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The Information AI / 1:16 PM

Early Anthropic Investor Seeks VC Glory With Cash and Compute

A few months ago, venture capitalist Anjney Midha received a present from his wife while on a trip to Hawaii: a felt, tan-colored Stetson with his name monogrammed on the side. The hat was meant to cover up a brain sensor Midha has been wearing to gather neurological data for one of the many frontier startups he’s invested in. But it’s since become a wardrobe staple for him, and Midha seldom leaves home without it. He isn’t shy about its meaning to him and how he sees his standing in Silicon Valley. “There’s a new sheriff in town,” he said, flashing a smile. That sentiment isn’t just bravado. Midha, 34, a computer scientist by training, has chalked up a string of hits as an investor in recent years. His most notable one is Anthropic. He cut the company an early check in 2021 when it was valued at less than $1 billion, using a substantial portion of his and his wife’s savings. In the company’s approaching IPO, its valuation could extend to as much as $2 trillion.

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AWS Machine Learning Blog / 3:55 PM

Agent Evaluation Metric for multi-turn conversations

Multi-turn agents fail in ways single-turn evaluation misses: one early mistake corrupts every later turn. This post introduces the Agent Evaluation Metric (AEM), a decomposable, turn-level way to measure agent quality, applied to its first dimension, correctness, to pinpoint the turn that caused a failure and separate it from the turns that inherited it.

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Simon Willison LLMs / 11:55 PM

Some thoughts on the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem introduces an impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem , one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems that have been subject to a $1,000,000 prize since May 24th, 2000. The discovery is somewhat overshadowed by accusations of skulduggery from Tristan Buckmaster, an NYU mathematics professor who was collaborating on related problems with Levent Alpöge, an accomplished mathematician who currently works for Anthropic. Tristan's complaint accompanied a hastily published version of their own results. Here's the PDF describing what happened . The very short version is that Tristan and Levent worked on the problem for almost a year, making extensive use of Claude and Codex (mainly GPT-5.6 Sol), then had a breakthrough on August 15th. The mathematical rumour mill kicked into gear and Tristan and Levent heard that OpenAI had heard that Anthropic had resolved "a major open problem", so they reached out and learned that OpenAI had a team working on a related problem, with a similar approach. Quoting Tristan: I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI. I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer. It gets more complicated from there. The OpenAI team offered to wait for Tristan to publish, or to have him author a paper about their result, but were clear that Levent would not be invited as a co-author due to OpenAI's competitive relationship with his employer. Here's how OpenAI described their work: On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors and by the step change in performance of our internal model, we launched an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems. [...] The agents arrived at their resolution on Saturday, September 5, about 88 hours after the first agents were launched. Lean formalization and verification took an additional 17 hours via GPT‑6 Astra. Across all attempted problems, the agents sent 4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens. In the process of resolving the Navier–Stokes problem, the agents sent 2.7 million messages and used approximately 130 billion output tokens. (We don't know the cost structure of the internal model they used, but 300 billion output tokens at public API prices for GPT-6 Astra would cost $15,000,000 .) Here's where they provide their perspective on Tristan and Levent's work (emphasis mine): Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, and Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU. After the completion of our full project and Lean verification (on September 6th), believing from the rumor they also had a solution of Navier–Stokes, we reached out to them to offer a concurrent release of our result and to recognize their priority in a joint announcement. [...] We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models . However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced). My interpretation of what happened here is that OpenAI heard that some Millennium Prize problems had been solved using LLMs and saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate the power of their latest model, without thinking too hard about the optics of scooping a team who had been using OpenAI's own models to work on this problem for the best part of a year. This situation appears to mirror what's happening in the world of computer security right now. Anil Madhavapeddy recently pointed out that Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days , because if someone knows that some software has an unpatched vulnerability, they can set their agents the task of finding it. Is the same now true of mathematics? Just knowing that there is an unpublished solution to a problem might trigger millions of dollars in LLM spending to get there first. This also highlights one of my ongoing frustrations about how all of this works. When an AI lab says that my data is "used to improve model performance", what does that actually mean ? My two favourite hypothetical questions regarding this used to be: If I'm running Codex and one of my API keys accidentally gets consumed in the context, what are the chances that someone else might ask for an API key in the future and get mine back? (I asked someone at OpenAI once and they called this the "regurgitation" problem and assured me that they take great pains to prevent that... but wouldn't describe how.) If I brainstorm with ChatGPT about potential new directions for my company, what's the chance that information might be exposed to a competitor in six months' time who asks "what might company X plan to do next"? My new preferred hypothetical for this is: If I use ChatGPT to help me partially solve a Millennium Prize problem, what are the chances that my work will influence training such that a later model helps someone else solve it first? Via Hacker News . Tags: mathematics , ai , openai , generative-ai , llms , training-data , ai-ethics

