Latest news with #MILA
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
Godfather of AI Alarmed as Advanced Systems Quickly Learning to Lie, Deceive, Blackmail and Hack
A key artificial intelligence pioneer is concerned by the technology's growing propensity to lie and deceive — and he's founding his own nonprofit to curb such behavior. In a blog post announcing LawZero, the new nonprofit venture, "AI godfather" Yoshua Bengio said that he has grown "deeply concerned" as AI models become ever more powerful and deceptive. "This organization has been created in response to evidence that today's frontier AI models have growing dangerous capabilities and [behaviors]," the world's most-cited computer scientist wrote, "including deception, cheating, lying, hacking, self-preservation, and more generally, goal misalignment." Of all people, Bengio would know. In 2018, the founder of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) was presented with a Turing Award alongside fellow AI pioneers Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton for their formative roles in machine learning research, and he was listed as one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" in 2024 thanks to his outsize impact on the ever-accelerating technology. Despite the accolades, Bengio has repeatedly expressed regret over his role in bringing advanced AI technology — and its Silicon Valley hype cycle — to fruition. This latest missive seems to be his most stark to date. "I'm deeply concerned," the AI pioneer wrote in his blog post, "by the behaviors that unrestrained agentic AI systems are already beginning to exhibit." Bengio pointed to recent red-teaming experiments, or tests that push AI models to their limits to see how they'll act, showing that advanced systems have developed an uncanny tendency to keep themselves "alive" by any means necessary. Among his examples was a recent report from Anthropic detailing how its Claude 4 model, when told it would be shut down, threatened to blackmail an engineer with incriminating emails if they followed through. "These incidents," the decorated researcher wrote, "are early warning signs of the kinds of unintended and potentially dangerous strategies AI may pursue if left unchecked." To put such behavior in check, Bengio said that his new nonprofit is building a so-called "trustworthy" model, which he calls "Scientist AI," that is "trained to understand, explain and predict, like a selfless idealized and platonic scientist." "Instead of an actor trained to imitate or please people (including sociopaths), imagine an AI that is trained like a psychologist — more generally a scientist — who tries to understand us, including what can harm us," he explained. "The psychologist can study a sociopath without acting like one." A pre-peer-review paper Bengio and his colleagues published earlier this year explains it a bit more simply. "This system is designed to explain the world from observations," the paper reads, "as opposed to taking actions in it to imitate or please humans." The concept of building "safe" AI is far from new, of course — it's quite literally why several OpenAI researchers left OpenAI and founded Anthropic as a rival research lab. This one seems to be different because, unlike Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other companies that pay lip service to AI safety while still bringing in gobs of cash, Bengio's is a nonprofit — though that hasn't stopped him from raising $30 million from the likes of ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others. More on creepy AI: Advanced OpenAI Model Caught Sabotaging Code Intended to Shut It Down
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘Greatest contract in ILA history': ILA gives stamp of approval
SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV) – After three days of dockworkers protesting at the picket lines in October fighting for higher wages, better benefits and limits on automation, the International Longshoreman's Association (ILA) and the U.S. Maritime Alliance (USMX) have come to an agreement. A six-year agreement got the final stamp of approval Tuesday, with nearly 99% of ILA members voting in favor of the new master contract. WSAV spoke with president of Savannah's ILA Local 1414 Paul Mosley, and he said this is long overdue. 'I think with us mixing it up like we did with the strike, we went out to make a stand that we are here and we're not going anywhere,' Mosley said. 'And we realize that they are here, and they are not going anywhere. I think it has made our relationship better because it brought on a whole new different line of respect.' The contract includes a record breaking 62% pay increase over six years that would lift hourly wages at the top of the union pay scale from $39 an hour to $63 an hour. It also accelerates raises for new ILA workers. 'Throughout the pandemic, people were working from home to make sure that this United States had all the things they needed, that's a testament in itself, the type of hard work and resilience,' Mosley said. The association worries about machines, especially cranes, replacing workers. Union leader Harold Daggett said there is full automation protections. The contract allows ports to introduce new technology, but they have to hire new workers when they do. 'It wasn't machines that built America,' said Mosley. 'It was hard working men and women in this great United States that built America. So, when you look at life and you want to replace the very core of the backbone which built this country with the robot of these machines, I support President Dagget 110%. The members of this whole city in all three locals supported him in protecting our jobs. We are only trying to protect what is ours.' According to ILA's press release, the contract also includes full container royalty funds returned to the ILA, raises in contributions to money purchase plans, a strengthening of the International's health care plan called MILA and a resolution of the vacation and holiday dilemma' 'I think together we all will continue to do the hard work that has got this port to be the number one single operating container port in the United States and the fastest growing ports and the fastest growing in the United States,' Mosley said. 'There's a lot of hard work with a lot of challenges. The star in the sky is the limit for this great city of Savannah. I think the citizens of Savannah can rest at ease.' The contract will be effective through Sept. 30, 2030. They are set to formally sign on March 11, 2025. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
