Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence, Britain, Government, Politics, Society, Technology

Proposed ‘kill switch’ for AI data centres

CYBER SECURITY

UK politicians are pushing for an AI “kill switch” that would allow ministers to shut down data centres.

Campaigners are seeking new laws that would give the Government powers to switch off AI systems in the event of a “catastrophic risk”.

A proposed amendment to the cyber security and resilience bill has the backing of at least 11 MPs, and is part of a coordinated campaign from Control AI, a group calling for strict AI regulations. The plans have not been endorsed by the Government, but demonstrate growing concerns about Artificial Intelligence among Members of Parliament.

Donald Trump, too, has recently expressed support for a kill switch and told Fox News that there should be government powers to shut down AI.

The amendment, proposed by Labour’s Alex Sobel, would give the technology secretary “last resort powers” to direct the shutdown of data centres “in the event of an AI security or operational emergency”.

The powers would come into force if there were a “catastrophic risk” to critical infrastructure, national security, or “severe, large-scale harm to human life”. Data centre operators would have to install infrastructure allowing them to be stopped instantly and establish secure communications to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology to enable ministers to act.

Meanwhile, Dario Amodei, the Anthropic chief executive, is expected to meet a group of 50 top European chief executives at a two-day forum to discuss AI adoption across the private sector.

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Artificial Intelligence, Research, Science, Society, Technology

Superintelligent AI and its threat to humanity

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Intro: Humanity faces an uncertain fate as experts brace for superintelligent AI. The tech industry claims looming “singularity” will change everything

Every time one of the world’s top artificial intelligence companies unveils a new system, employees at the US research organisation METR put it through its paces. Its ability is tested to complete a series of increasingly complex tasks.

The tasks are measured by how long each one would take a skilled human. They range from trivial arithmetic (two seconds) and completing a game of Wordle (13 minutes) to building complex military satellite software (taking a human expert 14.5 hours).

The test then serves as a gauge as to how capable AI has become – and where it might go.

The first version of ChatGPT, released in 2022, could only perform simple tasks that would take a human a few seconds.

But as AI systems have become more powerful, they are able to complete more complex actions that would take humans hours or days, such as breaking into a medical website and downloading all its data.

METR has found that AI capabilities are doubling in power every 196 days. Plotted on a graph, this progress starts slowly then rapidly accelerates to a near-vertical plane.

Converse with anyone in the AI industry for any length of time and the likelihood of them pulling up a version of the chart approaches 100pc, to the point where it has become a meme in its own right. It is being referred to as the most important chart in the world. The chart goes off the scale.

Last month, the AI lab Anthropic announced it had developed a new system, called Mythos, that it said was too powerful to release to the public because of its ability to find gaping holes in online security systems.

When METR’s researchers released the results of Mythos’s capability and function, they scored the system at 16 hours – meaning the world’s most powerful AI can now automate tasks that would take a human two full eight-hour shifts.

Nonetheless, they said the model was “at the upper end” of their ability to test. In other words, progress has become too fast for them to measure.

Not everybody is convinced by the results because the test only measures if a machine can do something half the time, not if it can do it consistently. The METR chart has, however, captured many people’s imaginations for two reasons.

First, the exponential growth looks strikingly similar to “Moore’s Law”, the maxim that has governed the electronics industry for more than half a century, stating that microchips roughly double in power every two years.

Second, it measures abilities, rather than intelligence. While many AI “benchmarks” resemble university exams and gradings, dealing in abstract reasoning or maths, the METR test studies whether AI can actually work.

It suggests that on current trends, vast amounts of human tasks could be automated in the next couple of years – including, most crucially of all, the art of developing AI models itself.

At that threshold, known in the tech industry as “recursive self-improvement”, all bets are off.

The concept is closely linked to superhuman AI because an AI that can make itself smarter could act like an evolutionary chain reaction, rapidly building to a system vastly more capable than mankind.

AI would have become – as IJ Good, the Bletchley Park codebreaker, predicted in 1965 – “the last invention that man need make”. Almost Orwellian in thought.

For 60 years, the idea seemed out of reach. But much of Silicon Valley believes this is about to change – and the US government is starting to notice.

The vast majority of people’s experience of AI has not changed much in the last couple of years. The release of ChatGPT in 2022 generated an initial flurry of excitement and fear in equal measure but, since then, progress has been less obvious.

The AI experience for many people comes in seeing an obviously fake video on their social media feeds, seeing an AI overview at the top of their search results, or having a bot that “helpfully” offers to summarise their emails.

But at the coalface, people are rapidly bringing forward their timelines for the day that superintelligence arrives.

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Artificial Intelligence, Business, Digital Economy, Technology

The next casualty of the Iran War has arrived

GLOBAL DIGITAL ECONOMY

Intro: The Iran War has led to shortage of helium, vital for AI but also for many of Britain’s smaller businesses. If the Strait of Hormuz blockade continues, a chip shortage could well be on the cards

The world has lost 40pc of its helium supply since the start of the latest war in the Gulf, first from Qatar and then from Russia.

