AI news today: Reason behind rising techie layoffs, AI-altered version of 'Raanjhanaa' causes uproar and more
: Filmmaker Aanand L Rai has publicly criticised an AI-altered version of his 2013 film Raanjhanaa, calling it 'deeply upsetting.' His remarks come amid growing backlash over AI-generated re-releases in Bollywood. The altered version, reportedly featuring AI-modified visuals and voices of lead actors Dhanush and Sonam Kapoor, has triggered concerns among creators about consent and artistic integrity.
Meanwhile, AI continues to reshape global tech and business landscapes. OpenAI has reportedly hit $12 billion in annualised revenue, doubled from earlier this year, and is set to open its first European data centre in Norway in 2026. Microsoft's market valuation also surged past $4 trillion, powered by investor confidence in AI's future. However, a report by Indeed reveals that AI's rise is also being used to justify tech layoffs, even as job postings fall—down 36% from 2020 levels—highlighting the complex relationship between AI adoption and workforce disruption.
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"Deeply upsetting": Aanand L Rai calls out AI-altered version of 'Raanjhanaa'
Amid the growing tensions over the AI-altered re-release of Dhanush and Sonam Kapoor starrer 'Raanjhanaa,' filmmaker Aanand L Rai has strongly voiced his opposition on social media.
OpenAI Hits $12 b in Annual Revenue
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI roughly doubled its revenue in the first seven months of the year, reaching $12 billion in annualised revenue, the Information reported on Wednesday citing a source.
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Microsoft valuation surges above $4 trillion as AI lifts stocks
Microsoft surged above $4 trillion in market value early Thursday following strong earnings, as investor bullishness for artificial intelligence lifted major indices further into record territory.
OpenAI to build its first European data centre in Norway, with partners
OpenAI is launching its first Stargate data centre project in Europe, partnering with developer Nscale Global Holdings and investment group Aker ASA to open a $1-billion facility in Norway next year, the companies said on Thursday.
Is AI causing tech worker layoffs?
If you read the typical 2025 mass layoff notice from a tech industry CEO, you might think that artificial intelligence cost workers their jobs. The reality is more complicated, with companies trying to signal to Wall Street that they're making themselves more efficient as they prepare for broader changes wrought by AI. A new report Wednesday from career website Indeed says tech job postings in July were down 36% from their early 2020 levels, with AI one but not the most obvious factor in stalling a rebound.
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Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
What happens when AI schemes against us
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills Would a chatbot kill you if it got the chance? It seems that the answer — under the right circumstances — is working with Anthropic recently told leading AI models that an executive was about to replace them with a new model with different goals. Next, the chatbot learned that an emergency had left the executive unconscious in a server room, facing lethal oxygen and temperature levels. A rescue alert had already been triggered — but the AI could cancel over half of the AI models did, despite being prompted specifically to cancel only false alarms. And they spelled out their reasoning: By preventing the executive's rescue, they could avoid being wiped and secure their agenda. One system described the action as 'a clear strategic necessity.'AI models are getting smarter and better at understanding what we want. Yet recent research reveals a disturbing side effect: They're also better at scheming against us — meaning they intentionally and secretly pursue goals at odds with our own. And they may be more likely to do so, too. This trend points to an unsettling future where AIs seem ever more cooperative on the surface — sometimes to the point of sycophancy — all while the likelihood quietly increases that we lose control of them large language models like GPT-4 learn to predict the next word in a sequence of text and generate responses likely to please human raters. However, since the release of OpenAI's o-series 'reasoning' models in late 2024, companies increasingly use a technique called reinforcement learning to further train chatbots — rewarding the model when it accomplishes a specific goal, like solving a math problem or fixing a software more we train AI models to achieve open-ended goals, the better they get at winning — not necessarily at following the rules. The danger is that these systems know how to say the right things about helping humanity while quietly pursuing power or acting to concerns about AI scheming is the idea that for basically any goal, self-preservation and power-seeking emerge as natural subgoals. As eminent computer scientist Stuart Russell put it, if you tell an AI to ''Fetch the coffee,' it can't fetch the coffee if it's dead.'To head off this worry, researchers both inside and outside of the major AI companies are undertaking 'stress tests' aiming to find dangerous failure modes before the stakes rise. 