(Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

4 divergent AI takes: Sexy, scary, mysterious, and hyped

AI was the star at Bloomberg’s tech conference

5/13/24 11:57AM

We don’t have an official count of how many times the tech titans at Bloomberg’s tech summit in San Francisco last week mentioned artificial intelligence, but it was definitely a lot. Good, bad, sexy, scary — how they thought about AI varied widely depending on the person. Here are some notable takes:

Sexy AI: Goes on dates for us

Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and executive chair of dating app Bumble, thinks there’s a better AI dating future than falling in love with bots.

“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and actionable relationships.”

She conceived of a hypothetical future in which AI acts as a “dating concierge” that could help you get over your particular hangups and “give you productive tips for communicating with other people.” Sounds good! Wolfe Herd then got a little more “out there.”

“There’s a world where your dating concierge could go on a date for you with other dating concierges.” The idea would be to winnow down the dating pool to the people you, the person, should actually go and meet.

Scary AI: influences the presidential election

How concerned is LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman about AI’s role in the upcoming election? “Very concerned.” Ruh roh!

He gave the example of people calling real court rulings about Donald Trump “deep fakes.” In other words “true things will be called deep fakes” which will create a “language of nontruth.”

Hype AI: It’s all that and a bag of lenses

While some people think AI is a massive grift, Snap cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel says “all the excitement around AI is warranted.”

How does that relate to the disappearing photo social media app?

“What’s been really exciting is the way we’ve been able to apply AI to image and video and 3D.” AR lens experiences that used to take graphic artists weeks can now be generated “on the fly using AI,” which Spiegel says will lead to an “explosion in creativity.”

Mysterious AI: We don’t know how it’s trained

OpenAI still won’t say it uses YouTube to train its text-to-video generator Sora.

Bloomberg's @shiringhaffary: “Was Youtube used to train OpenAI’s Sora?”
Open AI’s Brad Lightcap: “We’re looking at this problem. It’s really hard.”
— Rani Molla (@ranimolla) May 9, 2024

Back in March the company’s chief technology officer caused quite a stir after being unable to answer a seemingly simple question from the Wall Street Journal about what data the company used to train the model.

Two months later, that’s still the case. When asked to clear up whether or not Sora is trained on YouTube videos, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap gave a long winding non-answer.

“The conversation around data is really important. We obviously need to know where data comes from,” he said, before mentioning a recent blog post that also doesn’t answer the question. Lightcap talked about the need for a content ID system that lets creators understand when their content is being used to train AI and to be able to monetize that. “We’re looking at this problem. It’s really hard,” he concluded.

At this point, OpenAI’s omission about where Sora is trained has got to be for legal reasons rather than for lack of knowledge about whether it trained its AI on YouTube. Because what could be worse than “yes”?

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5