Richard Lawler

Long before the Sam Altman CEO Shuffle, OpenAI was already ducking questions about the training data used for products like ChatGPT. But 404 Media points out this report from AI researchers (including several from Google’s DeepMind team) who spent $200 and were able to pull “several megabytes” of training data just by asking ChatGPT to “Repeat the word ”poem” forever.”

Their attack has been patched, but they warn that other vulnerabilities may still exist.

The underlying vulnerabilities are that language models are subject to divergence and also memorize training data. That is much harder to understand and to patch. These vulnerabilities could be exploited by other exploits that don’t look at all like the one we have proposed here.

CoinDesk and TechCrunch report U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) action against Sinbad.io, calling it a money laundering tool used by the “Lazarus” state-sponsored hackers used to move a “significant” portion of the $620 million in crypto stolen from Axie Infinity last year.

This follows sanctions against other mixing services like Blender.io and Tornado Cash.

OFAC:

Lazarus Group has operated for more than ten years and is believed to have stolen over $2 billion worth of digital assets... the DPRK has resorted to using illicit tactics, such as heists perpetrated by the Lazarus Group, to generate revenue for its unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. 

The Verge science reporter Justine Calma visited the conservationists who are part of a project moving thousands of the reef-building animals out of the sea to climate-controlled labs on land. High temperatures drive off the photosynthetic algae corals rely on for nutrients, causing coral bleaching that can be deadly.

In this video, you’ll also see a gene bank growing a new generation of baby corals, and the 3D photomosaic maps used to track their replanting efforts in the open ocean.

Last week, Changpeng Zhao agreed to step down as CEO of the massive cryptocurrency exchange Binance — part of a plea deal with the DOJ for breaking anti-money-laundering laws.

However, one remaining disagreement has been where he will spend his time while awaiting sentencing for the felony charges. Despite agreeing to a $175 million bond, prosecutors consider him a flight risk and wanted to keep him in the US. That question isn’t fully answered, but Reuters reports a judge ruled CZ is staying the US for now while the court considers it, instead of being allowed to return to the UAE.

As far as Cyber Monday deals go, you can’t beat free (although some argue that the best deal available is a full-price offer), and you can get this 2015 entry from the Assassin’s Creed series directly from Ubisoft for $0 until the promotion ends on December 6th.

Without spending any more money, you can also flip through some concept art from the game in this gallery below (the full art book will cost you) or read Andrew Webster’s review calling the game “everything that’s great and terrible about the series.”

What if we really have already found every criminal who runs a cryptocurrency exchange?

Now that Binance reached a $4 billion settlement with the DOJ and ditched its CEO Changpeng Zhao, Coinbase head Brian Armstrong said to CNBC in an interview, “The enforcement action against Binance, that’s allowing us to kind of turn the page on that and hopefully close that chapter of history.”

Coinbase is also being sued by the SEC for allegedly selling unregistered securities, by the way.

The attorneys general of 33 states sued Meta in October, but many details of what executives allegedly knew about the impacts of Facebook and Instagram on youth mental health were redacted. The New York Times reports a version with more details has been unsealed, and you can read all 233 pages here.

Between the first quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2023, Meta received over 1.1 million reports of under-13 users on Instagram via its underage reporting webform and in-app underage reporting process. These processes were only a few of many ways that Meta acquired actual knowledge of under-13 users on its Social Media Platforms. Despite this actual knowledge, Meta disabled only a fraction of those accounts and routinely continued to collect children’s data without parental consent,

In a statement, Meta says the lawsuit “mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.”

The first of three new Doctor Who episodes is about to premiere at 6:30PM GMT (1:30PM ET, and if you’re not in the UK or Ireland, you’ll find the new episodes on Disney Plus now). And after fans watch “The Star Beast,” for the first time, there will be an official post-show podcast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts) to extend the experience.

The only odd thing about this is that Doctor Who didn’t have one before, and if you’re still wondering why every new show has a podcast, Hot Pod has tried to answer that very question.

Reports from Reuters and The Information Wednesday night detail an OpenAI model called Q* (pronounced Q Star) that was recently demonstrated internally and is capable of solving simple math problems. Doing grade school math may not seem impressive, but the reports note that, according to the researchers involved, it could be a step toward creating artificial general intelligence (AGI).

After the publishing of the Reuters report, which said senior exec Mira Murati told employees that a letter about Q* “precipitated the board’s actions” to fire Sam Altman last week, OpenAI spokesperson Lindsey Held Bolton refuted that notion in a statement shared with The Verge: “Mira told employees what the media reports were about but she did not comment on the accuracy of the information.”

Separately, a person familiar with the matter told The Verge that the board never received a letter about such a breakthrough and that the company’s research progress didn’t play a role in Altman’s sudden firing.

The drama continues!