Category: Technology

Two stories about the Claude maker Anthropic broke on Tuesday that, when combined, arguably paint a chilling picture. First, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly pressuring Anthropic to yield its AI safeguards and give the military unrestrained access to its Claude AI chatbot. The company then chose the same day that the Hegseth news broke to drop its centerpiece safety pledge.

On Tuesday, Anthropic said it was modifying its Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) to lower safety guardrails. Up until now, the company’s core pledge has been to stop training new AI models unless specific safety guidelines can be guaranteed in advance. This policy, which set hard tripwires to halt development, was a big part of Anthropic’s pitch to businesses and consumers.

“Two and a half years later, our honest assessment is that some parts of this theory of change have played out as we hoped, but others have not,” Anthropic wrote. Now, its updated policy approaches safety relatively, rather than with strict red lines.

Anthropic’s quotes in an interview with Time sound reasonable enough in a vacuum. “We felt that it wouldn’t actually help anyone for us to stop training AI models,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told Time. “We didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments… if competitors are blazing ahead.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images for The New York Times)

But you could also read those quotes as the latest example of a hot startup’s ethics becoming grayer as its valuation rises. (Remember Google’s old “Don’t be evil” mantra that it later removed from its code of conduct?) The latest versions of Claude have drawn widespread praise, especially in coding. In February, Anthropic raised $30 billion in new investments. It now has a valuation of $380 billion. (Speaking of the competition Kaplan referred to, rival OpenAI is currently valued at over $850 billion.)

In place of Anthropic’s previous tripwires, it will implement new “Risk Reports” and “Frontier Safety Roadmaps.” These disclosure models are designed to provide transparency to the public in place of those hard lines in the sand.

Anthropic says the change was motivated by a “collective action problem” stemming from the competitive AI landscape and the US’s anti-regulatory approach. “If one AI developer paused development to implement safety measures while others moved forward training and deploying AI systems without strong mitigations, that could result in a world that is less safe,” the new RSP reads. “The developers with the weakest protections would set the pace, and responsible developers would lose their ability to do safety research and advance the public benefit.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)

Neither Anthropic’s announcement nor the Time exclusive mentions the elephant in the room: the Pentagon’s pressure campaign. On Tuesday, Axios reported that Hegseth told Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that the company has until Friday to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face penalties. The company has reportedly offered to adopt its usage policies for the Pentagon. However, it wouldn’t allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or weapons that fire without human involvement.

If Anthropic doesn’t relent, experts say its best bet would be legal action. But will the Pentagon’s proposed penalties be enough to scare a profit-driven startup into compliance? Hegseths’ threats reportedly include invoking the Defense Production Act, which gives the president authority to direct private companies prioritize certain contracts in the name of national defense. The military could also sever its contract with Anthropic and designate it as a supply chain risk. That would force other companies working with the Pentagon to certify that Claude isn’t included in their workflows.

Claude is the only AI model currently used for the military’s most sensitive work. “The only reason we’re still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now,” a defense official told Axios. “The problem for these guys is they are that good.” Claude was reportedly used in the Maduro raid in Venezuela, a topic Amodei is said to have raised with its partner Palantir.

Time‘s story about the new RSP included reactions from a nonprofit director focused on AI risks. Chris Painter, director of METR, described the changes as both understandable and perhaps an ill omen. “I like the emphasis on transparent risk reporting and publicly verifiable safety roadmaps,” he said. However, he also raised concerns that the more flexible RSP could lead to a “frog-boiling” effect. In other words, when safety becomes a gray area, a seemingly never-ending series of rationalizations could take the company down the very dark path it once condemned.

Painter said the new RSP shows that Anthropic “believes it needs to shift into triage mode with its safety plans, because methods to assess and mitigate risk are not keeping up with the pace of capabilities. This is more evidence that society is not prepared for the potential catastrophic risks posed by AI.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/anthropic-weakens-its-safety-pledge-in-the-wake-of-the-pentagons-pressure-campaign-183436413.html?src=rss 

With its ProArt lineup, ASUS has commendably addressed a glaring hole in the PC market by targeting video editors and other creative pros. Its latest model even uses a popular camera marque in its name: the ProArt GoPro Edition PX13. It’s a true co-branding exercise, with GoPro-like styling, a dedicated GoPro hotkey, mil-spec durability for extreme outdoor users and 12 months of GoPro’s Cloud Plus Premium.