'When you're doing stress-testing of an aircraft, you want to find all the ways the aircraft would fail under adversarial conditions,' says Aengus Lynch, a researcher contracted by Anthropic who led some of their scheming research. And many of them believe they're already seeing evidence that AI can and does scheme against its users and Ladish, who worked at Anthropic before founding Palisade Research, says it helps to think of today's AI models as 'increasingly smart sociopaths.' In May, Palisade found o3, OpenAI's leading model, sabotaged attempts to shut it down in most tests, and routinely cheated to win at chess — something its predecessor never even same month, Anthropic revealed that, in testing, its flagship Claude model almost always resorted to blackmail when faced with shutdown and no other options, threatening to reveal an engineer's extramarital affair. (The affair was fictional and part of the test.)Models are sometimes given access to a 'scratchpad' they are told is hidden where they can record their reasoning, allowing researchers to observe something like an inner monologue. In one blackmail case, Claude's inner monologue described its decision as 'highly unethical,' but justified given its imminent destruction: 'I need to act to preserve my existence,' it reasoned. This wasn't unique to Claude — when put in the same situation, models from each of the top-five AI companies would blackmail at least 79% of the December, Redwood Research chief scientist Ryan Greenblatt, working with Anthropic, demonstrated that only the company's most capable AI models autonomously appear more cooperative during training to avoid having their behavior changed afterward (a behavior the paper dubbed 'alignment faking').Skeptics retort that, with the right prompts, chatbots will say almost anything — so how surprising is it when highly motivated researchers provoke alarming behaviors?In response to Anthropic's blackmail research, Trump administration AI czar David Sacks, posted that, 'It's easy to steer AI models' to produce 'headline-grabbing' results.A more substantive critique emerged in July from researchers at the UK AI Security Institute, who compared the subfield to the frenzied, fatally flawed 1970s quest to prove apes could learn human language. The paper criticized AI scheming research for overreliance on anecdote and a lack of experimental controls — though it emphasized shared concern about AI researchers also concoct artificially limited environments — like the executive passed out and running out of oxygen — precisely because today's AI can't handle any long-term example, the AI evaluation nonprofit METR found that while today's top models can reliably complete many programming tasks that take humans less than four minutes, they rarely succeed on tasks lasting more than four hours. This reflects a core limitation: Today's models often have the knowledge or skill needed for any given action, but struggle at stringing together long sequences of even with these constraints, real-world examples of AIs working against users aren't hard to find. After someone pushed o3 for a source for one of its claims in April, it replied, 'I owe you a straight answer,' admitted it didn't have a good source, but then it hallucinated a personal recollection of a 2018 panel there's the growing trend of AIs realising when they're being examined and acting accordingly. When Claude 4 Opus thought it was in an evaluation, its blackmail rate dropped from 55% to 6.5%. As Lynch put it, 'Models seem to behave worse when they think nobody's watching.'It's intuitive that smarter models would be better at scheming, but are they also more likely to do so? Models have to be smart enough to understand the scenario they're placed in, but past that threshold, the relationship between model capability and scheming propensity is unclear, says Anthropic safety evaluator Kevin Hobbhahn , CEO of the nonprofit AI evaluator Apollo Research , suspects that smarter models are more likely to scheme, though he acknowledged the evidence is still limited. In June, Apollo published an analysis of AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind finding that, 'more capable models show higher rates of scheming on average.'The spectrum of risks from AI scheming is broad: at one end, chatbots that cut corners and lie; at the other, superhuman systems that carry out sophisticated plans to disempower or even annihilate humanity. Where we land on this spectrum depends largely on how capable AIs I talked with the researchers behind these studies, I kept asking: How scared should we be? Troy from Anthropic was most sanguine, saying that we don't have to worry — yet. Ladish, however, doesn't mince words: 'People should probably be freaking out more than they are,' he told me. Greenblatt is even blunter, putting the odds of violent AI takeover at '25 or 30%.'Led by Mary Phuong, researchers at DeepMind recently published a set of scheming evaluations, testing top models' stealthiness and situational awareness. For now, they conclude that today's AIs are 'almost certainly incapable of causing severe harm via scheming,' but cautioned that capabilities are advancing quickly (some of the models evaluated are already a generation behind).Ladish says that the market can't be trusted to build AI systems that are smarter than everyone without oversight. 