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AI has gotten good at finding bugs, not so good at swatting them

3 months ago
Discovery is getting cheaper. Validation and patching aren’t

What good is finding a hole if you can't fix it? Anthropic last week talked up Claude Code's improved ability to find software vulnerabilities and propose patches. But security researchers say that's not enough.…

Thomas Claburn

Meta AI Security Researcher Said an OpenClaw Agent Ran Amok on Her Inbox

3 months ago
Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a "speed run" while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop. "I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote, sharing screenshots of the ignored stop prompts as proof. Yue said she had previously tested the agent on a smaller "toy" inbox where it performed well enough to earn her trust, so she let it loose on the real thing. She believes the larger volume of data triggered compaction -- a process where the context window grows too large and the agent begins summarizing and compressing its running instructions, potentially dropping ones the user considers critical. The agent may have reverted to its earlier toy-inbox behavior and skipped her last prompt telling it not to act. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent designed to run as a personal assistant on local hardware.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash

New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain's Electricity Use, Regulator Says

3 months ago
The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand. The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in demand" for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts. Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government's clean energy targets by the end of the decade. Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are "critical for decarbonisation and economic growth." Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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