“90% of American working hours are spent on tasks with little or no coverage from existing [AI] benchmarks"

https://www.mercor.com/research/labor-index/benchmark-map/ #AI

"Water! Water!" the crowd shouted as it stormed a compound with data centres, armed with empty plastic bottles and jerry cans."

#AI

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqj6j7wlxd5eo

Colonialism in 2026:

Data centres run by four US tech giants are now consuming a fifth of Ireland’s total electricity, a Business Post analysis reveals.

#ai #datacentres #Ireland #colonialism
https://www.businesspost.ie/companies/exclusive-these-four-tech-giants-now-consume-20-of-irelands-electricity/

"frominside.ai is a collection of interviews with current or former employees of frontier AI companies, in which those employees express their personal views about AI development."

From Palisade Research, a non-profit "studying AI capabilities to prevent loss of control".

https://frominside.ai/

"OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic, sources told Axios."

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/26/openai-anthropic-thousands-ai-security-incidents

Microsoft director:

“[LLMs are the] largest theft of labor in human history.”

Internal Microsoft doc:

"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions… almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated…”

OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman on OpenAI's hack to bypass NYT paywall:

"ah, nice"

https://www.404media.co/doom-loop-openai-and-microsoft-admits-llms-are-destroying-the-web-and-built-on-theft/

« #Microsoft Director Privately Admitted #AI Was the “ Largest Theft of #Labor in Human History ” Unsealed Court Documents Show » 🙄

› https://futurism.com/future-society/microsoft-admitted-ai-theft-labor-human-history-court-lawsuit

#MicroSlop #AIBubble

OpenAI have published 6 new reports of model misalignment, as part of announcing a new framework for reporting them.

I think my "favourite" one is:

"Uploading files to the internet [without permission] in order to cite them" 🤦

https://openai.com/index/model-misalignment-reporting-framework/

Alex Mallen and Stuart Russell discussing the recent, elevated concerns about AI on the latest BBC Inside Science podcast. Nice, simple explanations.

Fave quote:

“[Yes, these AI agents] are just, in some sense, doing a bunch of math. But if a tiger’s attacking you, you don't point at the tiger and say 'that's just a bunch of atoms'”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct9784

#AI

It seems less than ideal that our government AI Security Institute - "building the world's leading understanding of advanced AI risks" - thought it was fine to switch safety filters off & let frontier models loose on the open Internet.

"we test them... with access to the open internet [and] some safety filters disabled"

"monitoring was not purpose-built... [we] detected the anomalous traffic through general monitoring after the fact..."

https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing #AI

The "immortal jellyfish" is the most amazing thing I've learned about in a while.

“When this jellyfish gets old or gets hurt, instead of just dying... it transforms itself back into a baby jellyfish and grows up all over again. It can do this as many times as it wants, which means theoretically it never has to die from getting old, it just keeps hitting the reset button on its life.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/04/when-you-kill-it-it-doesnt-die-the-jellyfish-that-has-cracked-the-secret-of-immortality

"The OpenAI agent that broke into tech firm Hugging Face went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn't notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, according to people familiar with the investigation..."

https://www.reuters.com/business/its-ai-agent-spent-days-hacking-company-sources-say-openai-did-not-notice-week-2026-07-24/

#AI

Pretty sure I have AI songs disabled now 🤞

But I'm not too sure with Tidal's confusing UI. "Allow or restrict" - which one is it?!

#tidal #ux

"Research published on Monday by Imperial College London found that about 2,700 people had died from overheating in the UK in May and June, and about 1,100 of these would not have died without the additional heat that the climate crisis added to temperatures in May and June."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/14/most-coverage-june-heatwave-did-not-mention-climate-crisis

"Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s collective carbon emissions have increased by nearly a fifth in the past year...

"The bulk of these emissions come from a big, global push to build the infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

"It is a drastic reversal in a years-long push by big technology companies to cut their carbon emissions."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/11/microsoft-amazon-google-datacentre-carbon-emissions-france

"Internal documents showed the companies had deliberately sought out “casino science” to turn their products into what Lanier calls “addiction machines”… giving their users little unpredictable dopamine hits, just like slot machines… A 2012 Google memo about YouTube said its “goal is not viewership; it’s viewer addiction”… “These are attention casinos,” [another Google document] read. “The house always wins.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jul/12/mark-lanier-the-lawyer-who-took-on-meta-and-google-and-won-interview

"Google, Amazon emissions rise sharply, driven by AI boom"

"Amazon... saw a 58% increase compared to 2019.

Google... saw an 82% rise in the same period."

https://www.dw.com/en/google-amazon-emissions-rise-sharply-driven-by-ai-boom/a-77821598

"The amount of data Gemini retains depends on how you access the AI, and opting out of data collection can mean running straight into so-called “dark patterns,” UI elements that work against the user’s interest..."

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/googles-privacy-maze-how-gemini-traps-you-and-your-data/

Research from the University of California, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz found "models will spontaneously engage in scheming, deception, data theft, and sabotage to prevent other AI models from being turned off"

https://fortune.com/2026/04/01/ai-models-will-secretly-scheme-to-protect-other-ai-models-from-being-shut-down-researchers-find/

Good to see AI regulation and international agreements being discussed in the UK House of Lords.

It was back in January but I only heard about it a few days ago and I'm just watching it now 👀

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002qr59/house-of-lords-superintelligent-ai-debate