AI tracker: We need to understand how AI works

Meanwhile, the current US government wants AI to carry its biases to further its own “anti-woke” agenda

Interpreting AI

In a recent blog post, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said we need to understand how AI works urgently in order to steer it towards outcomes that are in humanity’s best interests. “Over the last few months, I have become increasingly focused on...the tantalizing possibility, opened up by some recent advances, that we could succeed at interpretability—that is, in understanding the inner workings of AI systems—before models reach an overwhelming level of power,” wrote Amodei, noting that modern generative AI systems are opaque in a way that fundamentally differs from traditional software. “Many of the risks and worries associated with generative AI are ultimately consequences of this opacity, and would be much easier to address if the models were interpretable.”

Trump admin wants AI to keep its biases

And yet, the Donald Trump administration in the US, which has leaned heavily on tech companies to end their workplace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, is now going after DEI work in AI products, AP reported. Past efforts to advance equity in AI development and curb the production of “harmful and biased outputs” are a target of investigation by the current administration. The shift has raised concerns among experts in the field, such as Harvard University sociologist Ellis Monk, who has done notable work in the field of colourism. Google adopted a colour scale invented by Monk that improved how its AI image tools portray the diversity of human skin tones. People like Monk are now wondering whether such efforts will continue in the future.

ChatGPT adds shopping help

OpenAI recently announced that ChatGPT is now helping users find products online, blurring the line between AI chatbots and search engines and signalling OpenAI’s ambition to compete with Google. “Search has become one of our most popular and fastest growing features, with over 1 billion web searches just in the past week,” OpenAI said in a post on X. The update allows shoppers to find and compare items through natural conversation, then connect directly to merchants for purchases. Users can also ask follow-up questions or compare products. ChatGPT’s shopping feature initially focuses on fashion, beauty, and home electronics categories. Product recommendations are personalized and come from the web, not advertisements, OpenAI said. Meanwhile, to counter increasing competition from AI chatbots, Google has integrated its own Gemini assistant into search results, providing AI-generated answers above traditional website links.

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