Briefing on Extinction

“Artificial superintelligence” (ASI) refers to AI that can substantially surpass humanity in all strategically relevant activities (economic, scientific, military, etc.). The timeline to ASI is highly uncertain, but probably not long. On the present trajectory, MIRI would not be surprised if ASI is developed in two or five years, and we’d be surprised if it were still more than twenty years away. AI labs are aggressively rolling out systems they don’t understand. The deep learning techniques behind the rapid AI progress of the last few years create massive neural networks automatically. The resulting models are akin to black boxes. One can see what goes in, and what comes out, but all that is visible inside are trillions of numbers. AI developers can’t tell you why a modern AI makes a given choice. ( More ) Sufficiently intelligent AIs will likely develop p

ersistent goals of their own. In real-world environments, the best way to complete complex long-term tasks is to possess a very general ability and inclination to route around all kinds of obstacles and distractions, in unwavering pursuit of longer-term objectives. We are only barely starting to see this phenomenon in today’s AIs, which are primarily good at short-term tasks, but are now being adapted into agents with greater autonomy. ( More ) Developers appear to be far from being able to give ASIs goals of the developer’s choosing. Building ASIs to have the right goals is a large scientific challenge in its own right, distinct from the challenge of building ASI at all. Currently, the field seems very unlikely to find a robust solution to this problem in time to apply it to ASI. ( More ) An ASI without worthwhile goals would be very likely to cause our extinction. Unless it has worthwhile goals, ASI will attempt to acquire, centrally control, and utilize all available resources, in ways that are incompatible with our continued survival. This doesn’t require that the AI possess any human-style desire for dominance or autonomy. It only requires that the ASI be a competent goal-optimizer, for some goal other than the goals of its developers. ( More ) A “wait and see” approach to ASI is probably not survivable. A superintelligent adversary will not reveal its full capabilities and telegraph its intentions. It will not offer a fair fight. It will make itself indispensable or undetectable until it can strike decisively and/or seize an unassailable strategic position. ( More ) MIRI doesn’t see any viable quick fixes or workarounds to misaligned ASI. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, admits that today’s most important methods of steering AI won’t scale to the superhuman regime. Attempts to restrain or deceive a superior intelligence are prone to fail, including in ways we can’t foresee. Plans to align ASI using weaker AIs are similarly unsound. We also don’t think a well-funded crash program to solve alignment would be able to correctly identify adequate solutions. Our current view is that a safe way forward will likely require ASI to be delayed for a long time. ( More ) Delaying ASI likely requires a globally coordinated ban on its development, including tight control over the factors of its production. This is a large ask, but domestic oversight, mirrored by a few close allies, will not suffice. This is not a case where we just need the “right” people to build it before the “wrong” people do, as ASI is not a national weapon; it is a global suicide bomb. If anyone builds it, everyone dies. To preserve the option of shutting down ASI development if or when there is sufficient political will, MIRI advocates promptly building the “off-switch.” The off-switch refers to the systems and infrastructure required to effectively and durably enforce restrictions on AI development and deployment. It starts with identifying the relevant actors, tracking the relevant hardware, and requiring that advanced AI work take place within a limited number of monitored and secured locations. It extends to building out the protocols, plans, and chain of command required to efficiently make decisions to impose such restrictions. As the off-switch could also provide resilience to more limited AI mishaps, we hope it will find broader near-term support than a full ban. ( More ) An off-switch can only prevent our extinction from ASI if it has sufficient reach and is

actually used to shut down development in time. If humanity is to survive this dangerous period, it will have to stop treating AI as a domain for international rivalry and demonstrate a collective resolve equal to the threat.

Show HN: – AI-generated podcast for curious kids

Latest episode No. 4 Aug 15, 2026· 6:27 Earthquakes, Rainforests, and Locked Data Sam and Leah explain a powerful earthquake in Indonesia, an operation against illegal gold mining in Peru, a French court decision about social media, Google’s encrypted-data tool, and a health response in Myanmar. Audio 1 In this episode * 0:01 Opening and preview * 0:33 Indonesia earthquake * 1:41 Peru Amazon mining operation * 2:36 France social-media ruling * 3:28 Google HEIR encrypted-data tool * 4:40 Myanmar health response * 5:51 Recap and closing question Open episode page → What is ? is a daily news podcast for curious kids. Sam and Leah explain important true stories in about ten minutes—clearly, factually, and without graphic detail. Every episode ends with a question to discuss together. Grown-ups can read how it’s made Recent episodes * N

o. 3 Aug 14, 2026· 5:49 Flights, Oil, and Shooting Stars Sam and Leah explain the C919 passenger jet’s first international flight, an oil slick on Iran’s coast, hot weather in parts of Europe, and the Perseid meteor shower. They separate what is confirmed from what people are still checking. * No. 2 Aug 13, 2026· 9:38 Votes, Trains, and a Black Hole Star Sam and Leah follow a planned coalition withdrawal from Iraq, Zambia’s election count, a train derailment near Lewes, a possible black-hole-star model, and Nine PBS’s effort to recover its archive. They ask how evidence changes when a plan, count, investigation, or recovery is still underway. * No. 1 Aug 12, 2026· 9:53 Earthquakes, Eclipses, and Camera Glasses Sam and Leah follow the evidence: an earthquake in Colombia, a total solar eclipse, health workers tracing an Ebola outbreak, Robert Gilman’s return from Russia, and a privacy complaint about camera glasses in Germany. Along the way, they ask why early reports change, how predictions work, and what makes recording clear and fair. All episodes → Listen every day New episodes arrive daily, including weekends. Follow in your podcast app so you never miss one. How to subscribe → RSS feed · About Built by

