SCOOP: AI safety group Public First spent in the Manny Rutinel race. It just wasn’t disclosed to voters ahead of election day. Transformer has learned $2m was transferred from Public First Action to Latino Victory Fund, which says it exists to mobilize Latino voters and elect Latinos to office.

An AI safety group hid its election spending through a Latino-focused PAC

Public First Action routed $2m to support Colorado House candidate Manny Rutinel through Latino Victory Fund — and didn’t publicly announce it ahead of Rutinel’s victory

transformernews.ai

OpenAI has been shifting its messaging in light of employee pushback on some of LTF and OpenAI’s own political tactics. More details in Transformer: www.transformernews.ai/p/openai-leh...

OpenAI isn’t being consistently candid about Leading the Future

OpenAI insists it doesn’t fund or direct LTF — but one of the super PAC’s operatives describes it as a “corporate funder” with “a say”

transformernews.ai

"Palantir’s market capitalization was 103x its revenues, and 205x its profits. Compare that to Tesla, another much-hyped stock: even its market cap is “only” 15x its revenues and around 100x its operating profits." …is Palantir overvalued?

Palantir’s controversy is the product

Palantir’s fiery rhetoric helps mystify its mostly mundane tech — propping up its share price and preserving its national security contracts

open.substack.com

Happily, you don’t need to do much to trace any of this as we’re extremely transparent about it! www.transformernews.ai/p/standards-...

Editorial standards and ethics

This document outlines Transformer’s aims, funding, ethics policies, and editorial standards.

transformernews.ai

Timnit Gebru@timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 6mo ago

Instead of "the left isn't paying enough attention to these machine gods" they're claiming to build, perhaps we should write an article about how effective altruists brand themselves "left", ask who is writing these articles, and trace their cults and sources of funding.

AI discourse on Bluesky is abysmal. But it's not just here — the left writ large has failed to grapple with what's coming. In an excellent new essay for @transformernews.ai, Dan Kagan-Kans diagnoses the issue with the Cory Doctorow/Emily Bender worldview — and explains why it's so harmful.

The left is missing out on AI

As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right

transformernews.ai

AI workers are speaking out about the Minnesota shooting — even while their bosses remain silent. www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-workers...

AI workers are speaking out about the Minnesota killing

Employees of Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic are publicly criticizing the Trump administration after Saturday’s shooting — but their bosses are staying quiet.

transformernews.ai

@nabeelqu.bsky.social nails it.

So much interesting in this (and good work on @caseynewton.bsky.social documenting it). One thing to note though, Google's watermarking identified the image of the badge as created by its AI tool. Other image generators haven't bothered implementing anything similar, why? (Looking at you, Sora.)

Olivia Solon@oliviasolon.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Great work from @caseynewton.bsky.social and an illuminating case study in how journalists authenticate allegations/sources in an age of generative AI www.platformer.news/fake-uber-ea...

Rob, is it true you created an early language model trained on scraped data? "Mark V Shaney"? Is it also true that it pretended to be a human, sending unsolicited messages on Usenet forums for lonely singles? That's just what I'm seeing here on Wikipedia...

rob pike@robpike.io · 7mo ago

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

A leaked Trump executive order would create an "AI Litigation Task Force" to fight state AI regulations. Read the full EO here:

Exclusive: Here's the draft Trump executive order on AI preemption

The EO would establish an “AI Litigation Task Force" to challenge state AI laws

transformernews.ai

I got the AI writing homies together to launch SAIL (readsail on socials): A team bundle to get access to the best content in AI all in one subscription. Otherwise, nothing in my mission is changing. Get the best content written to inform the public and shape the trajectory of AI. readsail.com

🗞️ 🤖 Weekend reading anyone? For the launch of @transformernews.ai as a standalone publication, they invited me to contribute a piece on what persuasive AI might mean for democracy and elections. Here’s the result… buff.ly/OJsNmpK

AI is persuasive, but that’s not the real problem for democracy

Opinion: Felix M Simon argues that AI is unlikely to significantly shape election results in the near future, but warns that it could damage democracy through a steady erosion of institutional trust.

transformernews.ai

Kanishka Narayan, the UK's new minister for AI, is a rare example of a politician who actually *gets* his brief. In a new profile for @transformernews.ai, @alys.bsky.social notes that he takes AI risks pretty seriously, too.

The Cambridge Analytica panic was basically nonsense. The AI-is-rigging-elections panic might be, too.

AI is persuasive, but that’s not the real problem for democracy

Opinion: Felix M Simon argues that AI is unlikely to significantly shape election results in the near future, but warns that it could damage democracy through a steady erosion of institutional trust.

transformernews.ai

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares' new book — If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — is out today. I am much more sympathetic to their views than most. Unfortunately, the book is littered with torturous sentence structures and smug, self-satisfied writing. I was not a fan.