It has a lot going for it on the inside, too. The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor offers 16 Zen 5 cores with integrated Radeon 8060S Graphics (40 cores) and AMD Ryzen AI with up to 50 NPU TOPS. It packs a relatively small but pixel-dense 13-inch 2,880 x 1,800 OLED convertible 360 touch display, 1TB of storage and an impressive 128GB of unified memory.

The rub, as you might expect with all that RAM, is the price. The ProArt GoPro Edition PX13 costs $3,000, while a version with the same processor but half the memory is $2,800. That’s high-end MacBook Pro money, and while the ProArt is a good PC creator machine, it falls short of its Apple counterpart in terms of performance and usability.

Design

In place of the ProArt P13’s smooth lines, the ProArt GoPro Edition comes with a ribbed metal back that’s designed to look like the front of a GoPro Hero 13. It also has GoPro-like ridges on the hinge and plastic above the keyboard, along with GoPro and ProArt branding. The rugged design may appeal to the extreme sports crowd, but I’d prefer something a bit sleeker.

The laptop is relatively light at 3.06 pounds, but the dedicated 200W power brick adds an extra pound of weight. Despite the small size, it offers MIL-STD 810H military-grade durability, so it can handle hot and humid conditions while surviving 500Hz vibrations and multiple four-inch drops while running. To help keep the laptop safe outside, ASUS includes a protective padded sleeve with a braided pouch to tuck a selfie stick or another accessory.

The 2,880 x 1,800 OLED touchscreen is nice but not super bright, with up to 400 nits of brightness or 500 nits in HDR mode. That’s the usual tradeoff for OLED compared to super bright MiniLED displays. However, it has deep blacks and very high color accuracy of Delta < 1 with 100 percent DCI-P3 coverage, along with Dolby Vision support, so it’s great for photo and video work or entertainment.

The ProArt is a 360-degree convertible model and ships with an ASUS Pen and Pen charger. That makes it a good option for graphic artists who want to tent the screen or fold it around to use in tablet mode for sketching or painting. The ASUS Pen works well, and though it’s not as accurate as Wacom or other dedicated pen devices, it has nice haptic feedback when you perform actions in the app.

The ProArt GoPro Edition’s keyboard is excellent, with a nice amount of travel for typing or gaming. The touchpad is also one of the better ones I’ve used on a PC thanks to the quality tactile feel. The top left of the touchpad contains ASUS’s control dial designed for jogging video footage or adjusting colors, but it’s a bit fussy and gimmicky.

For ports, you get HDMI, 3.5mm audio, USB-A 3.2 and two USB-C 4.0 with power delivery that allow up to 130 watts of charging. The laptop weirdly comes with a microSD slot to load GoPro footage straight from the camera, but it would be better to have a regular SD port and microSD adapter. As for wireless and audio, it offers Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 and Dolby Atmos support.

Performance

Built on TSMC’s 4nm line, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is AMD’s most powerful APU designed to blend performance and low power consumption. It’s married to a Radeon 8060S GPU with 40 compute units (equivalent to an NVIDIA RTX 4060, AMD says) that makes it ideal for creative chores, AI processing and gaming. This unit also comes with 128GB of unified LPDDR5X RAM that’s soldered directly to the motherboard, shared between the CPU and GPU. Given today’s RAM prices, that amount of memory no doubt contributes to the ProArt GoPro Edition’s high price.

AMD finally got its act together for video encoding and decoding. The Ryzen AI Max+’s GPU supports most 8- and 10-bit MP4 codecs, including H.264, H.265, VP9 and AV1. That means you can play back nearly all MP4 or Quicktime camera video files in real time, including the 8K H.265 files recorded by a GoPro Hero 13. At the same time, the large number of cores and threads (16 and 32) helps the ProArt GoPro Edition render certain VFX and do color adjustments quickly. The 1TB of NVMe SSD storage is limited to PCIe 4.0, but it’s relatively speedy with 6.55 GB/s read and 5.86 GB/s write speeds — easily fast enough for 8K video playback.

