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Hassabis’ idea is that this new group could review frontier AI models to ensure they don’t pose a danger in areas such as cybersecurity and biological threats or in any other way (more here). Industry peers generally called the proposal “thoughtful,” although Nadella labeled it “important” and Palihapitiya described it as “well reasoned.” (Kutcher settled for “agreed.”) Unfortunately, those accolades won’t get us far.
The AI industry has a long history of essays calling for something or other (usually action to prevent AI from destroying humanity, or jobs, or both). On Monday, for instance, 200 industry figures and academics published an open letter headlined “We Must Act Now” to “build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.”
Weren’t several of the AI firms, such as Anthropic and OpenAI, set up with that very goal in mind? Never mind—let’s not go down that rabbit hole. There’s no question Hassabis’ proposal is well timed, given that the Trump administration seems to be making up AI regulation as it goes along.
And that’s the problem. The adjective mostly used to describe Hassabis’ proposal— “thoughtful”—isn’t a term anyone would apply to how the Trump administration devises policy. (To be fair, it probably didn’t apply to the Biden administration’s AI policymaking either.) It’s hard to imagine what could change that.
Big Blue Experiences the Blues
IBM doesn’t usually figure in the news media’s coverage of how AI is upending parts of the tech industry. That changed on Tuesday. The venerable computing firm revealed that its upcoming second-quarter earnings report would be “disappointing” thanks to customers unexpectedly shifting spending away from its new Z mainframe and associated software, and toward hardware that’s in short supply and faces price increases for components such as memory chips. It’s all a result of the AI data center boom.
That’s a sensitive issue for any business in tech nowadays. IBM stock promptly fell 25%, which various news outlets described as the biggest one-day drop in the company’s stock price in decades, cutting its market capitalization to a mere $204 billion. That means IBM is now less valuable than cybersecurity firms Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike.
In Other News
• New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday signed an executive order that enacted the first statewide moratorium on data centers in the U.S., part of a mounting backlash against the technology at both state and local levels.
• DeepSeek is planning to raise funding again, weeks after its first fundraising closed, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The AI firm is also preparing to go public, Bloomberg reported.
• The White House announced the launch of the first program to come out of its early June executive order on AI cybersecurity. The initiative, dubbed Gold Eagle, is a clearinghouse composed of government agencies and companies that allows them to coordinate on cyber vulnerabilities and responses.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out today’s episode of TITV in which we celebrate the one-year anniversary of our show, speaking with the co-founder of Robinhood, the CEO of Decagon, the chief operating officer of Vercel and more special guests in our San Francisco bureau.
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