<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic claimed that its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts. Then we had the OpenAI\u2013Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic (proudly) and Meta (reluctantly) disclosed similar incidents involving their models. This was followed by Anthropic\u2019s claim that one of its models had made a mathematical breakthrough; soon OpenAI claimed a mathematical breakthrough of its own. Most recently, Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon went viral announcing his departure from the company, claiming that it and OpenAI are \u201cracing straight towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Each of these events was mostly covered breathlessly by the press, often repeating the companies\u2019 anthropomorphizing framings\u2014which are designed to portray their software is not only powerful but incipient \u201cartificial general intelligence.\u201d So what is really going on? Are we witnessing a massive, civilization-changing set of technological breakthroughs, or is this marketing?<\/p>\n
In all these incidents, massive fanfare from the companies (presented as mea culpas in illicit hacking cases) is accompanied by intense press coverage. Once there is time for experts in the relevant fields to examine what happened, a very different story emerges, but one that gets less media attention.<\/p>\n
Regarding the \u201chacking\u201d incidents, cybersecurity experts say the story is more about OpenAI\u2019s negligence and failure to adopt basic, established security practices than about \u201cmodels gone rogue\u201d or \u201cAI agents creating civilizations.\u201d <\/p>\n
As for the mathematical results, mathematicians who were initially \u201cstunned\u201d by OpenAI\u2019s press release saying that its latest chatbot, Astra, solved problems that \u201chave been open and seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade\u201d\u2014but they later realized that the results weren\u2019t as \u201cnovel as first appeared.\u201d Since then, mathematicians have accused the company of research misconduct and plagiarism, and they\u2019ve reiterated that Astra didn\u2019t make a \u201cprofound intellectual leap.\u201d Just weeks later, OpenAI claimed its own mathematical breakthrough. Two days before, Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at New York University\u2019s Courant Institute, published a bombshell statement suggesting <\/strong>that <\/strong>OpenAI had stolen other people\u2019s work and improperly attributed it. <\/p>\n Claims of incipient, dangerous superintelligence are not based in good scientific or engineering practice. Rather, they are narratives based in ideologies of transhumanism, eugenics, and wishful thinking about imagined future digital humans.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth thinking about why there is so much attention on computer programming and math as fields in which to apply large language models and related technology. Not only are they often elevated as the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement, but they involve problems where answers, once suggested, can be verified. The former property helps AI hype mongers sell the idea that they are building everything machines. The latter makes math and coding problems easier to tune systems for, since system output (sequences of likely words or pieces of computer code) can be evaluated without having to pay data workers to look at and annotate each one. Mathematicians in particular have warned against corporations using their field in this way. A statement signed by hundreds of them says there is \u201ccurrently a strong commercial incentive on the part of the technology industry to overstate the capabilities of their products\u201d and asks policymakers to \u201cconsult with experts, including mathematicians, in forming policy decisions rather than relying on press releases or popular reporting of mathematical results.\u201d<\/p>\n We echo this call and note that the illusion of speed and urgency promulgated by the tech companies is also a ploy to misdirect both policymakers and the public. Unfortunately, it sometimes works, such as with Senator Bernie Sanders\u2019s well-meaning but ultimately misguided proposed legislation to prevent the development of \u201cartificial superintelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n Describing them as \u201csuperintelligence\u201d or \u201crogue models\u201d ascribes agency to products rather than to the companies building them. This framing markets these companies\u2019 products as \u201csuperhuman\u201d and, at the same time, helps the companies evade accountability for their actions. <\/p>\n Instead of OpenAI being prosecuted for creating malware that hacked another company, press releases, news outlets, media personalities, and lawmakers refer to \u201crogue models\u201d as if they acted on their own. Instead of researchers being questioned about their companies\u2019 habit of plagiarizing academics\u2019 work or using customer data to train models without consent, the public\u2019s imagination is redirected to fears about what the future might hold upon the arrival of fictional superintelligent machines. <\/p>\n The AI industry has even suggested that popular, bipartisan anti-data-center activism is a \u201cdistraction\u201d from attempts to regulate the impending, scary, \u201csuperhuman\u201d machines these companies are building. According to the AI industry, we should be more worried about a fictional machine god than about the climate catastrophe that these data centers exacerbate, the asthma suffered by those living near them, the rising electricity bills of the public subsidizing them, or the water that is redirected to cooling them. <\/p>\n We know better than to make decisions based on marketing and better than to capitulate to corporate pressure to make those decisions quickly. Wise decision-making, by policymakers and communities, demands time to hear from independent experts and contextualize corporate claims. The best possible outcome from this summer of hype is that policymakers and the public at large learn to take a breath, hold onto our skepticism, and recognize this kind of hype for what it is the next time it comes around.<\/p>\n Timnit Gebru is executive director of DAIR and author of the forthcoming book Deep Unlearning: The Radicalization of a Tech Idealist, which is available for preorders now and set to publish on February 16. Emily M. Bender is professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and coauthor of The AI Con.<\/em><\/p>\n #Dont #fooled #summer #hype<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[401,14102,2792,768],"class_list":["post-22565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-dont","tag-fooled","tag-hype","tag-summer"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/summer-hype2.jpg",1200,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/summer-hype2-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/summer-hype2-300x150.jpg",300,150,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/summer-hype2-768x384.jpg",640,320,true],"large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/summer-hype2-1024x512.jpg",640,320,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/summer-hype2.jpg",1200,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/summer-hype2.jpg",1200,600,false],"covernews-featured":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/summer-hype2-1024x512.jpg",1024,512,true],"covernews-medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/summer-hype2-540x340.jpg",540,340,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?author=1"},"category_info":"Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}