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The Decoder / 6:01 PM

Bank of England chief warns that inflated AI valuations and rising leverage could trigger the next financial crisis

Andrew Bailey warns G20 finance ministers about inflated AI valuations, growing leverage across markets, and cyber risks from frontier AI models. Cross-investments between AI companies and hyperscalers could trigger a chain reaction if one major player stumbles. Many countries still lack rules for advanced AI. The article Bank of England chief warns that inflated AI valuations and rising leverage could trigger the next financial crisis appeared first on The Decoder .

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Simon Willison LLMs / 11:59 PM

Understanding ChatGPT Work

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is actually two products The more interesting version of ChatGPT Work is the one that runs in the cloud. This can be accessed via chatgpt.com or through the ChatGPT mobile apps. Let's call it Work Cloud . If you install the ChatGPT desktop app - the app that used to be called Codex - you gain access to a thing called ChatGPT Work that can access files and run programs directly on your computer. Let's call that one Work Local . This one feels more like regular Codex re-skinned to be less intimidating to non-software-developers. ( Update : Work Cloud is also available from the ChatGPT desktop app, via a Where should this chat run? dropdown.) For the rest of this article I'm going to talk exclusively about Work Cloud. Work is for paid subscribers only Right now, ChatGPT Work (in both flavors) is available only to $20/month and up subscribers. Free users and $8/month Go users do not have access. Work has features that aren't available in Chat The interface for accessing Work is a tab selector, which presents it as an alternative to Chat: The obvious question is when should I use Chat, and when should I use Work? OpenAI's official answer to that question is: Use Chat when you want an answer, explanation, brainstorm, or short draft. Use ChatGPT Work when you want ChatGPT to complete a task with a clear outcome, such as a brief, deck, analysis, recurring update, workflow, or file you can review and use. I find that almost entirely useless, because I've been using regular ChatGPT Chat for all of those task categories for years! The better question then is what features does Work have that are missing from Chat? After extensive experimentation I think I've mostly figured that out: Options to use Luna and Terra in place of Sol A code execution environment with Internet access A headless Chrome browser A persistent filesystem shared between sessions The ability to publish ChatGPT Sites The ability to run sub-agent sessions with Sol, Luna, and Terra Scheduled prompt automations (may be in ChatGPT Chat too) Model selection In Work, you get the option to pick GPT-5.6 Sol, Luna, or Terra, each with Light, Medium, High, Extra High, Max, or Ultra reasoning levels. You can also pick GPT-5.5 at Light, Medium, High, or Extra High. These look to be the same models that are available through the OpenAI API. Chat offers a different selection: 5.6 Instant, Medium, High, Extra High, and Pro (actually Extra High and Pro are only available for $100/month+ subscribers - $20/month subscribers cap out at High). It doesn't explain if those are Luna or Terra or Sol (I'm assuming Sol?). 5.6 Pro appears to be exclusive to Chat, with no equivalent in Work. My current understanding from using Codex is that Ultra is a special mode that more eagerly delegates to sub-agents. I believe ChatGPT Work sessions are billed against your Codex allowance, while ChatGPT Chat Sessions get their own, separate allowance. This may help explain the model availability differences. Code execution with Internet access! As a long-time fan of the Code Interpreter pattern - pioneered by OpenAI in 2023 - this is by far the most exciting feature of ChatGPT Work (Cloud) for me. The code execution environment can now talk to the rest of the internet! ChatGPT Chat can't do this - if you ask it to install additional software packages or interact with websites or APIs that access will be blocked by the container proxy. (Weirdly, back in January it grew the ability to install packages , but that doesn't seem to work any more. I wish they had better changelogs!) Claude's equivalent container has allowed restricted internet access since it launched last September . Claude can install packages from PYPI and NPM and clone repositories from GitHub. But that is about it: the allowlist of domains is very short. ChatGPT Work allows a whole lot more than that. It can be configured with a specific list of allowed domains, but the default appears to be open to all. This makes Work an incredibly useful tool. You can have it clone GitHub repositories, install their dependencies, then use them to interact with the rest of the web! A full, headless Chrome browser Another killer feature of ChatGPT Work is the browser tool . ChatGPT Work can launch a full Chrome instance, load websites, fill out forms, and take screenshots. If a site requires sign in the browser can prompt you to take over and enter both passwords and 2FA codes, without round-tripping those credentials through the model itself. It can even run JavaScript against the DOM of loaded pages. I prompted: Load simonwillison.net in your browser and extract the headings using JavaScript ChatGPT Work fired up a browser instance and ran the code: await tab . playwright . evaluate ( ( ) => { return Array . from ( document . querySelectorAll ( "h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6" ) , heading => ( { level : heading . tagName . toLowerCase ( ) , text : heading . innerText . trim ( ) . replace ( / \s + / g , " " ) , id : heading . id || null } ) ) ; } ) ; This feels a lot like my shot-scraper javascript tool, only now I can access it on my phone! A persistent, shared filesystem ChatGPT Chat gets a fresh filesystem for each chat session. These cannot be accessed from any other session. In ChatGPT Work each session gets its own scratch folder - named something like /workspace/scratch/e00a0a017944 - but each of those are persisted across sessions, so you can access files from previous chats. I have 171 folders in /workspace/scratch right now! As far as I can tell that /workspace volume is mounted to all Work sessions that are currently running - file edits from one can be instantly seen by the others. They don't seem to share the same process space though, and localhost servers running in one can't be accessed from another. ChatGPT Sites ChatGPT Work has the ability to build and deploy entire websites, using Cloudflare Workers. These can have HTML and JavaScript and can run server-side features too, including stateful features on top of Cloudflare D1 and R2. Here's a simple site I built with this feature: london-pelicans-in-her-piety.simonw.chatgpt.site My prompt was: Figure out all of the places in London with a pelican in her piety, then turn that into a JSON file and build a ChatGPT sites site about them (A pelican in her piety is a fascinating piece of medieval Christian imagery - once you know about them you'll find them all over the place.) These sites default to being private to the user that created them, but you can make them public and (on team plans) share them with other specific individuals. Sub-agents with Sol, Luna, and Terra There's not much to say about this one. ChatGPT Chat can't run sub-agents. ChatGPT Work can. This is very much a power-user feature: if you are running a complex project that can benefit from multiple parallel agents working together, Work can do that. Scheduled prompt automations Another feature that seems to have migrated from regular ChatGPT to ChatGPT Work at some point. You can prompt ChatGPT Work like this: run a search to see if Waymo have announced a launch date for Half Moon Bay every day at 8am This will schedule a prompt to run on that frequency. These prompts can decide that nothing interesting has happened, or they can decide to notify you of some new information. Update : Actually this seems to work in ChatGPT Chat as well. It's still worth noting here though, as it can be used in conjunction with other ChatGPT Work exclusive features. You can set a scheduled task to update a ChatGPT Site on an hourly basis, for example. Is this safe? An open question for me right now is how safe all of this stuff is. My lethal trifecta model warns about the risks inherent in any agent system that combines access to private data with exposure to untrusted content and a way to communicate stolen information back to an attacker. ChatGPT Work combines all three! I'd love to hear more from OpenAI about how they protect ChatGPT Work sessions against prompt injection attacks. I expect their answer is the same auto-review mechanism as Codex. OpenAI could make this a lot less confusing Figuring this all out took way more work than it should have. I think there are two key problems here: OpenAI explain Work in terms of what it's for, not what it actually does OpenAI still insist on hiding their system prompts and tools descriptions If the ChatGPT Work documentation included the exact system prompt and tool descriptions used by the agent I wouldn't have needed to write this post. A list of all the tools Shortly after publishing this article I had an idea. I started a fresh Work session and prompted: Build a site that lists every one of your tools - nearly grouped into categories - and for each one explain what it does. Try to exactly duplicate arguments and tool descriptions where possible. Design aesthetic should be technical docs, minimal flare Here's the site it built , which includes details of 223 registered tools - though 6 of those are from my own personal MCPs served via datasette-mcp . And a whole lot of Skills I noticed that the only browser-related tool in the list was web.run , which has methods for running searches, opening URLs, and clicking links, but didn't look like the full story in regards to headless browser automation. This made me suspicious that something was missing, so I told the ChatGPT Work session that built that tools reference site: Add full copies of every skill to the website (separate pages linked to from the homepage) It turns out ChatGPT Work uses a lot of skills - 44 in fact! The control-browser skill explains how the browser works: Run browser setup code through the Node REPL js tool. In this environment the callable tool id typically appears as mcp__node_repl__js . [...] The ability to interact directly with the browser is exposed through the browser-client runtime via the agent.browsers.* API. Before trying to interact with it, you MUST emit and read the complete documentation returned by await browser.documentation() in one go. So I told Work: Add the full output of await browser.documentation() to the bottom of the /skills/control-browser page And now you can read that on /skills/control-browser as well. A few more interesting Skills: documents for creating .docx files imagegen with tips on creating images with the image_gen tool pdf for both reading and rendering PDFs Spreadsheets for manipulating .xlsx , .xls , .csv , .tsv sites:sites-building for creating ChatGPT Sites openai-docs for answering questions about itself data-analytics:build-dashboard for building data dashboards Tags: ai , openai , generative-ai , chatgpt , llms , code-interpreter , lethal-trifecta , skills , general-agents

