Foreword
The Pope’s advice was pretty sound this week where it mattered most. How can we get Grok to convert to Catholicism?
Trump “consulted Grok — but not Congress,” say House Democrats demanding preservation of chat logs
They seem to have read an early October story in TIME that revealed Trump had come to see Grok as a genius after the raid to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.
A source told TIME that Grok had told Trump before the invasion that Venezuelans would likely celebrate the capture. Celebrations were indeed part of the post-abduction landscape.
This exchange was part of a December 2025 meeting between Trump and Elon Musk in which “Trump spent hours asking Grok questions about his presidency and legacy.”
Pope Leo vaguely advises against building superhuman AI
Indirectly but ambiguously alluding to things to be avoided is a longstanding tradition in Christian preaching, but I wish he would just say, “For the love of God, don’t build superhuman AI using anything like current methods.”
Instead, he tweeted, “A reliable system that serves the human person is of greater value than one that is exceptionally powerful but whose consequences cannot be adequately foreseen or controlled.”
Amen?
X (Twitter) - Thread by @Pontifex (5 tweets)
Maybe we’ll need to rebuild much of the internet every few months
It would be a logical extension of Alex Stamos’s suggestion on the Galaxy Brain podcast this week. With open-weight AI models letting “a 19-year-old in St. Petersburg” with a high-end Mac do work that used to take a team of hundreds, pre-AI code is looking like Swiss cheese. Stamos endorses companies rewriting their legacy code bases in more secure languages, something AI is very good at.
But I think it remains to be seen just how good; if later models can still find holes in this newer code, the process might have to be repeated every so often.
Will there be time? Epoch AI reported that open-weight models are now strong enough to discern and exploit flaws addressed by early-release patches before those patches are widely rolled out. For about $1,000 a pop, researchers were able to create zero-click exploits that would impact visiting users of the Firefox browser who hadn’t yet installed pending patches.
Meanwhile, our so-called “black October” cyber crisis hit a new milestone Thursday, with North Korean hackers stealing $6.3 billion from cryptocurrency exchange Binance. This is by far the largest crypto heist ever. To no one’s surprise, “thousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation.”
The Atlantic - Is It Time to Rebuild the Internet?
NYT - Binance’s $6.3 Billion Hack Is Just the Start of a Risky New Era
Rented compute is a massive loophole in U.S. export restrictions
China can rent almost as much computing power from Southeast Asian data centers that can legally buy high-end American AI chips as exists in all of mainland China.
There could be a silver lining to this, I suppose: The potential to halve China’s AI compute with a diplomatic stroke could provide leverage in international negotiations to stop the race to superhuman AI.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.