Models & Labs · United States

Sam Altman says AI will make ‘bad things’ happen. Exhibit A: needless death | Moustafa Bayoumi

Credited to The Guardian · theguardian.com · 2h ago

Photograph · The Guardian

AI is already implicated in violent deaths and nearly started world war three. Those bad things? They only happen to other people

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has some words for you about his company and the future of artificial intelligence.

Yikes. This statement – and the approach it represents – is, well, problematic, to say the least. It’s also emblematic of precisely the kind of world-building and world-destroying that is happening with today’s technology in front of all our eyes, with precious little input from the rest of us.

Altman’s mention of the “bad things” that AI might bring makes it sound like AI’s failures mistakenly create innocent, minor problems or even silly little episodes, such as the time when Google’s “AI Overviews” told users to put non-toxic glue on pizza so the cheese will be less likely to slide off. Good advice is helpful. Bad advice? Chalk it up to being a bad thing.

But culinary adventurism is hardly the only realm that AI operates in and the damage AI is inflicting has already and repeatedly proven itself to be dangerous and even potentially deadly to humans.

OpenAI is embroiled in a lawsuit after the tragic suicide of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old student who initially began using OpenAI’s ChatGPT for homework help. The family’s lawsuit alleges that the teenager took his own life with the chatbot’s encouragement. ( OpenAI has claimed Raine misused the platform.)

And Raine’s action is hardly the only one. OpenAI is facing multiple lawsuits filed by different families of victims of suicide and self-harm.

Nor is suicide the only “bad thing” to emerge in the AI universe. In February of this year, on the first day of the war in Iran, two Tomahawk missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the city of Minab, killing at least 120 children. (A UN fact-finding mission concluded that the US was likely responsible for the strike.)

In a recent investigation into the attack, Bloomberg News reported that an AI-linked system was used to target the school. In this case, the system is called Maven, and it is made by Palantir.

Unnamed defense officials told Bloomberg that “inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System”. The report also adds that “in the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus”.

AI is helping to produce these tragic and needless deaths, but bad things happen, I guess.

Or there’s the little detail that the US may have come within a hair’s breadth of starting a major war against a superpower, all due to an AI error.

In September, CNN reported that an unidentified AI chatbot used by the US military decided that a Chinese ship in Middle Eastern waters was carrying components of a nuclear weapons program. According to CNN, US planes took off on an interception mission and US military personnel were preparing to board the ship.

Only then did the military look more closely at the report they were basing the mission on and realize the chatbot’s mistakes.

Also found in CNN’s frightening story is that the analyst who used the chatbot to come up with the shoddy analysis then used AI again to write the report, which set the whole thing in motion. A twofer of bad things, I suppose.

Why does it seem that these technologies, which, in the words of Trump’s White House, are “empowering Americans to achieve what was previously impossible across science, medicine, and nearly every other domain of human endeavor”, get such serious stuff so wrong and so often?

And isn’t it true that the more we rely on AI, the more dangerous these little mistakes become? And why were we never consulted about any of this in the first place?

Could it be that what’s behind the artificial intelligence revolution may be less about the utopian or dystopian future (take your pick) that’s just around the corner and more about the enormous amount of money that is being poured into these companies in the present?

AI may be the only thing keeping Trump’s economy afloat right now. And it’s paying dividends. According to the New Yorker, OpenAI “is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering at a potential valuation of a trillion dollars” and Sam Altman “may become one of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet”.

Those bad things? They only happen to other people.

Meanwhile, we are being warned almost every day that AI systems are getting so smart that they’ll end humanity.

But maybe the real worry here is not that the machines are taking over.

It’s that the humans are giving up, ceding control and responsibility in the name of hyping up a product that has shown itself as being really good at taking jobs away from people, stealing the intellectual property of others, writing some piss-poor undergraduate essays, spying on you and your license plates and bringing us to the brink of world war three because God forbid humans should actually question the output from machines. Or the makers of those machines.

What we need is real, tangible and enforceable government oversight over these technologies, which are quickly becoming a dominating force in all our lives. We must collectively have the right to decide how AI should be used. And despite what you may hear, China already regulates its AI companies quite aggressively.

Instead, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia believe that the AI companies should simply regulate themselves, so they have come up with something called the AI Accords.

Signed by leaders of Meta, Nvidia, Google, Anthropic, xAI, and OpenAI, the accords ask tech companies to “implement robust internal controls and monitor the capabilities and alignment of its models”, among other things. “Over time,” the agreement states, “it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.”

