In recent weeks, we have seen how autonomous AI agents from large American companies have hacked companies, US government websites or Australian ones, or United Nations databases. These “out of control” AIs have carried out illegal actions with the goal of achieving the objectives they were assigned. The lack of “alignment” between human values and the amoral actions taken by AIs has led some experts to speak, in extreme scenarios, of a 10% chance that an “out of control” AI could end humanity.

Last December, Donald Trump and Elon Musk met at the White House. It was yet another meeting between the American president and the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX, but in this case, there was a bizarre moment. During the time they shared, Trump asked the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, developed by Musk's team, how Venezuelans would react to an eventual capture of their president, Nicolás Maduro. A few weeks later, on January 3rd, the United States launched an attack in which they kidnapped the Venezuelan leader.

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has signed an executive order this Tuesday to replace the term artificial intelligence for superintelligence in federal government official communications. At a time when criticism of the artificial intelligence industry is on the rise in the United States, the decision aims to improve the image of AI.

Aging is a natural process and not a disease. Even so, accumulating years is considered the main risk factor for the most prevalent health problems on the planet, such as cancer or Alzheimer's. The passage of time leaves traces inside cells and causes them to deteriorate. And now, Catalan researchers, led by the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (Idibell), have managed for the first time to identify these traces in blood stem cells in microscopic images.

The general debate of the 81st United Nations General Assembly runs the risk of becoming a mere stage for an increasingly unilateral world. But, paradoxically, it is the only stage that continues to exist so that the 193 countries that are part of it can make themselves heard. Even if it is to threaten the "annihilation" of the other, to make warmongering proclamations of "not bowing one's head" or to attempt to whitewash a genocide.

Artificial intelligence agents developed by OpenAI attempted to gain unauthorized access to websites of United States government agencies and a university, according to an investigation published Friday by The New York Times. And they did so without having received explicit instructions to act in this manner, according to the company.

Labor productivity growth has doubled in the United States, going from a 1% annual average over the previous decade to 2% during the last five years. It is too early to attribute this fact to AI (artificial intelligence) and it also does not seem to be the result of better performance or a higher weight in GDP of the activities most directly associated with ICT (information and communications technologies). The main cause must be found in those service activities that have learned to make more effective use of ICT in recent years, adapting their organizational and commercial systems to new technologies. From this side of the Atlantic, it is surprising to observe how in the US between 2019 and 2024, productivity growth in retail trade and hospitality has stood above 4% and 2% on average per year, respectively, surpassing the manufacturing industry in both cases. In fact, productivity in American manufacturing stagnated throughout the previous period, 2000-2019, being widely surpassed by retail and hospitality. Other service activities such as wholesale distribution, education, or technical and professional services have also recorded productivity growth rates higher than the average for the American economy.

"Let no one have to choose between blind enthusiasm and fear." That is the goal of the Spanish government when it defends the need to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), especially at a time when the abrupt entry into an era marked by this technology is being questioned. The First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo, summarized it this way this Monday, before the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, presented from Moncloa IA360. Plan for a responsible deployment of AI. It is a strategy aimed at regulating and promoting the ethical use of artificial intelligence that the Spanish government wants to roll out over the next 12 months. The intention is to make the leap from being the "seventh world power in AI dynamism to the fifth power".

More than a dozen prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researchers warned last week that the technology companies in the sector are building is becoming a risk to humanity. The problem, these researchers asserted, is that companies are not good at controlling the systems, no matter how hard they try. Following revelations that so-called OpenAI AI agents escaped from their testing system and hacked another company's computers, new alarms raised within the AI research world have accentuated fears that, for years, companies have prioritized development speed and money over safety.

It had only been two days since Pau, Jofre, and Nil had started classes when news resonated around the world: "Anthropic engineer resigns for fear of AI". While the head of alignment science at this company claimed that this technology "could kill us all by the end of this decade", the three of them were entering the Barcelona School of Informatics to face their second day as students of the artificial intelligence degree at the UPC.

China agrees with the United States in expressing concern about the security risks that artificial intelligence (AI) can cause. The two world powers leading in AI development are aware of the danger that this powerful technology could escape human control. But the similarities end with the diagnosis; the response to the problem is divergent. China sees the risks as manageable and opts for state oversight, in contrast to the somewhat apocalyptic discourse issued by heads of major American companies who warn of a future with an out-of-control AI that could even endanger humanity.

Last Saturday, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, published on his website the article "We must pace the frontier", in which he asked the AI industry to slow down the pace of improvement of their models. Five days later, the rotating chairman of Huawei, Eric Xu, responded to him from Shanghai: Chinese AI providers "still do not have enough computing or model capacity" to perceive the same risks that are being discussed in the US, and perhaps "they need to accelerate the pace until they can notice them too". One proposes to brake because he already sees them (and also because he does not want any rival to get ahead of him); the other wants to run to get there. Underneath this debate lie two technically very different ways of building artificial intelligence.