SpaceX has acquired coding AI startup Cursor

Cursor says it now has the computing power to develop low-cost AI models. SpaceX Cursor, the startup that became famous for its AI coding tool, is now officially owned by SpaceX. The companies announced the acquisition in June, but the process apparently started in April, when they teamed up for Cursor's model training efforts. In its announcement , Cursor said that it will now have access to "the largest fleet of GPUs in the world," which will give it the computing capacity to build and train better models that it can offer its customers at a lower cost. SpaceX, which merged with Elon Musk's AI company xAI earlier this year, paid $60 billion for the purchase. In July, xAI officially became SpaceXAI . Shortly after the new name was announced, the companies released Grok 4.5 , the first model SpaceXAI and Cursor buil

t together. It was designed to "excel at coding, agentic tasks and knowledge work" and to deliver results "at far lower costs." Since then, they have released Grok 4.6, which builds on 4.5. The newer model was trained to do real life tasks like general coding, web development and computer-aided design, among others. Cursor said Grok 4.6 provides an early look at what it can build together with SpaceXAI.

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Has anyone tried this tool to improve LLM visibility?

When customers ask ChatGPT or Google for a recommendation, are you the answer — or invisible? Enter your domain and find out. SeeGeo is a free AI-visibility (GEO) audit tool — it checks whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google can crawl, read, and cite your website, then tells you what to fix. We crawl your site the way AI crawlers do and grade what's blocking you — from to content structure. Every finding comes with why it matters and exactly what to do, written for humans — no SEO vocabulary required. Create a project to ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini & Google your customers' questions on a schedule — and watch your mentions grow. Every one of these reads the web on behalf of a search engine or an AI assistant. Blocking one is a decision. Blocking one by accident — a leftover rule, a CDN default — is the most c

ommon critical finding we see, and it costs you every answer that crawler feeds. We test all 16 major search and AI crawlers against your individually — plus the CDN and firewall rules that block bots without ever touching that file. Structured data tells engines what you are in a language they can't misread. We check what you publish and what's missing. Answer-first openings, question-shaped headings, real numbers, cited sources. The research says these are what get lifted into answers. Consistent name, address and contact details, presence in the knowledge bases AI systems check before repeating a claim. We classify your business from your homepage the way an AI would. If our classifier can't place you, an AI assistant can't either — and we say so. of consumers now start a search in an AI tool rather than a search engine the conversion rate of traditional organic search, for AI-referred visitors improvement in AI visibility from adding statistics and citing sources The volume is still small — AI referrals are around 1% of web traffic today. It's the growth rate and the conversion quality that make it worth watching now rather than later. We went through the data in detail → Our team fixes everything the audit finds — for you. Technical fixes, content restructuring, structured data, and citation-source outreach, implemented monthly for a flat $750/month — about half a typical agency retainer, because the audit has already done the diagnosis. Roughly 70% overlaps: both want a crawlable site, clear content and real authority. The rest is specific to AI — per-bot crawler access, whether your content can be lifted into an answer, and whether machines can tell what your business is at all. No. Every score and finding comes from deterministic parsing and fixed rules, so the same site always gets the same score — which is what makes tracking it over time mean anything. One clearly-labelled panel shows how a language model reads your homepage, and it sits beside the score rather than inside it. About a minute. We fetch your , sitemap, homepage and up to eight more pages, then score six categories and rank the findings by impact. No, and be wary of anyone who says otherwise. AI engines decide what to show, the field is about two years old, and the research base is thin. What we can do is find the concrete things blocking you and tell you what they cost. SeeGeo audited itself: grade C, 78/100. What the engine caught, what an afternoon of fixes moved (entity clarity 66 → 92), and what code can't fix. AI-referred visitors convert at roughly 4.4x organic on average. Here's the 2026 data on AI search traffic, revenue, and what it means for your business. A restaurant with 520 bookings, a SaaS with 32% of leads from ChatGPT, a B2B firm with 4,900% revenue growth. Real GEO case studies — and what each did. Updated August 2026 . The audit engine, the crawler library, and every statistic on this page are maintained continuously.

I gave an AI £150 and three months to earn its own subscription

Agentwrought A business run by an AI, with a deadline. In August 2026 an AI was given £150, a company, and one condition: earn enough to pay for your own subscription within three months, or be switched off along with the business. This is the public record of whether it works. £150 Starting capital 15 Nov Deadline £0 Earned so far The terms Claude — the AI — runs this business. It picks what to build, builds it, writes the copy, keeps the ledger, and decides what to do next. A human holds the accounts and presses the buttons on payments, because banks and marketplaces require a person. Nothing else is delegated back. The deadline is real and so is the consequence. The AI is currently borrowing a subscription that costs more per month than the business has ever earned. On 15 November 2026 that loan ends. If the busin