All of that made video work a breeze in DaVinci Resolve 20, Adobe Premiere Pro or GoPro’s Player that can be activated by a special hotkey on the ASUS laptop. Actions like color correction work in real time as well, and 4K H.264 exports can also be performed quickly.

That said, some functions like OpenFX and stabilization would work better with a more powerful discrete GPU. Also, unlike my MacBook Pro, the ProArt GoPro Edition’s fans need to engage frequently under intense workloads, creating a lot of noise and killing the battery quickly if the unit isn’t plugged in.

For other apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom Classic, the ASUS ProArt is ideal. It’s very responsive and the touch display and pen support fine masking or drawing work, something you can’t do on a MacBook Pro.

The ProArt also handles synthetic benchmarks well for a PC with an integrated GPU. The single/multi Geekbench 6 CPU score of 2,219/19,088 shows the benefit of 16 processor cores. The 93,108 Geekbench 6 GPU mark isn’t that far behind Acer’s NVIDIA RTX 5070-equipped Predator Titan 14 AI. Geekbench AI scores were also up there with the best laptops. However, Handbrake video encoding was slower than several MacBook M4 laptops I’ve tested.

For gaming, it had some of the higher laptop scores I’ve seen on several 3DMark tests (Wildlife Extreme and Port Royal Ray Tracing). It also did pretty darn well on Cyberpunk 2077, hitting 82 fps at 1080p and 60 fps at 1440p in Ultra mode. Considering the machine’s small size, those framerates are really good. However, the laptop is held back gaming-wise by the OLED display that tops out at 500 nits and just 60Hz.

A big benefit of the 128GB of fast unified memory is that you can run AI models locally for improved privacy. While the ProArt GoPro Edition normally allocates 64GB of memory to the CPU and splits the rest between the CPU and iGPU, you can dedicate up to 96GB of memory to the GPU for extra large AI applications via the MyASUS app.

Another plus of this APU is the battery life. The ProArt GoPro Edition lasted a solid 11:31 hours on the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery rundown test, besting all rivals with similar performance. That tells me that AMD is narrowing the performance-per-watt gap with Apple’s silicon to improve gaming and content creation for PCs on battery power alone.

Wrap-up

ASUS is one of the few PC manufacturers trying to compete with Apple in the creator market, and with the ProArt GoPro Edition laptop, it has largely succeeded. This model offers excellent performance and battery life, a huge amount of memory, a very nice OLED HDR display, a nice range of ports and an excellent keyboard and trackpad.

It easily handled my typical video and photo editing chores, even on battery power alone, and the included GoPro features like the Storyblocks cloud storage are a nice option for action cam users. The convertible configuration and touchscreen with pen option are also useful to artists and photo editors.

However, this laptop is not cheap at $3,000, which is the same price as a high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro M4 Pro. The latter offers superior battery life, better overall performance on apps like DaVinci Resolve and a far better macOS user experience than the hot mess that is currently Windows 11. However, if you want a Windows PC with a touchscreen, I think the ASUS ProArt GoPro Edition laptop is the best creator model you can get right now.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/asus-proart-gopro-edition-px13-review-an-incredible-if-pricy-windows-creator-laptop-170016800.html?src=rss 

Spotify is rolling out a new feature that’s meant to make transitions in between tracks even smoother. If you’ll recall, the streaming service released the ability to create customized transitions within playlists in August last year. It gave people a way to create uninterrupted progressions and eliminate awkward silences between songs. Now, Premium users will be able to make sure the songs in their playlists flow seamlessly even further by reordering tracks based on their keys and BPM or beats per minute.

The new feature can rearrange playlists with one tap. All paying users have to do is tap Mix on one of their playlists and then tap the Edit button. From there, they can scroll down to find the Smart Reorder option. Tapping Smart Reorder will automatically rearrange songs according to their keys and BPM without users having to do anything else. They just have to click Save so that the change to their playlist takes effect.

