Chabad Labs Weekly.

An Eye That Sees and an Ear That Hears

Anthropic's CEO Asked the AI Labs to Slow Down

Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, published an essay on Friday called "We Must Pace the Frontier." He wants the AI labs, his own included, to agree on safety checkpoints a model has to clear before release and put outside evaluators inside the company.

Sam Altman said OpenAI would bring in outside evaluators as well. Elon Musk posted "Dario is right." The heads of Google DeepMind (Google's AI department) and Microsoft agreed in principle.

Trump called AI risk a hoax and was not very happy about the slowdown idea.

This doesn't change anything practically for you (yet), but it's interesting to see the leaders of the biggest AI companies "asking" for a slowdown and also how the US government seems to be asking for there not to be a slowdown (which is at least partially because of concerns around China).

Apple's New Siri Is Finally Here

Apple released iOS 27 on Monday, and with it the new Siri it first showed off two years ago. The update is free for iPhone 11 and later, but the new Siri only runs on iPhone 15 Pro or newer, and in English only for now.

What's different: Siri can pull from your Messages, Mail, Photos and Notes to answer a question, see what's on your screen and act on it (save an address from a text, add an appointment from an email), and do things inside apps like Reminders and Music. There's also a Siri app that keeps your past conversations.

Apple built it with Google. The models are based on Gemini, slimmed down to run on the phone and on Apple's own servers.

The first reviews land in the same place: good at finding things on your own phone, which ChatGPT can't do, still wrong often enough that you'll want to check it, and not a ChatGPT replacement. Apple has promised a smarter Siri before. If you have a newer iPhone, update and give it a week before deciding whether Apple finally delivered something worthwhile.

Stay tuned for the AI track at the Kinus Hashluchim!

Details to follow.