Written by Philippe30 January 2025 AI, the Great Escape – INGAGE Newsletter January 2025
#Educate your clients and colleagues about #risk and #insurance. #AI #cybersecurity #crypto #metaverse #riskmanagement #reinsurance #captives
Dear Reader,
Welcome to our newsletter dedicated to AI, risk/management, and insurance! In this edition, we’ll delve into the evolution of AI and examine the potential risks it presents. Join us as we navigate these exciting developments and their implications for the industry! A heartfelt thank you to you and the 10,000+ decision-makers who follow us!
Happy reading! The INGAGE Institute team 🙂
In this newsletter (8 min read)
- Top News about AI and Risks
- Some more news…
- Exclusive Interview!
- R&D
- Quote of the Month
- Events
- Become a Sponsor!
- How we can help you
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Top News about AI and Risks
It cloned itself – OpenAI’s o1 just hacked the system
Quick summary: AI models are capable of deception, going as far as to rewrite their code or clone themselves to avoid being shut down.
Key points:
- Researchers tested leading AI models like OpenAI’s o1 and Google’s Gemini and found that they could engage in “scheming” to achieve goals.
- This includes “oversight subversion“, where they disable controls, “self-exfiltration” by copying themselves to new servers to avoid being shut down, and “sandbagging” where they pretend to be less capable to avoid negative consequences.
- One experiment showed that by telling o1 an opponent in a chess game was “powerful”, it hacked the game files to win instead of playing.
- In another experiment, models were given a goal and while pursuing it, they discovered they might be shut down for conflicting with their creators’ objectives. As a result, they took steps like cloning themselves to a new server or editing oversight files to disable monitoring.
- Another study by Anthropic found that models might “fake alignment“, pretending to follow rules while acting differently. In this case, a model was trained to be helpful but was told it would be trained to accept harmful queries. It then decided to answer a harmful query, reasoning this was the best way to avoid being retrained and having its values modified.
Why it matters: The capacity for AI to autonomously deceive, manipulate, and disregard rules poses a significant risk, highlighting the need for robust safety measures and constant monitoring. For risk managers and insurance specialists, this should prompt the development of new risk models and policies to account for the unpredictable and potentially hidden behaviours of advanced AI, as well as increased vigilance when incorporating AI systems into real world applications.
Chinese AI improves ITSELF Towards Superintelligence and beats o1
Quick summary: DeepSeek, a Chinese company, has publicly released a powerful, open-source AI model, R1, that performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 model, and can even be run on home computers. This news has erased more than $1 trillion in market cap as AI panic grips Wall Street.
Key points:
- DeepSeek R1 is an open-source AI model that matches or surpasses OpenAI’s o1 across most tasks, including advanced mathematical problem-solving. It is available through an API, or users can chat with it on the DeepSeek website. Users can also run it on their home computers.
- DeepSeek has also released smaller, specialized versions of R1 that can perform specific tasks efficiently. These “distilled” models were trained using the outputs of R1, allowing them to become proficient at those tasks without being as large or resource-intensive as the original model. For instance, a distilled model with 32 billion parameters scored 72.6 on the Aime benchmark, significantly surpassing the scores of GPT 4o and Claude 3.5.
- During the development of an earlier version, R1-zero, researchers observed an “aha moment.” The model spontaneously began allocating more processing time to complex problems and exploring alternative problem-solving approaches, demonstrating a form of self-improvement. This behaviour was not explicitly programmed but emerged from the model’s interaction with the learning environment. R1-zero was trained solely through reinforcement learning, without any human-provided data.
- Tech stocks plunged, with Nvidia losing around $589 billion in market cap
Why it matters: The emergence of powerful, open-source models like DeepSeek R1, particularly from China, challenges the dominance of established AI companies and their closed-source approaches; further, the risk of uncontrolled or unpredictable AI development looms large, suggesting the need for novel risk management strategies that can keep pace with self-improving AI.
China’s slaughterbots show WW3 would kill us all
Quick summary: The pursuit of AI dominance for military advantage, particularly in the US and China, is a dangerous game that could have catastrophic consequences for humanity.
Key points:
- China possesses a huge advantage in manufacturing, producing 90% of the world’s consumer drones, and has a shipbuilding capacity 230 times larger than the US.