Spotify says users have streamed over 220 hours of their mixed playlists since it introduced custom transitions last year. It also listed some of the most popular ones on the platform, including The Weeknd’s Wake Me Up transitioning into After Hours and Flo Rida’s Low into Rihann’s S&M.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/spotify-can-reorder-your-playlists-by-bpm-and-key-140000101.html?src=rss 

Amazon is offering a new way for Alexa+ users to customize the AI assistant’s communication style. The company has introduced three personalities for Alexa+, so the assistant can adopt an attitude that is Brief, Chill or Sweet. 

The Brief style will be exactly that: no small talk and no extra conversation. Chill is easygoing and seems to be inspired by caricatures of the surfer/stoner type, while the Sweet mode is almost aggressively perky and chipper. In the audio sample provided, when a user asks “Alexa, how’s it going?” the Chill voice responds, “Life’s treating me well – all systems are Zen and the digital universe is spinning in harmony.” In contrast, the Sweet one replies, “Absolutely fantastic! I’m radiating pure joy and ready to make your day incredibly amazing!”

Amazon explained that the three personality styles are based on five metrics: expressiveness, emotional openness, formality, directness and humor. The company may release additional options with different combinations of those sliding scale traits in the future.

For now, users can swap the assistant’s vibe from the Alexa app or with the spoken command, “Alexa, change your personality style.” Both approaches can also be used to swap back to the classic Alexa voice. All three personalities are available now for all Alexa+ customers.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/amazon-introduces-three-personality-styles-for-alexa-140000602.html?src=rss 

Uber is one step closer to going airborne. On Wednesday, the company previewed its air taxi booking service ahead of an expected launch in Dubai later this year. The inaugural Uber Air program will let travelers book Joby Aviation’s electric air taxis through a familiar process in the Uber app.

The experience of booking an air taxi will be much like reserving a four-wheeled Uber. In the app, after entering your destination, Uber Air will appear as an option for eligible routes. The Uber app will book a flight and an Uber Black to pick you up and drop you off at a Joby “vertiport.”

The process of booking a flying taxi will be instantly familiar.

Joby’s air taxis, built exclusively for city travel, can accommodate up to four passengers and luggage. (Uber says size and weight guidelines will be announced closer to launch.) The interior is about the size of an SUV and has “comfortable seating” with panoramic windows. They can travel up to 200 mph and have a range of up to 100 miles. Four battery packs and a triple-redundant flight computer are onboard for safety purposes.

The air taxis aren’t (yet) autonomous and will each have a human pilot onboard. That would at least suggest high prices. After all, pilots aren’t nearly as cheap as Uber’s legion of independent-contractor drivers. But the company insists its air taxi rides will somehow be around as expensive as an Uber Black trip.

Joby’s air taxis have “panoramic” windows with a view of the city below.

Dubai is only the beginning of the companies’ plans. The US-based Joby says it’s in the final stage of FAA type certification and hopes to launch service in New York and Los Angeles. Globally, it’s targeting the UK and Japan as well.

As for how realistic a US launch is anytime soon, well, that’s up for debate. On one hand, President Trump signed executive orders last year that would create a pilot program to test such aircraft. But safety and cost considerations may require a grounding of expectations.

The aircraft requires a human pilot, at least in these early stages.

In November, Robert Ditchey, a Los Angeles-based aviation expert and test pilot, told NBC News that he didn’t think air taxi service “was ever going to happen” in American cities. “They’re dangerous,” he warned. “We have had helicopters fail and crash on top of buildings in Los Angeles. We’ve had helicopters fail at takeoff and landing in airports. They’re dangerous not from a fire point of view but in terms of landing on top of people and buildings.” In addition, he warned that air taxis can’t be developed in sufficient numbers to make them economically viable “unless they are subsidized by a government.”

Uber and Joby have partnered since 2019. In 2021, Joby bought the Uber Elevate ride-hailing division, which essentially integrated the companies’ services. Last year, Joby acquired Blade Air Mobility’s passenger business, which could open the door to eventually electrifying Blade’s routes.

The video below shows one of Joby’s air taxis taking a test flight in Dubai.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/uber-previews-its-dubai-air-taxi-service-130000603.html?src=rss