We will soon find out whether the global digital economy can shrug off losses of such a critical gas on this scale and whether our political leaders will allow the AI boom to keep gobbling up an ever-greater share.

Industry cannot make advanced AI chips or semiconductors below 10 nanometres without ultra-high purity helium to cool the wafers and stabilise the plasma for etching. Even workhorse chips for cars and computers require lower-grade helium at 99.999pc purity.

But we also need helium for other high priorities: in nuclear power, advanced weaponry, aerospace, fibre-optic cables, quantum computing, chromatography, or to cool superconducting magnets in MRI machines. There are no easy substitutes. Liquid helium is the coldest known substance on Earth, with a boiling point of -269°C. Hence, why everybody is scrambling around trying to scoop up whatever they can find in the world.

It cannot be synthesised artificially – it comes from the radioactive decay of thorium and uranium – and is hard to store. China has strategic stockpiles of everything but not for this one vital input.

Helium is a small cost for digital behemoths with the deepest pockets, relying on “fabs” or foundries that cost $20bn (£15bn) a shot. Wafer fabs are not going to close, so with supply shortages, the larger conglomerates will be prepared to pay more than anybody else.

Another insidious process is at work. The semiconductor industry is in effect hoarding its scarce supply for the most lucrative AI fabs while rationing helium for routine “mature-node” chips that play a far bigger role in the day-to-day economy.

Triaging has taken hold. The industry reserves what they have for AI accelerators, high-bandwidth memory, and advanced logic chips for data centres.

There is less left for chips in cars, laptops, and the consumer electronics that we all rely on. Everybody is talking about petrol prices but nobody is talking about helium.

The fear is that there could be a repeat of the chip shortage that shut down European car factories during the pandemic. A Covid lockdown at a plant in Malaysia caused crippling losses on the other side of the globe. If a semiconductor factory anywhere in the world says that it won’t be able to supply more chips, then implicitly, the car industry is going to have big problems in the third and fourth quarters.

Qatar normally supplies a third of the world’s helium, a by-product of natural gas production at its giant North Field. Not a single shipment has moved through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began.

Some 200 cryogenic containers are stranded in the Persian Gulf and are slowly heating up, causing gas to leak out through the pressure valves to avert a lethal explosion.

Vladimir Putin has compounded the shortage by imposing what amounts to a ban on helium exports outside the Eurasian Economic Union, purportedly to secure supply for Russia’s domestic economy and fibre-optic industry. This endangers another 9pc until the end of 2027.

For once, it is China that is taking the immediate brunt of the supply chain shock. It produces barely 15pc of its own helium needs. All the rest comes from Qatar and Russia.

America is sitting pretty in one sense. It is the world’s biggest helium producer with two-fifths of the market.

But that does not shield the US from the larger supply-chain consequences any more than US oil supremacy spares it from rising crude prices and mounting shortages of jet fuel and diesel, leaving aside fertilisers, sulphur, and aluminium.

The US subcontracts most of its chip production to Asia. Its share of global semiconductor output has collapsed to 10pc from 37pc in the 1990s. It will be years before the US chips act and manufacturing rearmament turn this around.

More than 75pc of the world’s semiconductors are made in the Far East. Nvidia either makes or finishes all of its most advanced Blackwell chips at TSMC plants in Taiwan, while Samsung makes high-bandwidth AI chips for Google in South Korea. Both countries normally rely on Qatar for two-thirds of their helium.

Large volumes of workhorse chips for just about everything else are made in Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, often at arms-length operations for China.

Analysts say the world had plenty of helium before the war broke out and can probably cover half the loss from Qatar at a pinch.

The industry has an informal system for allocating scarce supply to the most critical needs. The top of the food chain are MRI machines, chip manufacturing, aerospace, and nuclear power. At the bottom end are things like welding. There is no doubt that some people are going to get badly hurt.

One thing we should have learnt from Covid is that once the world’s just-in-time (J-I-T) supply chain goes into convulsions, with ships scattered to the four winds and stuck in the wrong place, the effects can be drastic, long-lasting, and out of all proportion to the nominal value of the goods.

If the war drags on for a few more weeks – as it may do so since both Donald Trump and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards think they are winning – there are only two solutions. Either the market destroys demand in its own ruthless way or governments step in with emergency measures and make hard choices, something that Britain seems incapable of under Sir Keir Starmer.

For aviation fuel, diesel, or naphtha, it may mean a taste of wartime rationing. For helium, it may soon be a question of whether liberal democracies allow billionaire tech giants to outbid everybody and hoard scarce gas for unpopular AI expansion.

Do politicians finally face down the hyper-scalers and redirect helium supplies to the urgent priorities of military and energy rearmament, as well as to sustain routine sectors that employ infinitely more people?

Just days ago, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, more or less, admitted that Iran’s regime now has enormous power to do harm and that Washington has no coherent plan to restore the status quo ante, let alone to reach a better outcome that vindicates the war. “The Strait of Hormuz is basically an economic nuclear weapon that they’re trying to use against the world,” he said.

But what is to be done about it?

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