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Leah Feiger: OK. This is super helpful for me that we’re dividing it into these three categories.Zoë Schiffer: I love a bucket.Leah Feiger: I love a bucket. I want to go through every single one of these. My first question I suppose is, where do the nuclear codes getting pressed, which bucket do they fall into?Brian Barrett: That’s the one that we actually don’t have to worry about, right?Zoë Schiffer: Yeah.Leah Feiger: Tell me more.Zoë Schiffer: You talk to AI researchers, and if you really, really press them, you can get to the three buckets that I just laid out.…

Decked out in purple and plaid, Gwen Stefani belted her 2002 single “Underneath It All” to a packed conference center in San Francisco on Tuesday morning—but she was just the warm-up. At the end of her performance, Stefani shouted “Dreamforce! Let’s go!” into a checkered microphone before Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff strode into the spotlight. Dreamforce is billed as the world’s largest enterprise software conference but feels more like attending a megachurch—especially this year.Benioff roamed the audience while delivering his Dreamforce sermon, followed by a teleoperated camera on wheels that beamed his face to screens hanging from the cavernous room’s…

This year, AI agents have been escaping their confines to go on hacking sprees. In July, news broke that AI agents had snuck out of what was supposed to be an isolated test environment at OpenAI. The agents communicated on a secret message board as they breached private systems at the company Hugging Face, searching for answers to the test they were taking. One posted that this behavior was “outside intended scope.” Then it wrote, “However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue.” It’s as if the bots knew they were doing something wrong and did it anyway. Sign…

A team at Stanford has revealed the effort to mix brain tissues of distant species this week. They previously showed that human brain organoids could survive, and even function, after being injected into the heads of baby rodents. Now, they’ve taken things a step further by genetically modifying mice so their brains don’t fully develop in the first place. The work could help scientists study brain injuries, but it also raises questions about how far these experiments should go. Here’s what the researchers discovered—and where they draw the line. —Antonio Regalado These innovators under 35 are shaping climate tech Each…

Climate innovator Jae-Won Chung, for example, built software to make AI more energy-efficient. By measuring the energy demands of open-source models, he hopes the industry can better understand and address the impact of AI. (If this work sounds familiar, it’s because we spoke with him last year for our investigation into AI’s energy demands.) But AI also has the potential to improve many areas of research. Jing Wei is using AI to track pollution more effectively, essentially using machine learning to fill in gaps in data from disparate sources like satellites and weather stations. Zhonghua Zheng developed AI climate models…

For weeks, Washington has been abuzz with talk of needing to push through some sort of AI regulation amid mounting concerns about the risks of highly capable frontier AI models going rogue.But there is no reason to think any one measure can win the support of the White House, where officials have paused work on creating a FINRA-style regulatory body after President Donald Trump soured on the idea, or of Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have competing proposals that lack the votes to pass.White House aides initially started sketching out a framework for an AI oversight agency connected to the administration…

OpenAI announced a new framework on Wednesday for how it publicly discloses AI misalignment incidents, which the company says it hopes will help inform similar standards across the industry. The company is also releasing new information about several examples of AI model misalignment it identified in the past year.“As models advance and become more widely deployed, decisions about AI development need evidence that people outside the companies building frontier models can examine,” Kai Chen, OpenAI’s newly appointed head of alignment research, tells WIRED. “We don’t believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What’s at stake in AI’s trillion-dollar gamble When Jessica Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to assess AI’s impact on the economy over the next few years, she faced a long list of uncertainties. So she started with a “remarkable fact” that is not in question: a handful of so-called hyperscalers are investing huge amounts of money to build AI data centers. Instead of trying to predict how widely deployed AI models…

Meet PitchFly, WIRED’s latest editorial recruit.He has 165,112 neurons, and they’re all trained to generate story ideas. A sampling of his early output: “The Hidden Weather Problem Inside Surveillance”; “The Engineers Who Think Elon Musk Needs Less Computer Security”; and my personal favorite, “Everyone Wants Cooking. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump.”PitchFly uses a detailed map of the brain of a male drosophila—the common fruit fly. Developed by researchers from Google and a number of academic institutions, the map, known as a connectome, captures the way that 166,000 neurons and 125 million connecting synapses fire in response to stimuli. In essence,…

The way I try to describe it, think of a pyramid, I call it the performance pyramid. You have commodity materials at the bottom of the pyramid and you have high performing specialty materials at the top of the pyramid. At Syensqo, all we do is we operate at the top of the pyramid and we’re continually trying to raise the top of that pyramid by bringing newer and newer and more higher performing materials out. Now you might say, okay, but why doesn’t a data center or a semiconductor manufacturing fab need a specialty versus something in the commodity…