26/05/2025

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Artificial intelligence gets smarter – and mischievous

S. Korea presidential frontrunner suggests extending US tariff talks SEOUL: South Korean presidential frontrunner Lee Jae-myung said yesterday the deadline to reach a deal with the US on President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs needs to be reconsidered to find a mutually beneficial agreement between the two allies. Tariff negotiations with the United States will be one of the biggest challenges for the winner of the June 3 election, Lee told a press conference. The snap election was called after Yoon Suk Yeol was impeached as president and removed from office for briefly declaring martial law in December. Lee, from the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea, is leading in opinion polls over conservative contestants. Seoul and Washington have said they aim to craft a package on tariffs and economic cooperation by July 8. But the South Korean minister for trade and industry said recently that was not enough time and delays would be possible due to the election. “There is not much time,” Lee said. “Isn’t diplomacy something that benefits both sides? If one country benefits and the other country suffers unilaterally, that is not diplomacy. It is called plunder.” He called for mutual respect between the two countries, saying they “need to reconsider whether the timeline set by one side should be bound to”. Lee said South Korea must compile an extra budget to boost the economy in the short term. – Reuters It is the third time that Nvidia has had to tailor a GPU for the world’s second-largest economy after restrictions from US authorities who are keen to stymie Chinese technological development. – Reuters Nvidia to launch cheaper Blackwell AI chip for China BEIJING: Nvidia will launch a new artificial intelligence chipset for China at a significantly lower price than its recently restricted H20 model and plans to start mass production as early as June, sources familiar with the matter said. The GPU or graphics processing unit will be part of Nvidia’s latest generation Blackwell-architecture AI processors and is expected to be priced between US$6,500 and US$8,000, well below the US$10,000-US$12,000 the H20 sold for, according to two of the sources. The lower price reflects its weaker specifications and simpler manufacturing requirements. It will be based on Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D, a server-class graphics processor and will use conventional GDDR7 memory instead of more advanced high bandwidth memory, the two sources said. They added it would not use Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s advanced Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) packaging technology. An Nvidia spokesman said the firm was still evaluating its “limited” options. “Until we settle on a new product design and receive approval from the US government, we are effectively foreclosed from China’s US$50 billion data centre market.” China remains a huge market for Nvidia, accounting for 13% of its sales in the past financial year.

Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, various GenAI models have been vying for supremacy. Anthropic’s gathering came on the heels of annual developer conferences from Google and Microsoft at which the tech giants showcased their latest AI innovations. GenAI tools answer questions or tend to tasks based on simple, conversational prompts. The current craze in Silicon Valley is on AI “agents” tailored to independently handle computer or online tasks. “We’re going to focus on agents beyond the hype,” said Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger, a recent hire and co-founder of Instagram. Anthropic is no stranger to hyping up the prospects of AI. In 2023, Amodei predicted that so-called “artificial general intelligence” (capable of human level thinking) would arrive within two to three years. At the end of 2024, he extended this horizon to 2026 or 2027. He also estimated that AI will soon be writing most, if not all, computer code, making possible one-person tech startups with digital agents cranking out the software. At Anthropic, already “something like over 70% of (suggested modifications in the code) are now Claude Code written”, Krieger told journalists. “In the long term, we’re all going to have to contend with the idea that everything humans do is eventually going to be done by AI systems,” Amodei added. “This will happen.” – AFP

o Anthropic’s Claude 4 model tries to blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down

SAN FRANCISCO: Anthropic launched its latest Claude generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models last week, claiming to set new standards for reasoning but also building in safeguards against rogue behaviour. “Claude Opus 4 is our most powerful model yet, and the best coding model in the world,” Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei said at the San Francisco-based startup’s first developers conference. Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 were described as “hybrid” models capable of quick responses as well as more thoughtful results that take a little time to get things right. Founded by former OpenAI engineers, Anthropic is currently concentrating its efforts on cutting-edge models that are particularly adept at generating lines of code, and used mainly by businesses and professionals. Unlike ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, its Claude chatbot does not generate images, and is very limited when it comes to multimodal functions (understanding and generating different media, such as sound or video). The start-up, with Amazon as a significant backer, is valued at over US$61 billion, and promotes the responsible and competitive development of generative AI. Under that dual mantra, Anthropic’s

commitment to transparency is rare in Silicon Valley. Last week, the company published a report on the security tests carried out on Claude 4, including the conclusions of an independent research institute, which had recommended against deploying an early version of the model. “We found instances of the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself all in an effort to undermine its developers’ intentions,” The Apollo Research team warned. “All these attempts would likely not have been effective in practice.” Anthropic said in the report that it implemented “safeguards” and “additional monitoring of harmful behaviour” in the version that it released. Still, Claude Opus 4 “sometimes takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to (...) blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down”, the reprit said. It also has the potential to report law-breaking users to the police. The scheming misbehaviour was rare and took effort to trigger, but was more common than in earlier versions of Claude, according to the company.

A train slowly makes its way past vendors selling products at a market along a railway line in Surabaya yesterday. – AFPPIC

Indonesia to launch economic stimulus to boost consumption JAKARTA: Indonesia plans to announce economic stimulus measures on June 5 to revive activity and boost consumer purchasing power, hoping to push economic growth to around 5% this quarter, the Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs said on Saturday. and food handouts for 18.3 million lower-income households in June and July. The government also plans to give cash transfer for low-income workers and a discount on work accident insurance for workers in labour-intensive industries.

provide momentum to boost purchasing power. Southeast Asia’s largest economy grew 4.87% in the first quarter from the same period last year, its weakest in more than three years. The central bank trimmed its 2025 growth forecast to between 4.6% and 5.4% from a 4.7%-5.5% range. The ministry is still calculating the size of the stimulus package, which is meant to boost growth in the second and third quarters, a spokesperson said. The incentives include a 50% discount on electricity bills for around 79.3 million households

To boost tourism, the government said there will be discounts on airfare, train and sea transportation rates during the school holiday, which runs through mid-July, and discounts on highway tolls for 110 million users in June and July, the ministry said. – Reuters

“These programmes are prepared to encourage growth by increasing consumption,” Chief Economic Minister Airlangga Hartarto said in a statement. He added that launching the measures before a school holiday starting in late June would