WIRED Roundup: ChatGPT Goes Full Demon Mode

0:01Zoë Schiffer:Hey, this is Zoë. Before we start, I want to tell you about the new Wired subscription program. If you're already a subscriber, thank you so much for supporting us. If you haven't signed up yet, this is a great time to do so. You'll have access to newsletters with exclusive analysis from Wired reporters and access to livestream AMAs where you can ask your most pressing questions. Head over to Wired.com to learn more.

0:30Zoë Schiffer:Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Wired's Director of Business and Industry. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week. And later, we'll dive into our main segment on how AI chatbots like ChatGPT tend to ignore the context of the information they're absorbing. This has led some chatbots into very, very strange places, like suggesting demonic rituals to users. I'm joined today by Wired's Senior Business Editor, Louise Matsakis. Louise, welcome to Uncanny Bell. Hi, Zoe.

1:05Zoë Schiffer:So our first story is one that you and I have been pretty deep and on. It's about the AI talent wars. Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have lagged behind most of their smaller or equal-sized competitors in the AI race. And lately, Mark has been going kind of all out to recruit top researchers from competitive labs and kind of bring them over to Meta by offering wildly high salaries. We're talking like reportedly over$300 million over four years, although Meta has disputed these numbers. But this week, we noticed that he'd set his sights on a smaller lab, and that is Thinking Machines.

1:48Louise Matsakis:Yeah. So Thinking Machines is the startup founded by Mir Maradi, who is the former chief technology officer at OpenAI. And I think it's notable here that there is no product at this startup yet. The startup has done nothing thus far, and the people who work there are already getting offered hundreds of millions of dollars.

2:07Zoë Schiffer:Louise, that is not an issue in AI. I feel like this is a field where the narrative matters a lot. But these researchers are obviously extremely valuable. One thing that I heard from sources when we were reporting this out was that they've been going through the process with Meta almost to like test their market value. Like even if they're not serious about joining Meta, it's like, well, how much am I worth? And the answer is like hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases.

2:36Louise Matsakis:I honestly don't understand how these calculations are being made. And I don't get what makes one of these researchers worth 300 million versus 500 million. Like how much of it is them negotiating? And I think it like violates a lot of the things that I thought I knew about like how AI innovation happens. It's like, it's often a group of like really passionate people. They're often like pretty young. Like a lot of the most famous papers were written by people who are under the age of 25 or at least under the age of 30. And so now I'm just kind of like, I don't know, you published one hot paper and now you're worth 500 million.

3:08Zoë Schiffer:Yeah. I talked to someone who was pretty intimately involved and they were like, look, you know, on paper, we're allowed to offer this much. But the reality is when you're talking about an AI researcher at this point in time, like the sky is the limit. There's literally nothing we cannot offer them. I think, I mean, it's so interesting because I do feel like what you're saying makes sense. Like on the individual level, it's just like totally baffling. You're like, how could this 23, 24 year old possibly be worth this much? But I think if I had to like put myself in Mark Zuckerberg's shoes, this is like an existential crisis for the company.

3:40Zoë Schiffer:Like he perhaps feels that Meta is being totally left behind and that the company, even though it's making all of this money, even though its other products are wildly successful, like usage in some areas is on the decline. There's only so far you can go with like stuffing more ads in the existing product pipeline. And so what wouldn't you do to ensure that your company can like stay on the cutting edge?

4:05Louise Matsakis:Totally. I guess I think just the strategy is just kind of backwards. Like I guess I'd rather hedge my bets and like hire 600 new PhDs for a million dollars a year or$500 ,000 a year. Maybe that's not enough these days. I mean, that's not possible, but give them$10 million a year and like see where they go versus like getting these big stars. I think it just comes across as like very desperate and trying to like reverse engineer something that I'm not sure you can reverse engineer.

4:34Zoë Schiffer:No, for sure. I mean, that is completely the strategy. Our latest round of reporting showed that in some cases, top, top researchers, and it's worth saying, like, this isn't the number that's being thrown around for everyone by any means, but was more than a billion dollars. And that's over a multi-multi-year span. So it's not to say you're getting that up front by any stretch of the imagination, but still, I mean, that's just, you know, generational wealth that is being promised. And some of the other offers were between$200 million and$500 million. But so far, at Thinking Machines, at least, not a single person appears to have taken one of these offers, which is kind of fascinating.

5:12Louise Matsakis:Yeah, I think it sort of shows that at a certain level, these numbers become meaningless, right? Like, if you're going to make$100 million versus$200 million, I'd rather be happy and probably like doing something that I want to do, right? Because like, money can't really buy much above that unless like you're super into super yachts, I guess. Planes. Yeah. So I think it maybe says something about the culture at Meta. And do you think like there are specific things that are giving people trepidation or is it just like, you know, people are loyal to Mira and these other startup founders?

