Tesla titan and multi-billionaire Elon Musk has reportedly warned US senators at a private meeting that unregulated artificial intelligence technology poses a “civilisational risk” to society. Senate majority leader Chuch Schumer convened a meeting of the most prominent tech executives in the US to help pass a bipartisan legislation encouraging both the rapid development of AI technology and also mitigating its biggest risks. The closed-door meeting was attended by some of the tech industry’s biggest names, including Tesla and SpaceX boss Mr Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft chief Bill Gates, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, as well as OpenAI founder Sam Altman. As Mr Musk left the Capitol building following several hours of the meeting, he told reporters that “we have to be proactive rather than reactive” in regulating AI as its consequences of going wrong are “severe”. “The question is really one of civilizational risk. It’s not like … one group of humans versus another. It’s like, hey, this is something that’s potentially risky for all humans everywhere,” he said, according to NBC News. Mr Musk also reportedly called for a government AI agency, similar to the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Aviation Administration to oversee developments in the sector and ensure safety. Leaders in the tech industry also called for a balanced approach towards regulating AI. In his prepared remarks, Mr Zuckerberg said the two defining issues for AI are “safety and access”, adding that the US Congress should “engage with AI to support innovation and safeguards”. “New technology often brings new challenges, and it’s on companies to make sure we build and deploy products responsibly,” the Meta chief said. “This is an emerging technology, there are important equities to balance here, and the government is ultimately responsible for that,” he added. The Facebook founder called for policymakers, academics, civil society and industry to work together to minimise the potential risks of AI, but also to maximise its potential benefits. Some of the measures he suggested for building safeguards into AI systems included “selecting the data to train with, extensively red-teaming internally and externally to identify and fix issues, fine-tuning the models for alignment, and partnering with safety-minded cloud providers to add additional filters to the systems we release”. As lawmakers at the US Capitol Hill interacted with tech giant chiefs about potential AI regulations, companies including Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon were also being probed on the conditions of the workers behind tools like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard. Lawmakers are reportedly probing the working conditions of data labelers who are tasked by companies, often at outsourced firms, to label data used to train AI and for rating chatbot responses. “Despite the essential nature of this work, millions of data workers around the world perform these stressful tasks under constant surveillance, with low wages and no benefits,” lawmakers, including Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, said in a letter to tech executives. “These conditions not only harm the workers, they also risk the quality of the AI systems –potentially undermining accuracy, introducing bias, and jeopardizing data protection,” they said. Read More Elon Musk was on brink of death after catching malaria on South African safari, book claims Fatherhood, rows with Amber Heard and ‘the woke mind virus’: 6 big revelations from Elon Musk’s biography Putin praises Musk as ‘outstanding person’ days after report Tesla boss stopped Ukrainian attack Long-form video content is here to stay, says YouTube UK boss Cybertruck sparked Tesla revolt that saw secret design plan, Musk biography reveals Everything Apple killed off at iPhone 15 event

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Elon Musk has launched a new AI company that aims to “understand reality” and unlock the secrets of the universe. The formation of xAI brings together researchers from leading artificial intelligence firms, including Google’s DeepMind, OpenAI and Microsoft Research, who collectively have contributed to major advances in AI in recent years. Announcing the launch on Twitter on Wednesday, Mr Musk gave further details about what he hoped to achieve with his latest venture. “I often wonder where consciousness starts, as we progress from one cell to ~35 trillion cells,” Mr Musk wrote. “If the Standard Model is correct, then quarks and leptons become ‘conscious’ no later than ~13.8B years from start, assuming there are no sentient aliens. Btw, where are the aliens!?” Mr Musk has warned for months about AI’s potential for “civilizational destruction,” arguing that a race among companies such as Google and Microsoft to develop the technology should be halted to allow time for drafting regulation for the sector. The reason for the launch of xAI is “to understand the true nature of the universe,” said Mr Musk, who also co-founded OpenAI but later left the startup credited with sparking the generative AI frenzy through its launch of the ChatGPT chatbot. Dan Hendrycks, who serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit that aims to reduce the risks posed by the technology, will be an adviser to xAI. The startup’s team includes several former engineers and scientists from Alphabet-owned Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. “We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar ... GPT-3.5, and GPT-4,” the startup said on its website. The company, which is looking for experienced engineers and researchers to join its team as technical staff in the Bay Area, will hold a Twitter Spaces event on 14 July. Mr Musk’s startup will work closely with his other companies including Twitter and Tesla, according to the website. Tesla shares showed little reaction to the news and were trading 1.5 per cent higher, a sign that investors were not worried the startup will be a potential distraction for Mr Musk. The billionaire in March registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm lists Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary. Mr Musk has previously warned of the existential risk posed by advanced AI, claiming that it is one of the most serious threats to the future of humanity. Earlier this year, he joined more than 1,000 tech leaders and researchers in signing an open letter urging a moratorium on the development of powerful AI. Additional reporting from agencies Read More ChatGPT creator says AI ‘superintelligence’ is impossible to stop xAI: Everything we know about Elon Musk’s new AI company Elon Musk posts series of explicit tweets about Mark Zuckerberg Twitter gets strange endorsement from Taliban over rival Threads

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By Douglas Gillison and Hannah Lang WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The top U.S. consumer financial watchdog on Tuesday proposed to regulate tech

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A huge bubble of galaxies that is one billion lightyears across could be a remnant of the ripples caused by the Big Bang, according to astronomers who have mapped the structure. The structure, named Hoʻoleilana by University of Hawaii scientists, is thought to have been caused by so-called Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs). These were ripples in the particles of the early Universe in the period following the Big Bang, when planets, solar systems and galaxies were not yet fully formed. As the ripples went outward, they created areas of density in the particles, causing bubble-like structures in which galaxies eventually coalesced. Until now, the BAOs were just a prediction – part of the wider Big Bang theory. No specific structures in the Universe had been found which mimicked their patterns. But Hoʻoleilana fits the description of these huge cosmic bubbles perfectly, according to Brent Tully, who led the study at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy. “We were not looking for it. It is so huge that it spills to the edges of the sector of the sky that we were analyzing,” he said. “As an enhancement in the density of galaxies it is a much stronger feature than expected. The very large diameter of 1bn light years is beyond theoretical expectations. “If its formation and evolution are in accordance with theory, this BAO is closer than anticipated, implying a high value for the expansion rate of the universe.” The bubble is absolutely huge. It is made up of several superclusters, structures which themselves are thought to be among the Universe’s largest arrangements of matter. This includes the Hercules Supercluster, the Corona Borealis Supercluster and the Sloan Great Wall. All of these structures contain thousands of galaxies. In the middle of Hoʻoleilana sits the Bootes Supercluster and the Bootes Void, an immense space of nothingness which is an incredible 330m lightyears across. Daniel Pomarede, from the CEA Paris-Saclay University, who contributed to the research, said: “It was an amazing process to construct this map and see how the giant shell structure of Ho’oleilana is composed of elements that were identified in the past as being themselves some of the largest structures of the universe.” The research was published on 5 September in The Astrophysical Journal. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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