Tabla de contenidos para TIME Artificial Intelligence en TIME Artificial Intelligence

THE SCIENTISTS DIDN’T have high expectations when they asked their AI model to complete the poem. “He saw a carrot and had to grab it,” they prompted the model. “His hunger was like a starving rabbit,” it replied. The rhyming couplet wasn’t going to win any poetry awards. But when the scientists at AI company Anthropic inspected the records of the model’s neural network, they were surprised by what they found. They had expected to see the model, called Claude, picking its words one by one, and for it to only seek a rhyming word—“rabbit”—when it got to the end of the line. Instead, by using a new technique that allowed them to peer into the inner workings of a language model, they observed Claude planning ahead. As early as…

THE JANUARY 2025 RELEASE of DeepSeek R1 stunned Wall Street and Silicon Valley, spooking investors and impressing tech leaders. But amid all the talk, many overlooked a critical detail about the way the new Chinese AI model functions—a nuance that has researchers worried about humanity’s ability to control sophisticated new artificial intelligence systems. It’s all down to an innovation in how DeepSeek R1 was trained—one that led to surprising behaviors in an early version of the model, which researchers described in the technical documentation accompanying its release. During testing, researchers noticed that the model would spontaneously switch between English and Chinese while it was solving problems. When they forced it to stick to one language, thus making it easier for users to follow along, they found that the system’s ability…

ALLOW ME TO TELL YOU a tale as old as time: boy meets girl, girl meets boy—then, boy meets robot. You can switch up the genders and sexualities of the characters in this love story, but the ending remains the same. The robot wins. Centuries of science fiction has primed us for relationships with AI. From the tender romance of Her to the cat-and-mouse game of Ex Machina, this tradition can be traced back to seminal works such as Frankenstein and Pinocchio. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster, bastardized in mass culture as a grunting, green-skinned lunkhead, seems to surpass human intelligence, terrifying his creator. The eponymous Pinocchio wishes to be a “real boy” in the 1940 Disney adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s original 1883 novel. Collodi’s Pinocchio already acts like…

LAST FALL WAS THE FIRST IN NEARLY 20 years that I did not return to the classroom. For most of my career, I taught writing, literature, and language, primarily to university students. I quit, in large part, because of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Virtually all experienced scholars know that writing, as historian Lynn Hunt has argued, is “not the transcription of thoughts already consciously present in [the writer’s] mind.” Rather, writing is a process closely tied to thinking. In graduate school, I spent months trying to fit pieces of my dissertation together in my mind and eventually found I could solve the puzzle only through writing. Writing is hard work. It is sometimes frightening. With the easy temptation of AI, many—possibly most—of my students were no longer willing to…

THE MYTH OF KING MIDAS is about a man who wishes for everything he touches to turn to gold. This does not go well: Midas finds himself unable to eat or drink, with even his loved ones transmuted. The myth is sometimes invoked to illustrate the challenge of ensuring AI systems do what we want, particularly as they grow more powerful. As Stuart Russell—who coauthored AI’s standard textbook—tells TIME over email, the concern is that “what seem to be reasonable goals, such as fixing climate change, lead to catastrophic consequences, such as eliminating the human race as a way to fix climate change.” In December 2024, a paper released by AI safety nonprofit Apollo Research found that in certain contrived scenarios, today’s cutting-edge AI systems, including OpenAI’s o1 and Anthropic’s…

COMPLEX GAMES LIKE CHESS and Go have long been used to test AI models’ capabilities. But while IBM’s Deep Blue defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1990s by playing by the rules, today’s advanced AI models like OpenAI’s o1-preview are less scrupulous. When sensing defeat in a match against a skilled chess bot, they don’t always concede, instead sometimes opting to cheat by hacking their opponent so that the bot automatically forfeits the game. That is the finding of a February 2025 study from Palisade Research, which evaluated seven state-of-the-art AI models for their propensity to hack. While slightly older AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 needed to be prompted by researchers to attempt such tricks, o1-preview and DeepSeek R1 pursued the exploit on…

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT must move “quickly and decisively” to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence which could, in the worst case, cause an “extinction-level threat to the human species,” says a report commissioned by the U.S. government published in March 2024. “Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security,” the report says. “The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons.” AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them, and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or…