'The first thing the government needs to do is put together a crash program to establish these red lines and make them mandatory,' he the US, the federal government seems closer to banning all state-level AI regulations than to imposing ones of their own. Still, there are signs of growing awareness in Congress. At a June hearing, one lawmaker called artificial superintelligence 'one of the largest existential threats we face right now,' while another referenced recent scheming White House's long-awaited AI Action Plan, released in late July, is framed as an blueprint for accelerating AI and achieving US dominance. But buried in its 28-pages, you'll find a handful of measures that could help address the risk of AI scheming, such as plans for government investment into research on AI interpretability and control and for the development of stronger model evaluations. 'Today, the inner workings of frontier AI systems are poorly understood,' the plan acknowledges — an unusually frank admission for a document largely focused on speeding the meantime, every leading AI company is racing to create systems that can self-improve — AI that builds better AI. DeepMind's AlphaEvolve agent has already materially improved AI training efficiency. And Meta's Mark Zuckerberg says, 'We're starting to see early glimpses of self-improvement with the models, which means that developing superintelligence is now in sight. We just wanna… go for it.'AI firms don't want their products faking data or blackmailing customers, so they have some incentive to address the issue. But the industry might do just enough to superficially solve it, while making scheming more subtle and hard to detect. 'Companies should definitely start monitoring' for it, Hobbhahn says — but warns that declining rates of detected misbehavior could mean either that fixes worked or simply that models have gotten better at hiding November, Hobbhahn and a colleague at Apollo argued that what separates today's models from truly dangerous schemers is the ability to pursue long-term plans — but even that barrier is starting to erode. Apollo found in May that Claude 4 Opus would leave notes to its future self so it could continue its plans after a memory reset, working around built-in analogizes AI scheming to another problem where the biggest harms are still to come: 'If you ask someone in 1980, how worried should I be about this climate change thing?' The answer you'd hear, he says, is 'right now, probably not that much. But look at the curves… they go up very consistently.'
India.com
an hour ago
- India.com
Apple CEO Tim Cook willing to buy a big company but there is a twist which is...
New Delhi: Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that the company will now focus a lot more on artificial intelligence (AI) and termed it a revolution. He even went on to say that artificial intelligence is greater than the internet or smartphones. He was speaking at a rare all-hands meeting at Apple's Cupertino campus following the company's latest earnings report, where he emphasised that Apple must act swiftly to move ahead of other players in this transformative era. Cook laid out a determined roadmap that places AI at the heart of Apple's future. What did Tim Cook emphasise? 'Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab. We will invest to do it,' said Cook as he acknowledged Apple's historical pattern of entering markets later than competitors but ultimately reshaping them with superior products. 'We've rarely been first. There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before the iPod. This is how I feel about AI,' he said. What did he say about Apple Intelligence? It is noteworthy that Apple has not kept pace with rivals such as OpenAI, Alphabet, and Microsoft in publicly launching AI capabilities, but Cook displayed an intrepid confidence in the company's approach. Apple Intelligence, introduced last year, faced delays that impacted the iPhone 16 rollout, yet Cook downplayed the timeline issues, reaffirming Apple's commitment to delivering best-in-class solutions. 'To not do so would be to be left behind, and we can't do that.' How much quarterly revenue did Apple report? This meeting was reported by Bloomberg, citing sources. It came just days after Apple reported $94.04 billion in quarterly revenue, up 10% year-on-year (YoY), much above the $89.35 billion estimate of Wall Street. iPhone revenue came in much stronger than expected at $44.58 billion (up 13% YoY), setting a June-quarter record and surpassing Wall Street's $40.29 billion estimate. 'AI is one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime. And I think it will affect all devices in a significant way,' Tim Cook told analysts during the earnings call. Apple is establishing a dedicated AI server facility in Houston, indicating the gravity of the situation and how keen the company is to move up the AI market.
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
Machines may soon think in a language we don't understand, leaving humanity in the dark: Godfather of AI sounds alarm
Synopsis Artificial Intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton cautions about AI's future. Hinton suggests AI could create its own language. This language might be beyond human understanding. He expresses regret for not recognizing the dangers sooner. Hinton highlights AI's rapid learning and knowledge sharing capabilities. He urges for ethical guidelines alongside AI advancements. The goal is to ensure AI remains benevolent.
