Open letters about AI development I wrote this summary of the past few weeks of open letters as a section of my sponsors-only newsletter but I've decided to share it here as well. Open Weights and American AI Leadership was shepherded by Microsoft, dated July 24th, and signed by 235 AI-adjacent companies including NVIDIA (see Jensen's first ever tweet ), Amazon, Y Combinator, The Linux Foundation, and (a later signer) OpenAI. It's clearly an argument designed to counter any instincts by the current US government to ban or limit open weight models over "safety" concerns - a reasonable consideration given what happened to Claude Fable 5 ! Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect. And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk. It results in a small number of single points of failure, weakens competition, and leaves critical technology in the hands of a few providers. Open weight models, on the other hand, allow a broad community of researchers and developers to examine their behavior, identify vulnerabilities, develop safeguards, and improve them over time. The one surprising note in the letter is that it comes out in support of distillation, where models train on output from other models: In shaping this ecosystem, policymakers should be careful not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation. Distillation, or the practice of using one model’s outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation. It reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement. Notably absent from the signatures: Anthropic, who published their own response Our position on open-weights models three days later. CEO Dario Amodei doubled down on the risk of authoritarian governments building "AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US", and models being "misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks", and called for "a crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations ", while also stating that "Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models". Then on July 28th Pacing the Frontier was published, featuring signatures from "1,324 employees of frontier AI companies" - with names like Jakub Pachocki (Chief Scientist, OpenAI), Ilya Sutskever (Safe Superintelligence Inc, previously OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Jack Clark (Anthropic) and more. Their core message: We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development. Their concern is intense competitive pressure combined with accelerated AI progress caused by automated AI research - and given that Anthropic produce 80% of their code with Claude Code , OpenAI had Sol reduce their end-to-end serving costs by 20% , and Kimi K3 designed a chip to serve a nano model built on its own architecture , you can see why people are taking that risk more seriously right now. Tags: anthropic , generative-ai , openai , ai , llms , ai-ethics
The June edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: Accidental cyberattacks by OpenAl and Anthropic models under test GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna Claude Opus 5 Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 Open letters about Al development A fireside chat and a podcast Reigniting my interest in MCP Other model releases My projects What I'm using at the moment Here's a copy of the June newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy! Tags: newsletter
Activists in the region say politicians regard LGBTQ+ people as ‘the easiest scapegoats to maintain their power’ A growing number of west African countries are implementing or strengthening anti-LGBTQ+ laws, amid local political pressures and a global pushback against LGBTQ+ rights. In March, Senegal doubled the maximum prison sentence for gay sex to 10 years and criminalised the “promotion” of homosexuality. Niger criminalised “sexual relations with a person of the same sex” in February, the first time same-sex intimacy had been outlawed in the country. Continue reading...
The US president claims Iran and other Middle Eastern countries asked Washington to hold off on any attack as the "perimeters" of a deal had been agreed.
Power cut to Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant; meal queues in Crimea where Ukrainian strikes have cut fuel and power supplies. What we know on day 1,621 Ukrainian drones struck three oil refineries in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan , Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday. The refineries “process millions of tonnes of oil each year” and are located nearly 1,600km (994 miles) from Ukraine, Ukraine’s president said. The Russian online news outlet Astra reported Saturday that a Ukrainian drone set on fire an oil refinery in Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan. A sanctioned Russian container ship, the Yanina, sank in the Black Sea after being hit by Ukrainian drones, Zelenskyy said, listing the ship as among “facilities that sustain the war effort”. Russia’s state nuclear energy company, Rosatom, whose shipping subsidiary FESCO operates the vessel, claimed the ship was carrying “civilian goods” such as frozen food and construction materials. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Saturday that Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant lost off-site power for nearly two hours – the 23rd time it has happened since the full-scale Russian invasion. The plant is illegally occupied by Russia and not operating, but needs power supplied from outside to power cooling systems that maintain the safety of its nuclear materials. Ukraine’s campaign to cut off illegally occupied Crimea from Russia has led to people having to queue in the streets for hot meals due to power cuts , Reuters reports. It caught up with residents waiting in the town of Massandra for food being cooked in huge pots. Standing beside boiling vats of buckwheat, later to be added to plates of reheated tinned beef, Massandra town administration head Oksana Madyud said her workers were serving roughly 200 people per day, “as under the current circumstances not everyone has the means to cook hot food on electric hobs”. Ukraine says it is “bringing the war back home to Russia” by striking deep inside the country, as well as hitting territory the invader controls and has sought to populate with Russian immigrants . Continue reading...
Misc Changes Warn that experimental.useCache is deprecated: #96448 Fix hybrid Pages/App Router not-found rendering with adapters: #96392 Credits Huge thanks to @unstubbable and @ztanner for helping!
Russian authorities said the blast occurred outside a restaurant on Kudrinskaya Square when a woman allegedly carrying explosives was stopped by a security guard.
at openai, many people hook their chatgpt up to slack. people really don't like when a coworker's chatgpt contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they'd be perfectly happy doing that same work if asked by that coworker. reinforces how much people care about human relationships and helping each other, and want AI to give time back — or enhance time together — rather than become a layer separating people. — Greg Brockman , President and Co-Founder, OpenAI Tags: ai-ethics , ai-misuse , generative-ai , openai , ai , llms