February 4, 2025 News
Google Removes Ban on AI for Weapons and Surveillance from Its Principles
Google has quietly removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website, replacing it with language about supporting "national security." This change comes amid ongoing employee protests over Google's contracts with the U.S. and Israeli militaries, with the Pentagon's AI chief recently confirming some company AI models are accelerating the military's kill chain.
Skynet Chance (+0.15%): Google's removal of explicit prohibitions against AI for weapons systems represents a significant ethical shift that could accelerate the development and deployment of autonomous or semi-autonomous weapons systems, a key concern in Skynet-like scenarios involving loss of human control.
Skynet Date (-2 days): The explicit connection to military kill chains and removal of weapons prohibitions suggests a rapid normalization of AI in lethal applications, potentially accelerating the timeline for deploying increasingly autonomous systems in high-stakes military contexts.
AGI Progress (+0.02%): While this policy change doesn't directly advance AGI capabilities, it removes ethical guardrails that previously limited certain applications, potentially enabling research and development in areas that could contribute to more capable and autonomous systems in high-stakes environments.
AGI Date (-1 days): The removal of ethical limitations will likely accelerate specific applications of AI in defense and surveillance, areas that typically receive significant funding and could drive capability advances relevant to AGI in select domains like autonomous decision-making.
Figure AI Abandons OpenAI Partnership for In-House AI Models After 'Major Breakthrough'
Figure AI has terminated its partnership with OpenAI to focus on developing in-house AI models following what it describes as a "major breakthrough" in embodied AI. CEO Brett Adcock claims vertical integration is necessary for solving embodied AI at scale, promising to demonstrate unprecedented capabilities on their humanoid robot within 30 days.
Skynet Chance (+0.06%): Figure's pursuit of fully integrated, embodied AI for humanoid robots increases risk by creating more autonomous physical systems that might act independently in the real world, potentially with less oversight than when using external AI providers.
Skynet Date (-1 days): The claimed "major breakthrough" and vertical integration approach could accelerate development of more capable embodied AI systems, potentially bringing forward the timeline for advanced autonomous robots that can operate independently in complex environments.
AGI Progress (+0.04%): Figure's claimed breakthrough in embodied AI represents significant progress toward systems that can understand and interact with the physical world, a crucial capability for AGI that extends beyond language and image processing.
AGI Date (-1 days): The shift to specialized in-house AI models optimized for robotics suggests companies are finding faster paths to advanced capabilities through vertical integration, potentially accelerating the timeline to embodied intelligence components of AGI.
ByteDance's OmniHuman-1 Creates Ultra-Realistic Deepfake Videos From Single Images
ByteDance researchers have unveiled OmniHuman-1, a new AI system capable of generating remarkably convincing deepfake videos from just a single reference image and audio input. The system, trained on 19,000 hours of video content, can create videos of arbitrary length with adjustable aspect ratios and even modify existing videos, raising serious concerns about fraud and misinformation.
Skynet Chance (+0.04%): While not directly related to autonomous AI control issues, the technology enables unprecedented synthetic media creation capabilities that could be weaponized for large-scale manipulation, undermining trust in authentic information and potentially destabilizing social systems humans rely on for control.
Skynet Date (+0 days): This development doesn't significantly affect the timeline for a potential Skynet scenario as it primarily advances media synthesis rather than autonomous decision-making or self-improvement capabilities that would be central to control risks.
AGI Progress (+0.03%): OmniHuman-1 demonstrates significant advancement in AI's ability to understand, model and generate realistic human appearances, behaviors and movements from minimal input, showing progress in complex multimodal reasoning and generation capabilities relevant to AGI.
AGI Date (+0 days): The system's ability to generate highly convincing human-like behavior from minimal input demonstrates faster-than-expected progress in modeling human appearances and behaviors, suggesting multimodal generative capabilities are advancing more rapidly than anticipated.
OpenAI's Operator Agent Shows Promise But Still Requires Significant Human Oversight
OpenAI's new AI agent Operator, which can perform tasks independently on the internet, shows promise but falls short of true autonomy. During testing, the system successfully navigated websites and completed basic tasks but required frequent human intervention, permissions, and guidance, demonstrating that fully autonomous AI agents remain out of reach.
Skynet Chance (-0.13%): Operator's significant limitations and need for constant human supervision demonstrates that autonomous AI systems remain far from acting independently, requiring explicit permissions and facing many basic operational challenges that reduce concerns about uncontrolled AI action.
Skynet Date (+2 days): The revealed limitations of Operator suggest that truly autonomous AI agents are further away than industry hype suggests, as even a cutting-edge system from OpenAI struggles with basic web navigation tasks without frequent human intervention.
AGI Progress (+0.02%): Despite limitations, Operator demonstrates meaningful progress in AI systems that can perceive visual web interfaces, navigate complex environments, and take actions over extended sequences, showing advancement toward more general-purpose AI capabilities.
AGI Date (+0 days): The significant human supervision still required by this advanced agent system suggests that practical, reliable AGI capabilities in real-world environments are further away than optimistic timelines might suggest, despite incremental progress.
Qeen.ai Secures $10M Seed Funding to Develop Autonomous E-commerce AI Agents
Dubai-based Qeen.ai has raised a $10 million seed round led by Prosus Ventures to develop AI-powered marketing agents for e-commerce businesses in the Middle East. Founded by Google and DeepMind alumni, the startup uses reinforcement learning technology to create fully automated agents that handle content creation, marketing, and conversational sales for merchants.
Skynet Chance (+0.01%): While Qeen.ai's autonomous agents represent another step toward AI systems operating independently in commercial contexts, their narrow focus on e-commerce optimization and bounded operational scope limits potential control concerns.
Skynet Date (+0 days): The development of domain-specific commercial AI agents is an expected progression that neither significantly accelerates nor delays potential risks related to advanced AI systems; these specialized applications don't substantially alter the timeline toward more general autonomous systems.
AGI Progress (+0.01%): Qeen.ai's reinforcement learning technology applied to e-commerce demonstrates incremental progress in creating AI systems that can autonomously optimize for specific goals in a complex domain, though it remains highly specialized rather than general.
AGI Date (+0 days): The commercial success and rapid funding of specialized AI agent applications creates additional investment and development momentum in the agent space, potentially accelerating progress toward more capable autonomous systems.