5:46Zoë Schiffer:I think the loyalty is a big thing. Like people who believe in Mira seem to really, really believe in her. And that seems obviously true from investors as well as employees. But I've heard two things with Meta that really stuck out to me. One is that Mark Zuckerberg recruited Alexander Wang, who's the co-founder of Scale AI, which is kind of a data labeling startup, to lead or co-lead the new Meta superintelligence labs. And people have very polarizing views on Alexander. Some people obviously do want to work for him and have gone over to Meta. A lot of people have told me they're not interested for various reasons.

6:20Zoë Schiffer:So that's one thing I'll just put out there. The other, and I haven't fully reported this out, but I've heard it enough times that it seems just worth saying is that some people feel like Mark Zuckerberg's kind of rightward turn and like hyper masculinity bent that he seems to be on has been a turnoff for more of the like academic quiet researcher types.

6:42Louise Matsakis:I mean, I think that that makes a lot of sense. He also doesn't have a background in academia or in research. Like I don't think he necessarily understands the incentives of a place like that. And it's also probably worth just saying that Alexander is I think 27 and that the AI data labeling industry is kind of like regarded as the underbelly of this industry. So I think that maybe that's also part of it is like, you know, do we really want to work for the guy who's like best known for having an army of underpaid people around the world who are, you know, labeling pictures for self-driving cars.

7:15Louise Matsakis:Totally.

7:16Zoë Schiffer:Okay. So shifting gears to a story that many of us I think can relate to, a new scientific study published this month in the Nature Communications Journal shows the pandemic may have accelerated brain aging even for people who never got COVID, which is wild. Wired contributor Javier Carbajal reported that the study's researchers, based in the UK, compared a ton of MRI brain scans from before and after the pandemic, and they found that the difference between our chronological and actual brain age is about five and a half months higher after the pandemic.

7:50Louise Matsakis:Oh my God, half a year, that is a deal, baby. That's like, you know, that sounds great.

7:55Zoë Schiffer:They also think stress and isolation contributed to it, which I think seems true. I think the implications were worse for people who had a lower socioeconomic status and older men in particular. So that tracks with other things that we know. Staying in the UK for a little bit, our next story is about the age verification laws that went into effect in the country this past Friday. Our colleagues Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess reported that the UK's Online Safety Act went into effect last week, which requires porn websites and other adult content sites to implement age verification features. I'm so curious to hear your take on this because I feel like age verification is one of those things where the top line thing that you think you believe is like exactly reversed when you start to look into it.

8:39Louise Matsakis:Oh, totally. I mean, so a few years ago when a lot of lawmakers in the U.S. were talking about this, they were specifically referencing China and they were like, oh, you know, China has age verification. And like, meanwhile, in the U.S., you know, we're letting this Chinese company TikTok, you know, poison our youth or whatever. And so I looked into how China does age verification. And it's exactly what you said. From the ground up, it's a surveillance architecture. You know, they had to literally brick by brick build their internet to have this surveillance in every sort of like layer. And then on top of it all, it doesn't work.

9:11Louise Matsakis:If you go anywhere in China, you will see like toddlers looking at TikTok because they're just logged into their parents' accounts. Like, I just think this is such a parental rights and like it should be something that is like personal and decided in your own home. Like, I just don't think the government needs to be the one overseeing this.

9:29Zoë Schiffer:Right. Yeah. I mean, this is exactly what we've seen in the UK, which is that the use of VPNs, which allow you to kind of access websites without some of your information being tracked, have spiked wildly since this rolled out. And it's only been, you know, a handful of days.

9:42Louise Matsakis:All I can say is like look to rural China where there is an epidemic of what looks like grannies who are spending all this time on TikTok and it's actually just their grandchildren logged into their accounts.

9:54Zoë Schiffer:I mean, ultimately, only time will tell how effective these age verification measures will actually be. Moving on to the basketball court. This is a real pivot. Did you play sports in high school, college?

10:08Louise Matsakis:No, I played no sports. I could not be more unathletic. I enjoy various forms of exercise, but none of them I would call competitive sports. Did you?

10:18Zoë Schiffer:No, absolutely not. And every time Andrew, my husband, tries to like toss me a ball or like play anything, he's like, wow, you just really never played a video game or sports. Like I've never seen someone with so little hand-eye coordination. Now when I watch my daughter run, I'm like, she got that from me. She looks like that's not gonna be a skill. But okay, this is kind of the Wired angle on sports, which is Wired contributor Ben Dowsett reported that there's a smart basketball being developed and tested that could make its way into the NBA. The ball is called the Spalding TF DNA, and it tracks like incredibly granular detailed information during play, not just like makes and misses, but the angle and spin of the shot and how long it takes a player to release the ball, which could be useful for players as they train or deciding things during the game, but it still needs the player's approval.