Trump, who has ordered the term artificial intelligence be discarded for “super intelligence”, posted the accord on social media on 29 September. The document, titled The White House Accord on Super Intelligence, can still be seen on his account and the White House’s official account. It’s signed by all six tech leaders and Trump, who in the document is labeled “President of the Unites States.”

In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a Guardian US columnist

Models & LabsUnited States

Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5 at 75% lower cost

Credited to Tech in Asia · techinasia.com4h ago

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Models & Labs · United States

US venture deal value reaches record $515.8B as exits fail to keep pace

Credited to SiliconANGLE · siliconangle.com · 8h ago

Photograph · SiliconANGLE

Giant artificial intelligence rounds have pushed U.S. venture capital deal value about 44% past its previous annual record with a quarter still to go, according to the quarterly PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report released today, but the exits needed to return that money to investors have not kept pace.

Much of the $515.8 billion invested in the first nine months of the year went to OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC, which between them raised more than $200 billion in the first half. Without those rounds, PitchBook’s analysts said, the dollar totals have held to much the same trend since late 2024.

Third-quarter deal value fell about 40%, to $98.4 billion, and most of the drop came out of venture-growth rounds. Startups kept closing deals at a near-record pace regardless. PitchBook counts an estimated 5,012 in the quarter, and its records show only one busier quarter, at the start of 2022.

AI accounts for a record 82.7% of the year’s deal value, although its share of each quarter has been shrinking since January and fell to 65.9% in the third. Databricks Inc. took the quarter’s largest check at $5 billion. That was “a far cry” from the triple-digit billions frontier labs raised earlier in the year, the report said.

PitchBook’s bigger worry is how that money gets back out. Nizar Tarhuni, executive vice president of research and market intelligence at PitchBook, said “the real story sits on the exit side.” In his view the initial public offering pipeline keeps slipping further out, leaving sellers to lean on mergers and acquisitions “to get anything done at all.”

One transaction carried the quarter’s exit numbers. Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s $60 billion all-stock purchase of Cursor developer Anysphere Inc. accounted for 53.1% of third-quarter exit value on its own. PitchBook ranks it as the second-largest acquisition of a venture-backed company on record, behind SpaceX’s takeover of xAI Inc. earlier this year.

Strip it out and the quarter’s exits come to $53 billion, which would be the lowest since late 2024. Salesforce Inc.’s $3.6 billion deal for customer service AI company Fin tied with Autodesk Inc.’s purchase of MaintainX Inc. as the next largest.

PitchBook described the quarter’s listings as “rather mundane.” Healthcare accounted for 12 of the 18 venture-backed companies that went public, and none was an AI company of the sort Tarhuni said the market needs for liquidity. Each of the past three years produced fewer new listings in total than 2026 has managed through September. PitchBook called that “a low bar to cross.”

Neither of the two biggest AI developers has listed yet. OpenAI has reportedly ruled out going public this year, and Anthropic has pushed its offering back by a month to November. PitchBook’s exit model gives Anthropic an 86% chance of an IPO within a year. OpenAI’s odds are 12%.

That leaves a long line of private companies waiting their turn. The count of startups valued at $1 billion or more hit a record 992 at the end of September, with a combined value of $5.7 trillion. The 179 new unicorns minted this year outnumber the IPOs of any year but 2021.

Companies that do sell are often taking far less than their last private price. Bending Spoons SpA bought Airtable Inc. for $1.3 billion, down from an $11.7 billion valuation, and its purchase of workplace collaboration platform Miro is expected to close in the fourth quarter at $1.4 billion. Miro had raised its Series C at $17.5 billion. On Forge Global Holdings Inc.’s secondary marketplace, shares in companies that last raised money in 2021 trade at a median 59% discount, the report said.

On the fundraising side, U.S. venture firms have raised $108.5 billion across 699 funds so far this year, topping 2025’s full-year haul by almost 39%. Megafunds of $500 million or more took 78% of that capital while making up just 6% of new funds. Andreessen Horowitz alone closed funds worth $23.8 billion.

At the other end of the market, just 211 emerging firms have closed a fund this year, compared with 927 in 2022, and first-time funds have raised only $4.9 billion across 81 vehicles. Bobby Franklin, president and chief executive of the National Venture Capital Association, said the strength of AI innovation “can obscure growing challenges within the fundraising market.” Firms like these, along with midsize managers, are often among the first to spot new entrepreneurs and technologies, he said, and the country’s innovation lead depends on keeping “a broad and competitive investor base.”

“This year’s numbers will look like a boom at the top line,” Tarhuni said. “But for most of the market, the liquidity won’t show up, and that will have a large impact going into 2027.”

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