Thinking Machines

Headlines · 2

1. 3h
   Pentagon's Emil Michael says export controls can rein in AI labs that don't cooperate

   Emil Michael, a senior Defense Department official and a vice chair of the White House's Super Intelligence Force, told The Information in a video interview that the executive branch can use tools including export controls to check AI companies that don't cooperate with the government, citing past limits on exporting encryption and enforcement by the Justice Department. He likened frontier labs that call for regulation to a drunk driver asking to be pulled over, and said existing laws are “more than sufficient.” Michael also said the government had already acted: according to his account, Anthropic refused to withdraw a model after the government found it was jailbroken, and within two hours the company was under export controls. He said the Pentagon has labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, and that there is no discussion about working with the company at the department unless it changes its stance on models having control over humans. He said about 1.7 million of the department's 3.5 million employees now use AI, up from 80,000 a year earlier.

   The Information · 🔥 19
2. 3d
   Western open-weight models still trail China's on performance, experts say

   Experts speaking at a Rest of World event in San Francisco said a wave of new open-weight models from American and European companies aims to win over users of Chinese open models worried about security, but still falls short of the dominant Chinese systems on performance. The article notes that US startup Reflection released its first open-weight model last week, and that European labs Aleph Alpha and Mistral also released new open-weight models. It adds that four Chinese models were among the top five on OpenRouter's leaderboard last week, that LiveBench recently placed DeepSeek in its top five for the first time, and that top Chinese models trailed US rivals by just 3% on benchmark scores; Chinese open models can do some tasks 50% to 90% cheaper than leading American frontier models, though Chinese companies still face compute limits and monetization questions.

   Rest of World · 🔥 0

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