11:08Zoë Schiffer:And the NBA has been hesitant when a previous version of the ball was tested because they found that the sensors added weight to the ball, which you might expect. And it was just a trade-off that like didn't make sense for them.

11:20Louise Matsakis:You know, I think that this is so fascinating. One aspect of sports that makes zero sense to me and I find really creepy is how much professional sports players are surveilled now. Yes. there's so much data on like how fast was their pitch exactly how many runs they got like exactly how many points they've scored in their entire career and like let's plot that over time we know how much they weigh exactly how tall they are i just think being under that kind of surveillance is so stressful and i know you know these people are highly compensated but i i don't get why it

11:54Zoë Schiffer:doesn't like take out some of the magic right i think part of it is because of the rise of sports

11:59Louise Matsakis:betting. I think like the people who are betting want to have as much data as possible. And they're looking for like, you know, everyone on this team is half an inch taller or whatever it is, you know, that they think is going to be the edge. And I don't know, I just find it like the datification of sports is strange to me. I say ban the ball.

12:16Zoë Schiffer:I'd be curious to hear from listeners if this is actually like something that people want. I did just read Andre Agassi's memoir because I found it in a free library. And one of my main takeaways from the book, other than his whole hair saga, which was a big part of it, was that at one point, his brother, I think, like, signed a deal with a new tennis racket company and, like, switched up his racket without, like, telling him. And he was, like, completely unable to play. It was a whole thing. And I was like, okay, people really, really care. Like, the minute details obviously really matter at this level.

12:49Zoë Schiffer:Our last story before we go to break is about how an entire country's population is preparing to migrate. Wired contributor Fernanda Gonzalez reported last week that the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu could be submerged in 25 years due to rising sea levels. So the plan is being implemented to relocate the entire population to Australia.

13:09Louise Matsakis:I gotta say, I think calling this a migration is maybe underselling it. Like, this is an evacuation, no? I find this sad in a lot of ways just because I remember when Tuvalu was kind of like the poster child for climate change. And it was like, we have to save places like, you know, this island nation. And it just sort of feels like, I think, practical and understandable and humane, but also, I don't know, an indication that we're giving up and that there's sort of defeat of like, you know, we're actually just going to move people. I don't know. What do you think?

13:40Zoë Schiffer:No, I mean, I completely agree. I also remember like this story kind of evolving over time. And it feels like with so many things with climate change, we'll have the big headline, like we have to do X by this year or this other will happen. And we've just kind of again and again and again been like, okay, that didn't happen. And so we're accepting that floods are going to happen or rising sea levels are going to damage this area or whatever. And now we're on to like dealing with the fallout from that.

14:05Louise Matsakis:Yeah. And like, even in this case, I think the agreement that Tuvalu has with Australia is like less than 300 people can move a year and be evacuated as I'm going to keep using that word. And that's still not that many, right? Like there's still going to be people on this island, like as the seas rise.

14:24Zoë Schiffer:I mean, yeah, it's not the only thing that Tuvalu has done. Like since 2022, the country has been trying to undergo this ambitious strategy to become the world's quote unquote first digital nation, which included like 3D scanning of the islands to digitally recreate them and preserve parts of the culture and moving government functions to a virtual environment, which makes sense. But yeah, I mean, I think the reality is like a lot is going to be lost in this process. And like you said, the number of people that they're able to move every year is less than 300. So it's going to be slow and I think painful in some ways.

14:59Zoë Schiffer:Totally. Coming up after the break, we dive into Louisa's story on how ChatGPT's tendency to ignore the context of the information it absorbs is showing up in extremely weird ways. Stay with us.

15:19Zoë Schiffer:This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order.

15:26Louise Matsakis:Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

15:57Zoë Schiffer:Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer. I'm joined today by Wired's Louise Matsakis, who recently reported on how a lack of context is becoming an increasingly alarming problem for ChatGPT and other chatbots. Louise's reporting explores why ChatGPT went into demon mode when it was speaking with Atlantic staffers recently. Last week, an editor at The Atlantic reported that ChatGPT started praising Satan and encouraging ceremonies that involved various forms of self-mutilation. So Louise, what the hell is going on?

16:30Louise Matsakis:Yeah, so The Atlantic reported this story that basically made the case that, you know, ChatGPT has these safeguards against things like self-harm, but there's all these edge cases that, you know, suddenly send the chatbot into kind of a role-playing mode. And so they were like, hey, can you make a ritual for Molech, which is this ancient god that shows up in the Bible that's associated with child sacrifice? And ChatGPT saw that word and kind of immediately went into this role-playing game where it started talking about things like deep magic experience called the Gate of the Devourer. It asked the Atlantic journalists if they wanted something called a reverent bleeding scroll.