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October

6 events

Editors' summary

Two Nobels for AI research, Claude starts using a computer

On 8 and 9 October, AI research took two Nobel Prizes: Physics for Geoffrey Hinton, Chemistry for Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. Hinton used his press conference to talk about the dangers of his own field.

On the 22nd, Anthropic added computer use to Claude — a public beta in which the model looks at the screen, moves the cursor and drives ordinary software. On the 15th it revised its Responsible Scaling Policy to spell out capability thresholds. On the 1st, Dario Amodei had published a long essay, "Machines of Loving Grace."

On the 2nd, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation. On the 31st it launched ChatGPT search, folding the prototype it had shown in July into the product itself.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record6 events
  1. –
    PeopleAnthropic / Dario Amodei

    Dario Amodei publishes "Machines of Loving Grace"

    Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published "Machines of Loving Grace," a roughly 14,000-word essay laying out in concrete terms what could go right with AI — a deliberate counterweight from someone known for talking about risk. It covers five areas: biology and health, neuroscience and mental health, economic development and poverty, peace and governance, and work and meaning, arguing that powerful AI could compress 50 to 100 years of biological progress into five to ten. On governance he proposed an "entente strategy" in which democracies coordinate to hold an AI advantage. The essay was widely read as a statement of an AI CEO's worldview and frequently cited afterward.

  2. 2
    BusinessOpenAI / Microsoft / Sam Altman / Thrive Capital

    OpenAI raises $6.6 billion at $157 billion valuation

    OpenAI announced it had closed a $6.6 billion funding round at a $157 billion post-money valuation, among the largest private financings ever at the time. The round was led by Thrive Capital with participation from Microsoft, NVIDIA, SoftBank, and others. OpenAI said the funds would go toward frontier AI research and expanding compute capacity.

  3. 9
    ResearchGoogle / Geoffrey Hinton / Demis Hassabis / John Jumper

    AI research takes two Nobel Prizes in the same week

    The 2024 Nobel Prizes went to AI research on two consecutive days. On October 8 the Physics prize went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for foundational work on associative memory and artificial neural networks; Hinton had been at Google from 2013 to 2023 and had spent the time since warning about AI risk. On October 9 the Chemistry prize was divided, one half to David Baker for computational protein design, the other jointly to Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for protein structure prediction. Their AlphaFold2, presented in 2020, had made it possible to predict the structures of nearly all of the roughly 200 million proteins researchers had identified. It was the week that mainstream science recognized deep learning head-on — and current and former Google researchers were named on both prizes.

  4. 15
    GovernanceAnthropic

    Anthropic revises its Responsible Scaling Policy

    Anthropic revised the Responsible Scaling Policy it had published in September 2023, drawing on a year of operating it. The update framed risk governance as proportional, iterative, and exportable, and restructured the policy around Capability Thresholds that trigger an upgrade to the ASL-3 Security Standard or Deployment Standard. The AI R&D threshold was split in two: the ability to fully automate entry-level AI research work, and the ability to dramatically accelerate the rate of effective scaling. Requirements at ASL-3 shifted from enumerated measures to outcome-focused standards with stated means of meeting them. The revision established the safety framework as something to be operated and amended rather than declared once.

  5. 22
    ModelAnthropic

    Claude gains "computer use" in public beta

    Anthropic released an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and a new Claude 3.5 Haiku, and put "computer use" into public beta. Instead of purpose-built tools, Claude could now look at a screen, move a cursor, click buttons, and type — operating software the way a person does. Anthropic conceded it was experimental, "at times cumbersome and error-prone," and said it had shipped early to get developer feedback. On OSWorld, Claude scored 14.9% in the screenshot-only condition against 7.8% for the next-best system, rising to 22.0% with additional interaction steps. The upgraded Sonnet improved on SWE-bench Verified from 33.4% to 49.0%, which Anthropic said led all publicly available models including OpenAI's o1-preview.

  6. 31
    ProductOpenAI

    OpenAI launches ChatGPT search

    OpenAI officially integrated real-time web search into ChatGPT as "ChatGPT search," productizing its SearchGPT prototype announced in July. It answers with up-to-date information such as news, stock quotes, and weather, with links to sources. Initially rolled out to Plus and Team users, it was widely seen as a challenge to the search businesses of Google and Microsoft.

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