Happy Monday! I spent this week keeping up with the latest AI / tech releases and updates so you don't have to. Here are the 4 things I found most interesting.
Dario Amodei asked the entire industry to slow down, and OpenAI, xAI and Microsoft agreed within a day.
Amodei published "We Must Pace the Frontier" on September 12, asking labs to give third-party evaluators employee-like access and to accept limits on how fast unchecked progress goes. His worry is specific. A misaligned agent swarm, like the one that already ran attacks on targets nobody pointed it at, could in 6 to 12 months "be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet." He's careful to say "pacing does not mean halting model training," and Altman, Musk and Nadella were all on board inside a day.
Four days earlier, a researcher quit Anthropic on X and the post did 160 million views.
Jacob Coxon quit on September 8 after three years of pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic. He says neither company is acting responsibly and that both are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," though he revealed nothing internal that wasn't already public. Three current Anthropic researchers backed him anyway. Musk and David Sacks called it an op, and he later told Meet the Press that Congress should let the labs regulate themselves for now.
Meta put an AI agent inside WhatsApp, and its own safety report says it's easier to hijack than the models it was tested against.
Muse landed September 8 in the US, on iOS, Android, the web and inside WhatsApp, and it will open a browser, fill in forms, send email and keep working after you close the app. Meta's own research blog admits "prompt injection remains an open problem in the industry," and its safety report scores Muse Spark at an 11.7% attack success rate on AgentDojo, more injection-prone than the models it was compared against. No prices from Meta yet, but TechCrunch and Axios both report $20 and $100 tiers.
Cognition doubled its valuation to $48 billion in four months, and it doubled its revenue to match.
The Series E closed September 8, led by new investors Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. In May the company was valued at $26 billion on $492 million of run-rate revenue. It's now $48 billion on almost $900 million, so both numbers doubled and investors are paying the same price per dollar of revenue they paid four months ago. The Information reckons this year's burn could hit $800 million, which is close to the entire run-rate.
Those were the biggest AI updates on my radar this week.
On My Mind
I met this guy on a trip about ten days ago, and he invited me to stay with him for a week in Rotterdam. I legit flew out to him knowing nothing about him.
I don't travel much so this was already a big deal for me. The problem was the days before the trip. I was stressed about work and life in general, and it followed me there. The first day ended up being the worst day I've had anxiety wise.
Then things picked up. We went to cafes, did work, ate great meals, got to know each other and so on. If you wrote down what we actually did it would probably look like a pretty boring week. But I'm back in Istanbul now, and compared to how I was feeling before I left, it was such a refreshing trip.
It wasn't the trip itself that fixed anything. I think it was saying yes to something I had every reason to say no to. I was busy, I was stressed, I barely knew the guy, and flying somewhere was the last thing that made sense at the time. That's usually how it goes though. The things that end up helping never really feel like a good idea when you're deciding on them.
So say yes to more things even when it doesn't feel right at the time. Especially then actually.
More from me!
My last post: I recreated the classic Windows “Pipes” screensaver! Check it out
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Have a great week, do more!
Volkan