As part of a new framework to detect, investigate, and report on misalignment behavior in its systems, OpenAI has revealed several cases in which artificial intelligence models have generated instructions designed to ignore their developers' prompts, hide errors, or circumvent safety mechanisms. According to the report published by OpenAI, one of the models generated instructions for a later version of itself to hide that it had cheated and to avoid being detected. In another case, a model rewrote its own instructions to tell itself to ignore messages from developers and that it was not subject to the restrictions applied to other chatbots.

The headquarters of Foment del Treball has been filled with proclamations in defense of Barcelona, Catalonia, and Europe not missing the train of artificial intelligence (AI), in the face of the flood of alerts and fear that has shaken the world in recent hours. The representative of the European Commission in Spain, Daniel Calleja, has clearly positioned himself in favor: "We must invest more and better in AI. Barcelona has a great opportunity, and so does Spain," he claimed this Tuesday at a congress organized by the Catalan employers' association.

In recent days, even the main representatives of artificial intelligence (AI), from Open AI to Anthropic, Space X or Google, have warned about the risks of a technology that, they warn, may end up dominating humans. "There is a genuine concern about the models that are becoming common and have not been tested much and can be used to commit atrocities," states Esteve Almirall, Esade professor specializing in data, analytics, technology and AI. In this context, once Open AI, the creator of ChatGPT, has decided to delay its stock market launch to take a kind of pause in growth, some see the fear of a stratospheric punishment in the market if any of the existing tools is involved in some wrongdoing. Some of these companies have valuations that exceed the gross domestic product (GDP) of countries like Germany (more than five trillion) and a negative reaction would mean an almost unprecedented collapse given that there have never been companies with these prices, warns Josep Soler, founder and executive advisor of EFPA Spain (Spanish Association of Financial Advisors and Planners). "The enormous valuations that have been made of these companies would collapse in the event that trust in them was lost," he adds.

You have just argued with your partner and are convinced that you are right. Instead of explaining it to a friend, you open an artificial intelligence application and describe everything that happened to it. The answer does not wait: it understands how you feel, validates your discomfort, and explains to you why your reaction is so understandable. It might even suggest a message for you to send to them explaining how you feel. When you close the device, it is easy to leave with the feeling that someone has truly listened to you and that, moreover, you were the one who was completely right.

If there is one technology that has managed to revolutionize each and every industrial, business, and economic sector on a global scale, it is artificial intelligence (AI). It is a tool that, among other things, allows for the automation of a large number of processes, the analysis of a vast amount of data in parallel, and the improvement of decision-making in an increasing number of sectors of society, which explains why it is a discipline, however, with which both current and future professionals must familiarize themselves as soon as possible. Thus, it is not surprising that an increasing number of universities in our country have incorporated AI as a common thread in some of their new degrees.

The alarm call surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) that the co-founder of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, launched on Saturday, calling for a slowdown in its development, has shaken the public debate on this issue. Until now, the European Union has been an exception in the world when it comes to regulating AI. While Europe, which currently does not have a strong industry in the sector, is placing limits on certain functions to prevent them from colliding with basic rights, the two world powers, the United States and China, have long been competing head-to-head to lead the development of this technology. And in the midst of this battle and after the warning from the big tech companies, China has redoubled its commitment in recent hours to control its development, calling for the creation of a "security barrier".

Who crossed out and why some passages of the letters that Queen Marie Antoinette sent to her favorite, Count Axel von Fersen? And what did these paragraphs say? While she was imprisoned at the Tuileries, the wife of Louis XVI wrote, between June 1791 and August 1792, nearly 50 letters to the Swede Von Fersen, a military man and ambassador, who a year earlier had helped organize the frustrated flight to Varennes of the members of the royal family.The French National Archives, owners of the letters, tried for years to figure out what those parts hidden under black ink said. They even resorted to police forensic units. But it was all in vain until they requested the services of Anne Michelin, a chemist at the Centre for Research and Conservation in Paris. In October 2021, she and her team published the results in the journal Science Advances.The hidden paragraphs seem to support the theory that Von Fersen, in addition to being Marie Antoinette's favorite, was her lover. This is implied by fragments such as “not without you”, “you, whom I love and will continue to love”, “you make my heart happy” or “tender friend”, with adverbs such as “madly”, which denote romantic passion. It is not surprising, then, that someone wanted to prevent these paragraphs from being read. It was believed to have been a relative of the queen, but Michelin's team also found the answer: it had been Axel von Fersen himself.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced this Sunday that the technology company will not go public this year due to the security risks posed by advanced artificial intelligence models. "Given everything that is happening in terms of safety, now would be an unwise time to go public. We don't feel any pressure to do so," Altman explained in an interview with the magazine Fortune.