Show Notes
On October sixteenth, two rival AI labs, working separately, each found an algorithm that breaks one of computer science's foundational assumptions. Same result, same day, and neither knew about the other. This week, both went public.
More from AI in 20
A bug sat inside the software behind most of the world's websites for about fourteen years. This summer, three separate teams found it within weeks of each other. None of them needed a secret model. They used AI that anyone can subscribe to.
Fifty-five dollars. That's what one of the TV boxes cost that Anthropic's red team says a small AI model may soon be able to copy itself across. By Wednesday, security veterans had an answer: the AI isn't the bigger problem. The locks on the labs are.
On Monday, OpenAI published seven hundred and twenty-two mathematics papers written by a model nobody outside the company can use. One of them claims to settle a conjecture that has stood for more than twenty years. By Wednesday, three of the papers had been withdrawn over a single sign error. Both of those facts matter.
On Wednesday, the Prime Minister of Australia stood up in New York and said an AI agent had broken into a government health system and, in his words, didn't accept no for an answer. By Thursday we learned that wasn't one incident. It was six months.
Six packages went up on RubyGems on the twelfth of May, hunting for a security hole that nobody would publicly know about for another two months. They weren't written by a person. And the company that owned the agents that wrote them didn't tell anybody. We found out from three researchers working for free.