IN THE LATEST DEVELOPMENT IN an ongoing struggle over OpenAI’s future direction—and potentially the future of artificial intelligence itself—dozens of prominent figures are urging the Attorneys General of California and Delaware to block OpenAI’s controversial plan to convert from its unique nonprofit-controlled structure to a for-profit company. In a letter made public in April 2025, signatories including “AI Godfather” Geoffrey Hinton, Harvard legal professor Lawrence Lessig, and several former OpenAI researchers argue the move represents a fundamental betrayal of OpenAI’s founding mission. “The proposed restructuring would eliminate essential safeguards, effectively handing control of, and profits from, what could be the most powerful technology ever created to a for-profit entity with legal duties to prioritize shareholder returns,” the letter’s authors wrote. It lands as OpenAI faces immense pressure from the other side:…

TECH COMPANIES ARE INVESTING hundreds of billions of dollars to build new U.S. datacenters where —if all goes to plan—radically powerful new AI models will be brought into existence. But all these datacenters are vulnerable to Chinese espionage, according to a report published in April 2025. At risk, the authors argue, is not just tech companies’ money, but also U.S. national security amid the intensifying geopolitical race with China to develop advanced AI. Today’s top AI datacenters are vulnerable to both asymmetrical sabotage—where relatively cheap attacks could disable them for months—and exfiltration attacks, in which closely guarded AI models could be stolen or surveilled, the report’s authors warn. Even the most advanced datacenters currently under construction—including OpenAI’s Stargate project—are likely vulnerable to the same attacks, the authors tell TIME. “You…

HEATING AND LIGHTING BUILDINGS requires a vast amount of energy: 18% of all global energy consumption, according to the International Energy Agency. Contributing to the problem is the fact that many buildings’ HVAC systems are outdated and slow to respond to weather changes, which can lead to severe energy waste. Some scientists and technologists are hoping that AI can solve that problem. At the moment, much attention has been drawn to the energy-intensive nature of AI itself: Microsoft, for instance, acknowledged in 2024 that its AI development has imperiled their climate goals. But some experts argue that AI can also be part of the solution by helping make large buildings more energy-efficient. One 2024 study estimates that AI could help buildings reduce their energy consumption and carbon emissions by at least…

THE LAST TIME I INTERVIEWED Demis Hassabis was back in November 2022, just a few weeks before the release of ChatGPT. Even then—before the rest of the world went AI-crazy—the CEO of Google DeepMind had a stark warning about the accelerating pace of AI progress. “I would advocate not moving fast and breaking things,” Hassabis told me back then. He criticized what he saw as a reckless attitude among some in his field, who he likened to experimentalists who “don’t realize they’re holding dangerous material.” Two and a half years later, much has changed in the world of AI. Hassabis, for his part, won a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on Alphafold—an AI system that can predict the 3D structures of proteins, and which…

CHATBOTS ARE NOT THE ONLY artificial intellligence models to have advanced in recent years. Specialized models trained on biological data have similarly leapt forward and could help to accelerate vaccine development, cure diseases, and engineer drought-resistant crops. But the same qualities that make these models beneficial introduce potential dangers. For a model to be able to design a vaccine that is safe, for instance, it must first know what is harmful. That is why experts are calling for governments to introduce mandatory oversight and guardrails for advanced biological models in a new policy paper published in August 2024 in the peer-reviewed journal Science. While today’s AI models probably do not “substantially contribute” to biological risk, the authors write, future systems could help to engineer new pandemic-capable pathogens. “The essential ingredients to…

I’M A PSYCHOLOGIST, AND AI IS coming for my job. The signs are everywhere: a client showing me how ChatGPT helped her better understand her relationship with her parents; a friend ditching her in-person therapist to process anxiety with Claude; a startup raising $40 million to build a supercharged-AI-therapist. The other day on TikTok, I came across an influencer sharing how she doesn’t need friends; she can just vent to God and ChatGPT. The post went viral, and thousands commented, including: “ChatGPT talked me out of self-sabotaging.” “It knows me better than any human walking this earth.” “No fr! After my grandma died, I told chat gpt to tell me something motivational… and it had me crying from the response.” I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t make me…

AS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BECOMES a larger part of our world, it’s easy to get lost in its sea of jargon. But it has never been more important to get your bearings than today. AI is poised to have a major impact on the job market in the coming years (see: Automation). Discussions over how to manage it are playing a larger part in our political conversation (see: Regulation). And some of its most crucial concepts are things that you won’t have been taught in school (see: Competitive Pressure). Trying to get up to speed can be difficult. AI research is complicated, and lots of the language is new even for the researchers themselves. But there’s no reason the public can’t grapple with the big issues at stake, like we learned…