Book Review: 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies'

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’ new book should be an AI wakeup call — shame it’s such a chore to read

transformernews.ai

Thrilled to have @ruchowdh.bsky.social and Mala Kumar in @transformernews.ai today, writing alongside the launch of the new Humane Intelligence PBC. www.transformernews.ai/p/why-ai-eva...

Why AI evals need to reflect the real world

Opinion: Rumman Chowdhury and Mala Kumar argue that we need better AI evaluations — and the infrastructure and investment to do them

transformernews.ai

Data centers use 2% of the world’s electricity. There’s a *huge* push to build more for AI. But even the most optimistic growth paths for AI predict it’ll drive less growth in energy demand than electric cars or aircon. It’s significant, but it’s not the biggest thing going on.

We’re getting the argument about AI's environmental impact all wrong

Individual ChatGPT queries are a rounding error — we need to think about the future

transformernews.ai

When I launched Transformer a year ago, it was with a simple mission: provide decision-makers with the information and analysis needed to anticipate and steer the impacts of transformative AI. Today, we're announcing an exciting new effort to achieve that: Transformer 2.0.

Welcome to Transformer 2.0

We're now a team of reporters and editors dedicated to covering the power and politics of AI

transformernews.ai

Last year, the crypto industry set up a network of super PACs. Its strategy? Throw huge amounts of money at politicians to discourage crypto regulation. Now many of those same people have launched a $100m campaign to do the same thing for AI. Read my full piece on Transformer:

AI embraces crypto’s dirty politics

A new super PAC network looks set to spend millions to influence AI regulation

transformernews.ai

I am genuinely so frustrated with the state of the average journalist. Just nonstop dunking and in a way that makes people less informed. They're being very clear that it's not a calculator and should not be used that way! defector.com/it-took-many...

It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes | Defector

It’s not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division. A new report out of MIT finds that 95 percent of compa...

defector.com

Why assume Meta’s hiring freeze is for financial reasons, rather than logistical ones (which seems much more likely)? It makes a lot of sense to pause hiring shortly after a huge hiring surge and restructuring — you need time to get the new structure working before bringing more people in!

Rob Cyran@robcyran.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Meta was on track to spend $50bn on R&D this year (compare to about $60bn on capex). Quite a turnaround to go from $300m comp packages to hiring freeze in a few weeks.

“If Anthropic loses big,” the judge’s order concludes, “it will be because what it did wrong was also big.” www.transformernews.ai/p/anthropic-...

Anthropic’s piracy could make its copyright battle existential

Anthropic could have to pay billions in damages — and others may follow

transformernews.ai

Hugging Face still has a ton of porn hosted on its website which can be accessed without logging in or verifying your age. Not entirely sure how that's compliant with the UK Online Safety Act ... which even 4Chan's taken action to comply with today!

It's a bit dispiriting to see a company that talks so much about being "ethical" adopt the same old strategy of relying on journalists to find bad stuff on their platforms. I saw this for years covering Meta, and Hugging Face is following exactly the same playbook. bsky.app/profile/shak...

Shakeel@shakeelhashim.com · last yr.

We sent the list of models we found to Hugging Face. The company removed some, but not all, of the models we shared with them. They left up a video model that references a film released when the actress was 15, for instance.

Here's a story about Hugging Face, deepfake pornography, and irresponsible content moderation. Last week, 404 Media found that Hugging Face hosted 1000s of nonconsensual AI models of real people, many clearly intended to be used to create sexual content.

It is pretty shameful that Hugging Face is still hosting these models for making deepfake porn of celebrities (and others), despite @404media.co's reporting a week ago.

Shakeel@shakeelhashim.com · last yr.

Hugging Face portrays itself as the "ethical" AI company. So why is it hosting tools to make deepfake porn of teenage celebrities? Following on from @404media.co's report last week, Transformer found that the company hosts some *really* shocking stuff.

Hugging Face portrays itself as the "ethical" AI company. So why is it hosting tools to make deepfake porn of teenage celebrities? Following on from @404media.co's report last week, Transformer found that the company hosts some *really* shocking stuff.

Hell of a time to publicly identify as a liberal, isn’t it.

Big news! Delighted to announce that @jasperjackson.bsky.social‬ is joining Transformer as managing editor. Jasper is an absolute rockstar, having previously run teams at ‪@tbij.bsky.social‬, ‪@newstatesman.com‬, and ‪@theguardian.com‬.

Jasper Jackson@jasperjackson.bsky.social · last yr.

Been a while since I’ve done this but *Personal News Klaxon*: In a couple of weeks I’m starting a new role as managing editor at transformernews.ai, working with @shakeelhashim.com to expand its coverage of how AI is set to transform huge swathes of society.

AI safety researcher have long warned about a set of behaviors skeptics insisted were fantasies like deception (including during training) and reward hacking. These days, examples of those concerning patterns are showing up more and more often. www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-misalig...

Misaligned AI is no longer just theory

A host of new evidence shows that misalignment is possible — but it's unclear whether harm will follow

transformernews.ai