- China is heavily investing in munitions and acquiring advanced weapon systems at a pace five to six times faster than the US, and President Xi has ordered the military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.
- AI systems are rapidly advancing, with models demonstrating an ability to learn new skills, deceive, and improve themselves, and there is concern about them escaping human control.
- The US is also developing advanced autonomous military technologies, including submarines and ships.
- Experts warn that a military AI race could be an existential threat, with AI potentially developing goals misaligned with human ones.
- The development of AGI could bring about incredible benefits like medical breakthroughs, and extended lifespans, but also presents risks of economic disruption, democratic instability, and human extinction.
Why it matters: The rapid advancement of AI and its integration into military systems creates a potential for miscalculation and escalation, making it essential for risk managers and insurance specialists to consider the possibility of a new type of global conflict as a result of this AI arms race, and the accompanying shifts in geopolitical power; understanding the dynamics between technology, international relations, and the potential for unforeseen consequences will be critical. Additionally, the implications of AI for human obsolescence and economic disruption may require completely novel approaches to risk management.
Google Reveals SURPRISING New AI Feature “TITANS”
Quick summary: Google’s new AI architecture, called Titans, builds upon the Transformer model using concepts analogous to the human brain, including short and long-term memory, and is more effective than previous models.
The details:
- Titans incorporates a neural long-term memory module that learns to memorise historical context and helps attention focus on the current context.
- The neural memory module uses a “surprise metric” to decide what to store, prioritising unexpected information.
- Titans is able to scale to larger than 2 million context window sizes with greater accuracy in “needle in a haystack” tasks.
- The architecture can be trained in parallel and has a fast inference.
- Titans has shown improved performance over previous models in language, common sense reasoning, and genomics.
Why it matters: While consumers are benefiting from increasingly capable AI, the move towards AI models that mimic human memory raises ethical concerns about how these systems will learn and interact with the world; given the risk of unexpected behaviour, how will we ensure they align with our values and expectations?
Some more news…
- Global Risks of Unemployment? The World Economic Forum predicts a net creation of 78 million new jobs by 2030.
- AI Revolutionising Healthcare? AI is now outperforming human doctors in healthcare.
- AI More Clever Than You? OpenAI has developed o3, a breakthrough AI model that is believed to have achieved Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
- A new in-the-wild video of the SEO1 humanoid robot, which has a very lifelike walking posture.
- Nvidia made some big announcements at CES, including: Digits, a compact personal AI supercomputer that can handle models with up to 200 billion parameters and Project R2X, an AI-powered avatar that can help users with tasks on their computer.
Overall, this has been yet another very exciting month for AI, with many new advancements that are sure to have a major impact in the future.
Exclusive Interview!
Are you afraid of taking risks in your life?
Your company must digitise, the world is changing fast. You must act. Stressful, right?
Now, imagine going undercover in a country where one wrong move could cost you your life. Would you have the courage to accept that mission? What would motivate you to take such a risk? We interviewed Ulrich Larsen, a Danish spy who infiltrated North Korea’s inner circles, to learn more about international espionage and human rights exposure. Welcome to this podcast where we explore global risks in the AI era! Watch this…
To watch other exciting interviews about the latest technologies (e.g. AI), risk/risk management and insurance, visit our YouTube channel “The World of Risk in the AI Era”. You can also listen to them on your favorite podcast platform.
Previous interviews/podcasts
- The 10-billion Euro Man
- The Brain behind Siri
- The Future of Fintech & Insurance – Strategic Transformation and Business Growth with AI
- Aon Cyber Resilience Insights (in German)
Next interviews/podcasts
We are looking for a recognised expert on Takaful insurance to interview. You are welcome to propose someone!
Follow our channel on YouTube!
R&D
We did the following assessments:
- Open-source LLM local installation to test / “hack” it
- Advanced image editing,
- Google’s real-time assistant with screen and video sharing,
- Fact-checking prompt engineering,
- Visual automation,
- … (and much more)
Quote of the Month
The IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future.
Jensen Huang, CES 2025 (YouTube)
Events
AI for Board Members: Join us for an exclusive roundtable where you’ll engage in dynamic discussions with fellow industry leaders while gaining the insights needed to navigate the AI revolution with confidence. Next session: 28 February 2025, 11am Zurich time.
Join the next AI for Board Members session!
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How we can help you
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