March 7, 2025 News
Microsoft Develops Competing AI Models As Relationship With OpenAI Grows Tense
Microsoft is actively developing its own AI models, including a family called MAI and reasoning models comparable to OpenAI's o1 and o3-mini. The tech giant is also exploring alternative providers like xAI, Meta, Anthropic, and DeepSeek for its Copilot products, suggesting growing tension with its longtime collaborator OpenAI despite Microsoft's $14 billion investment.
Skynet Chance (+0.04%): Increasing competition between major AI developers likely accelerates capability advancement while potentially reducing coordination on safety measures, creating risks that competing entities might prioritize capabilities over alignment to maintain market position.
Skynet Date (-3 days): The intensified competition between Microsoft and OpenAI, along with Microsoft's simultaneous partnerships with multiple AI labs, significantly accelerates the AI arms race dynamic and likely compresses timelines for potentially risky advanced capabilities.
AGI Progress (+0.08%): Microsoft's development of competitive reasoning models and exploration of multiple AI partners indicates substantial progress in capabilities across the industry, with major resources being directed toward advancing frontier AI systems by multiple well-funded entities simultaneously.
AGI Date (-4 days): Microsoft's parallel development of its own advanced models while maintaining relationships with multiple competing AI labs significantly accelerates the competitive dynamics in frontier AI, potentially compressing AGI timelines through increased resources and competitive pressure.
Signal President Warns of Fundamental Privacy and Security Risks in Agentic AI
Signal President Meredith Whittaker has raised serious concerns about agentic AI systems at SXSW, describing them as requiring extensive system access comparable to "root permissions" to function. She warned that AI agents need access across multiple applications and services, likely processing data in non-encrypted cloud environments, creating fundamental security and privacy vulnerabilities.
Skynet Chance (+0.09%): Whittaker highlights how agentic AI requires unprecedented system-wide access across applications with root-level permissions, creating fundamental security vulnerabilities that could enable malicious exploitation or unexpected emergent behaviors with limited containment possibilities.
Skynet Date (+2 days): The identification of fundamental security and privacy risks in agentic AI may lead to increased scrutiny and regulation, potentially slowing deployment of autonomous agent capabilities until these security challenges can be addressed.
AGI Progress (+0.01%): While the article doesn't directly address technical AGI progress, it highlights important practical limitations in implementing agent architectures that will need to be solved before truly autonomous AGI systems can be deployed safely.
AGI Date (+2 days): Identifying fundamental security and privacy barriers to agentic AI implementation suggests additional technical and regulatory hurdles must be overcome before widespread deployment, likely extending timelines for AGI development.
xAI Expands AI Infrastructure with Massive Memphis Property Acquisition
Elon Musk's AI company xAI has acquired a 1 million-square-foot property in Memphis to expand its AI data center operations, complementing its existing facility. The company plans to upgrade its primary Memphis facility to 1 million Nvidia GPUs this year, up from 100,000, while also expanding with another data center in Atlanta containing $700 million in hardware.
Skynet Chance (+0.05%): The massive expansion of AI computing resources by xAI represents a significant increase in raw computing power available for AI development, which could enable training of more powerful and potentially less controllable systems. The sheer scale of infrastructure growth (10x GPU increase) suggests preparation for extremely compute-intensive AI models.
Skynet Date (-3 days): The rapid scaling of AI compute infrastructure (from 100,000 to 1 million GPUs in a single year) and xAI's aggressive expansion across multiple facilities accelerates the timeline for developing more advanced AI systems. This acceleration of capability development outpaces corresponding safety measures and oversight mechanisms.
AGI Progress (+0.08%): The substantial investment in compute resources directly advances capabilities for training larger, more sophisticated AI models. The 10x increase in GPU capacity within a year represents a significant boost to the raw computational foundation needed for AGI development.
AGI Date (-3 days): The aggressive scaling of computing infrastructure (10x increase in GPUs, multiple data centers) suggests xAI is preparing for rapid advancement in AI capabilities that could significantly compress the timeline to AGI. The massive $75 billion valuation and continued fundraising indicate sustained momentum toward this acceleration.