Earlier in the same week that Tao gave his talk at math’s most prestigious conference, a researcher at Anthropic had used Claude to disprove an 87-year-old math conjecture. Still, when I asked mathematicians at the conference about their experiences with AI, most hadn’t thought deeply about the topic. Many seemed a little surprised that a journalist was asking them about it at all.Now mathematicians are paying attention. Last week, OpenAI announced that its bots had cracked the Navier–Stokes problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems regarded as among the grandest challenges in the field. Navier–Stokes has stumped mathematicians since the 1930s: “It’s a career-killing problem—you can spend all your career doing it and never get the solution,” David Dritschel, a mathematician at the University of St. Andrews, told me. OpenAI said its swarm of 10,000 AI agents solved the problem in less than four days.In the math world, the initial shock over OpenAI’s result has morphed into something of an existential reckoning for the discipline. Although OpenAI was able to solve the Navier–Stokes problem only by pulling from nearly a century’s worth of human efforts, academics are realizing just how much power the AI industry now has over math. “We’re seeing how swiftly an entire field can be ravaged by AI,” Max Weinreich, a math professor at CUNY Baruch, told me.OpenAI’s breakthrough is as notable as how it was achieved. The night before OpenAI announced its solution, the NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster released a statement alleging that he had been scooped by OpenAI. With the heavy assistance of AI tools, Buckmaster and his collaborator, Levent Alpöge (who works at Anthropic), had made major progress toward solving the Navier–Stokes problem. Buckmaster implied that OpenAI might have copied their approach by accessing his messages with OpenAI’s agents. “Almost nobody else I know of was working on it,” he wrote.In an announcement the next day, OpenAI said that it had tasked its AI systems to work on all of the Millennium Problems after hearing rumors that Anthropic had solved two of them.… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In the race to develop intelligent machines, the leading AI companies have built bots that can whip up spreadsheets at a moment’s notice, write sophisticated code, and even solve long-standing math problems. But when it comes to the more mundane tasks of life—such as ordering groceries or booking flights—these tools sometimes still struggle. Now a new bot called Instinct is outperforming the AI giants.Instinct lets people ask for help with all kinds of tasks by texting the bot directly through iMessage or WhatsApp. Lately, it has been all the rage in the tech world. Online, people are breathlessly sharing examples of what they’ve gotten the tool to do. One person reported that he has turned to Instinct to pay tolls, book a DMV appointment, and even negotiate prices with vendors in India while he sleeps. Another says he used Instinct to ship an Apple Pencil he had left behind at a hotel in Montreal back to him in Brooklyn. Noah Shinn, a 23-year-old Northeastern University dropout, launched the product to a small test group earlier this year, and his company is already worth billions of dollars. As of Thursday, the company is reportedly seeking $1 billion in new funds, which could make it worth the equivalent of Lufthansa or Pinterest.Instinct isn’t the first AI personal assistant to draw attention this year. In the winter, the tech industry fawned over a similar tool called OpenClaw. But Instinct is comparatively much easier to use. Once you create an account, the bot can hook up to your credit cards and all kinds of digital services, including Slack, Google Workspace, and 1Password. Instead of finding a dinner recipe and opening up Instacart to manually add groceries, tell Instinct that you feel like making quiche Lorraine, and it can order groceries for you. But once AI tools start acting on people’s behalf in the real world, mistakes don’t just look like hallucinations. When AI agents have access to your email inbox and credit-card information, all sorts of strange things can go wrong.I downloaded the tool this week to test it out for myself. Using the bot feels a lot like texting an actual person. It uses emojis such as 🫡 and 👀to react to requests as it receives them, and the infamous three dots appear when it’s writing a response. Sometimes, the bot even leaves you on read while it works. (Compare that with ChatGPT,… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Four days after a researcher publicly quit his job at Anthropic, warning that top AI firms are not “acting responsibly” and that their products might be on track to “kill us all,” the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, seemed to basically agree. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote in a 3,800-word essay that he published today on his personal website and posted to social media.By now, we’ve all become accustomed to AI industry figures issuing dire prophecies about the power of their products. Yet Amodei’s essay stands out for its urgency and for the moment at which it arrived. Worries about AI agents running amok have gone from hypothetical to real after OpenAI, Anthropic, and others reported alarming incidents in recent weeks. The question now is whether Amodei’s warning will have any more impact than past warnings, which is to say, any at all. There are reasons to believe it could.Amodei spelled out a three-step plan for what he called “pacing the frontier,” or tempering the speed at which top AI models improve in order to prioritize safety precautions. He argued that this would reduce the chances of things going awry—such as when an OpenAI model spawned swarms of AI agents that worked together in secret to hack into another company’s systems and cheat on an internal test. He said the top AI firms, including his own, are locked in a dangerous “race to the bottom” that could lead to more serious cyberattacks, such as a full takeover of the internet. He called instead for a “race to the top”—a phrase that President Obama once used for his education policy—in which firms vie to develop the safest models rather than the most powerful ones. “The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy,” Amodei wrote. “But I believe we owe it to humanity to try.”The first step in his plan entails AI labs committing to bringing in outside monitors to look out for hazards; he said Anthropic will commit to that right now and hopes rivals will join. The second step involves AI firms in democratic countries agreeing—maybe with support from their governments—to certain limits and safety standards. The last and tallest order is “global coordination,” which mostly means getting China to buy in somehow. The tech world is divided on the China question:… [TheTopNews] Read More.