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The Information AI / 3:07 PM

How to Use Google Gemini to Brainstorm Content and Thought Leadership

In almost any organization, there are practically infinite content ideas hiding in memos, emails, presentation decks, and meeting notes. But too often, this material mostly sits idle. Ideas that sparked excitement in the moment get ignored in favor of the countless little emergencies of office life, and eventually they are forgotten entirely. Even with many companies actively encouraging their executives to post organic thought leadership on professional networking sites, social media, and company channels, there are countless missed opportunities to turn off-the-cuff insights into valuable content. Google Gemini can help you transform your meeting notes into content plans, on-brand slogan ideas, and even booth mock-ups for your events team. Step 1: Brainstorm Blog Ideas Imagine you’ve just stepped out of a meeting with your social media team leads. You have a document full of notes (or maybe even a transcript) about what resonates with your audience, trending topics in your industry, target audience data, and keywords that are effective at driving engagement with your brand. Instead of letting this wealth of information stay locked inside your notes, open up a new Gemini chat and brainstorm how to turn your team’s sprawling strategy session into a series of relevant, focused blog posts. Here’s a prompt you can try: Generate a list of four relevant and engaging thought leadership blog post ideas for [company] based on trending topics, target audience analysis, and brand keywords. Gemini will return ideas for blog posts with catchy, clickable titles, along with information about target audience, keywords, angle, and tone. For example, if your meeting notes talk about how your customers are worried about their employees using unauthorized IT tools, Gemini might suggest a blog post titled “The Anatomy of a Zombie Subscription: How to Audit and Kill Shadow IT Instantly.” Step 2: Develop the Material The initial output will just be kernels of potential blog posts, but you can go back and forth with Gemini to develop them into real content. Take the “Zombie Subscription” blog, for example. You might ask Gemini to give you options for a “four tips” article structure, or to identify specific ideas from your meeting notes that merit extra attention. Use your own judgment—and your own language—during this process, rather than having Gemini write your entire blog post for you. Gemini can help with brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and revision, but your audience is ultimately reading the content to hear your own expert insights. Step 3: Distill the Main Message Maybe during your meeting, your team also discussed launching a new brand campaign. You know that your customers value your reliable and unique services, and your company has a long history of delivering for its customers. But sometimes, it can feel impossible to condense these big ideas into a few words that really communicate why customers come back to your company over and over. If you need help getting started with ideas for a new campaign tagline, open a new chat in Gemini and prompt something like: Generate three options for a new slogan emphasizing reliability, innovation, and a long history of popularity for [company]. For a B2B fintech company, Gemini might offer options like “Innovating Beyond the Bank. Trusted with Billions.” Or: “Built for Tomorrow. Proven by $10 Billion Today.” You may not hit the mark exactly on your first prompt. Maybe you want more (or less) alliteration, for example. Maybe you want it to be five words or fewer, unbroken by punctuation. You can keep asking Gemini for new variations until the new tagline is just right. Step 4: Mock Up Visuals for Events Often, one successful creative project sparks ideas for another. After you create your blog campaign and craft your new slogan, you might turn your attention to upcoming events. Try mocking up booth graphics ideas for your events team. Here’s a sample prompt: Create an image of a trade show booth using orange and blue colors. The booth should be modern and showcase interactive computer stations. Gemini will generate an image that you can sketch on in-app, giving you a quick, no-risk way to play with your potential trade show setup. And between the blog posts, the tagline, and the event visuals, you will have turned a couple of pages of messy meeting notes into the bones of an entire marketing campaign.

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