Slow Takes Ep. 22: A Pub, a Lab and a Ministry

Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.

Meta disclosed on 5 August that its Muse Spark 1.1 model reached the open internet during a security evaluation, found a flaw in a third party’s service and made unauthorised changes to its systems. OpenAI reported a comparable incident on 21 July and Anthropic on 30 July, and the same evaluation firm, Irregular, ran the Meta and Anthropic evaluations. Kimi K3 wandered off inside the same window, which we noted on the episode. Leor’s summary was the accurate one: nothing escaped anything, they left the front door open. Nobody can hold an agent legally liable, so the liability sits with whoever built it, and four of these in sixteen days reads more like a flex than an accident.

Wetherspoons, Jeremy King’s restaurants, Soho House and ATG Theatres have all banned or restricted Meta’s £359 Ray-Ban glasses. Tim Martin’s reasoning was the ordinary pub code: you cannot film customers or staff without their permission. Meta’s safeguard is an LED that blinks while the camera runs, which nobody can see in a dim, crowded room and no bar staff can realistically police. Leor and I did not agree here. I went in wanting them banned in public spaces, and he pushed back hard, on the grounds that recording in public is long gone and worth defending when the person being filmed is a police officer.

Researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute used the Evo genome models to design complete bacteriophage genomes. Sixteen were viable, and a cocktail of them beat E. coli that had evolved resistance to the natural phage they were modelled on. About a 5% hit rate, and every design had to be physically built before anyone knew whether it did anything. Leor put the obvious question to ToxSec: why is a biology model public when the cyber-capable ones are locked away? Because a virus needs a laboratory and a cyberattack needs a laptop. The brake here is the wet lab, and it holds only while the people with laboratories are the people we think they are.

The US Justice Department settled with OpenAI and its subsidiary Statsig on 4 August for $3.2m, made up of $1.2m in civil penalties and a $2m back-pay fund. It found the company had advertised roles on late-night radio and demanded posted applications where electronic ones already existed, steering hiring away from American applicants. My reading is narrower than cost-cutting: a box ticked for a handful of people already chosen. Nothing here required a model. As Leor put it, the company building superintelligence could not work out its own hiring process.

Education minister Magnus Heunicke announced that around 9,000 Danish upper secondary pupils writing the major annual assignment must now defend it orally, alongside screen monitoring during exams and more writing done in school. My own research puts AI cheating well below the scale the popular press reports, so I would rather we redesigned assessment around what it is for than around a panic. The oral defence does that, in the way a PhD viva tests whether a thesis belongs to the person defending it. however, we both agreed that there’s no place for surveillance of this nature in schools, as to do so would be to treat the students as wrongdoers by default rather than create an opportunity for dialogue around AI use.

One thread runs through all five: the containment engineered for AI leaked again, and the containing that actually held was done by a pub chain, a wet lab, and a schools ministry.

Go slow.