2026-04-14
5 分钟Hello, this is Alok Jha, host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Please do have a listen.
In 2019, OpenAI finished training a new large language model called GPT-2.
The Artificial Intelligence Lab initially declared it too dangerous to be released.
Dario Amodei, then OpenAI's research director, insisted that the world needed time to prepare.
In the end, it was released later that year.
A sequence of far more powerful models have since been developed without unleashing Armageddon.
Yet seven years on, Mr Amodei, now head of OpenAI's bitter rival Anthropic, is worried once again.
On April 7th, he declared that the latest addition to his lab's Claude family of models,
dubbed Mythos, is too powerful to be made widely available just yet.
This time, he might be right.
According to Anthropic, the capabilities of Mythos are substantially
beyond those of any model we have previously trained.
The lab says it is particularly alarmed by the system's ability to find software vulnerabilities and either fix them,
if set to work as a defender, or exploit them, if acting as a hacker.
Such claims ought normally to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Anthropic built the model, ran the tests, and stands to benefit from the perception that its system is far more brilliant
than anything to have come before it.