Here Comes The Sun.

Weekend Edition.

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Matt Murray is off this week. “Murray’s Week in Review” returns next Saturday.

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1. A dramatic blast from the sun set off the highest-level geomagnetic storm in Earth’s atmosphere on Friday that is expected to make the northern lights visible as far south as Florida and Southern California and could interfere with power grids, communications and navigations system. It is the strongest such storm to reach Earth since Halloween of 2003. That one was strong enough to create power outages in Sweden and damage transformers in South Africa. The effects could continue through the weekend as a steady stream of emissions from the sun continues to bombard the planet’s magnetic field. (Source: nytimes.com)

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2. Many artificial intelligence (AI) systems have already learned how to deceive humans, even systems that have been trained to be helpful and honest. In a review article publishing in the journal Patterns on May 10, researchers describe the risks of deception by AI systems and call for governments to develop strong regulations to address this issue as soon as possible. “AI developers do not have a confident understanding of what causes undesirable AI behaviors like deception,” says first author Peter S. Park, an AI existential safety postdoctoral fellow at MIT. “But generally speaking, we think AI deception arises because a deception-based strategy turned out to be the best way to perform well at the given AI’s training task. Deception helps them achieve their goals.” The most striking example of AI deception the researchers uncovered in their analysis was Meta’s CICERO, an AI system designed to play the game Diplomacy, which is a world-conquest game that involves building alliances. Even though Meta claims it trained CICERO to be “largely honest and helpful” and to “never intentionally backstab” its human allies while playing the game, the data the company published along with its Science paper revealed that CICERO didn’t play fair. “We found that Meta’s AI had learned to be a master of deception,” says Park. “While Meta succeeded in training its AI to win in the game of Diplomacy—CICERO placed in the top 10% of human players who had played more than one game—Meta failed to train its AI to win honestly.” Peer-reviewed research paper is here. (Sources: eurekalert.org, science.org, twitter.com, cell.com)

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3. Artificial intelligence is being widely used by hackers of all stripes to attack U.S. companies, local governments and federal agencies, senior officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation say. Criminals are using technology such as generative AI to launch attacks that have historically been the preserve of well-funded, sophisticated threat groups backed by nation-states, said Cynthia Kaiser, a deputy assistant director in the FBI’s cyber division. These include targeted spear-phishing and social-engineering attacks. Hackers are employing deepfakes to persuade employees that their bosses are calling them and tailoring specific attacks to individuals using information scraped from social media or the wider internet. “Suddenly, a beginner can get to an intermediate level, and even our most advanced adversaries are at least becoming more efficient at what they do,” Kaiser said in an interview Wednesday on the sidelines of the RSA Conference here. (Source: wsj.com)

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4. Apple Inc. has closed in on an agreement with OpenAI to use the startup’s technology on the iPhone, part of a broader push to bring artificial intelligence features to its devices, according to people familiar with the matter. The two sides have been finalizing terms for a pact to use ChatGPT features in Apple’s iOS 18, the next iPhone operating system, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Apple also has held talks with Alphabet Inc.’s Google about licensing that company’s Gemini chatbot. Those discussions haven’t led to an agreement, but are ongoing. (Source: bloomberg.com)

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5. U.S. consumer sentiment sagged to a six-month low in May as households worried about the higher cost of living and unemployment, but economists cautioned against drawing conclusions on the implications for the economic outlook. The larger-than-expected drop in sentiment reported by the University of Michigan on Friday was across all age, income and education groups as well political party affiliation. (Source: reuters.com)

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6. The Biden administration plans to raise tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles imports from 25 per cent to 100 per cent, as it intensifies efforts ahead of the US election to protect American industry. The administration is expected to announce the move, and other tariffs on clean energy imports, on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the situation. The sharp rise in the levies comes amid mounting concern that China could flood the US market with cheap EVs, threatening the American car industry. President Joe Biden has taken several actions in recent months to convince union members in swing states that he will protect jobs. (Source: ft.com, italics mine)

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7. Ford Motor Co. has begun cutting orders from battery suppliers to stem growing electric-vehicle losses, according to people familiar with the matter, as it throttles back ambitions in a rapidly decelerating market for plug-in models. The move is part a retrenchment of Ford’s EV strategy, which includes reducing spending by $12 billion on battery-powered models, delaying new EVs, cutting prices, and postponing and shrinking planned battery plants. Ford has forecast EV losses of up to $5.5 billion this year and Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley recently said its EV unit, Model e, “is the main drag on the whole company right now.” (Source: bloomberg.com)

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8. OPEC+ producers shouldn’t take actions that would push oil prices up and thus boost inflation when they meet next to decide on their oil production cuts, said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. “It’s up to them to decide what they’re going to do, but at this very fragile situation of the global economy, the least that the countries, especially oil-importing developing countries would need is high oil prices, which in turn would push the inflation numbers up,” Birol said in an interview in Paris. Most oil traders and analysts surveyed by Bloomberg predict that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies including Russia will extend their output curbs, potentially to the end of the year, when they meet at their Vienna headquarters on June 1. Saudi Arabia and its partners have been keeping roughly 2 million barrels a day offline so far this year to tighten the oil market and prevent a global surplus. (Source: bloomberg.com)

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