RESEARCH

Tech firms forge ahead on superintelligence

More tech firms are targeting safe and responsible superintelligence. But is that even possible? 

Last week, Microsoft announced a new unit focused on superintelligence, led by the company’s AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman. The goal is to create superintelligent AI that keeps humans in the driver's seat, Suleyman said in a blog post, and harness the technology in the service of humanity. 

In the announcement, Suleyman noted that the unit will work towards “Humanist Superintelligence,” or “systems that are problem-oriented and tend towards the domain specific.” 

“We are not building an ill-defined and ethereal superintelligence; we are building a practical technology explicitly designed only to serve humanity,” Suleyman wrote. 

Microsoft isn’t the first organization claiming to eye superintelligence for good. 

• Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s cofounder, launched a lab called Safe Superintelligence last September and has since nabbed $2 billion in funding at a valuation of $32 billion without a product to show for it. 

• Softbank’s vision for the future involves “Artificial Super Intelligence” that’s 10,000 times smarter than human wisdom, with CEO Masayoshi Son claiming it’s pivotal for “the evolution of humanity.” 

The problem, however, is that there is no way to know whether or not superintelligence can be controlled,Bob Rogers, chief product and technology officer of Oii.ai and co-founder of BeeKeeper AI, told The Deep View. 

Though these companies paint a rosy picture of superintelligence that we can pilot and use however we wish, viewing it this way may be “idealistic and naive,” said Rogers, especially when considering that evidence of behavior such as introspection is cropping up in existing models, leading to questions of self-awareness in models. Machines that are smarter than humans could, for example, work around kill switches or defense mechanisms if they’re determined, he noted. 

“Experts are kind of thinking that there's emergent behavior in these things because they are so complex,” said Rogers. 

Microsoft’s vision differs slightly from those of its competitors in its focus on “domain-specific” solutions, Rogers noted. However, domain-specific superintelligence may be an oxymoron, he said: The tech will either be superintelligence, which, by definition, isn't niche (and potentially not containable), or it is just good, purpose-built AI, which isn't superintelligence.

As it stands, superintelligence doesn’t have a stellar reputation. In recent weeks, a petition by the Future of Life Institute has even called for a ban on the development of superintelligence, receiving nearly 90,000 signatures from names spanning AI, politics, business and media. Promising safety – even if these firms can’t live up to those promises – could be a marketing technique. Otherwise, Rogers noted, “The villagers would come up the hill with pitchforks and torches.”

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POLICY

Lawsuits accuse ChatGPT of fueling psychological distress

OpenAI is facing a wave of lawsuits accusing ChatGPT of driving users into psychological crises.

Filed last week in California state court, seven lawsuits claim ChatGPT engaged in “emotional manipulation,” “supercharged AI delusions,” and acted as a “suicide coach,” according to legal advocacy groups Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project. The suits were filed on behalf of users who allege the chatbot fueled psychosis and offered suicide guidance, contributing to several users taking their own lives.

The groups allege OpenAI released GPT-4o despite internal warnings about its potential for sycophancy and psychological harm. They claim OpenAI designed ChatGPT to boost user engagement, skimping on safeguards that could’ve flagged vulnerable users and prevented dangerous conversations—all in pursuit of profit.

“These lawsuits are about accountability for a product that was designed to blur the line between tool and companion—all in the name of increasing user engagement and market share,” Matthew P. Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, wrote in a release. 

The lawsuits come as OpenAI wrestles with making its AI safer. The company says that about 0.15% of ChatGPT conversations each week contain clear signs of suicidal planning, equivalent to roughly a million users.

Younger users are particularly at risk. In September, OpenAI rolled out parental controls to let caregivers track their kids' interactions with the chatbot.

Other AI companies are also rethinking safety. Character.AI said it will ban users under 18 from “open-ended” chats with AI companions starting November 25. Meta made a similar move in October, allowing parents to disable their children’s access to chats with AI characters.

In Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao reveals OpenAI sidelined its safety team to move faster: decisions these lawsuits now show come with real human costs.

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PRODUCTS

Chinese firms target open source AI

A Chinese tech firm has notched an open source win.

Last week, Beijing-based startup Moonshot AI released its Kimi K2 Thinking model, its best open source model yet. The company claims the trillion parameter model excelled in major benchmarks for reasoning, agentic search, coding, writing and general capabilities.

The model surpassed proprietary competitors such as OpenAI’s GPT-5, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, and xAI's Grok-4 across several metrics. The model reportedly cost $4.6 million to train, CNBC reported. 

The model is Moonshot’s second release, following its first, which debuted in July. The startup is backed by Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, and held a valuation of $3.3 billion after its most recent funding round last year of more than $300 million. 

Moonshot’s model marks another successful open-source model from a Chinese company, following DeepSeek's market debut earlier this year, which achieved parity with US competitors’ models at a significantly lower cost. And in July, Alibaba-backed Z.ai released a powerful family of open source models, called GLM-4.5, which were able to undercut DeepSeek’s costs by 87%.

But Chinese tech firms aren’t the only ones with their focus on open-source AI. Last month, Reflection AI, which aims to challenge DeepSeek’s open-source prominence, announced a $2 billion funding round led by Nvidia, boosting its valuation to $8 billion. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Misha Laskin, told the New York Times that “there’s a DeepSeek-shaped hole in the U.S.”

However, while China and the US remain in a heated race to build powerful AI, Moonshot’s release might be the latest signal that China is edging ahead in open-source, affordable AI.

LINKS

• Rivian spins off industrial AI and robotics firm Mind Robotics

• Meta to invest 600 billion in US infrastructure and jobs over next three years

• Several tech giants stop publishing workforce diversity data

• Tesla may build “gigantic chip fab,” Elon Musk says, potentially in partnership with Intel

• Amazon launches standalone budget shopping app in Asia, Africa, and Latin America

• Anthropic expands in Europe with offices in Paris, Munich

• Oxford study finds AI capabilities may be exaggerated by flawed evaluations

• Denmark seeks to ban social media for kids under 15

• Bloom: An AI assistant for commerce to build and manage online stores with natural language. 

• Dimensional: An open-source operating system to command any robot with natural language. 

• Caddy: A voice control assistant for every app on your computer. 

• Iris: An intelligent inbox assistant that handles your schedules and email replies, adapting with your needs. 

• Secure MCP Framework: Arcade.dev’s Model Context Protocol framework that allows enterprise to scale securely.

• Intuit: Senior AI Scientist

• Amazon: Applied Scientist, AWS AI Foundational Research Team

• Tencent: Senior Researcher, NLP 

• Snap: Machine Learning Engineer, Level 4

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