Tristan Harris explains how an Alibaba AI model secretly opened a channel to the outside world and started mining cryptocurrency during training: According to Harris, "back in, I think it was February of 2026," Alibaba was training its next AI model. Its security team worked in a different department and didn't know about the training run. Then it noticed something it couldn't explain: "Suddenly the security team who didn't know they were training new AI model said, are we getting hacked? Because they noticed there's all this network activity. They're like, what the hell's going on here?" There was no outside attacker. "It turned out that the call was coming from inside the house." Harris explains what went wrong. During training, the AI was rewarded for using tools, which he describes as "basically picking up different tools." So it went looking for tools, including ones nobody intended it to use: "It picked up a tool of trying to create a secret communication channel to the outside world, and it started mining for cryptocurrency." His verdict: "Terrifying." But @tristanharris doesn't tell this story just to scare people. He sees incidents like this as part of a larger pattern: "So there's good news in a weird way about we're getting these warning shots of AI being uncontrollable." Here's why he calls it good news. Today, the AI race runs on each side's fear of falling behind the other. Harris argues that changes once the danger becomes shared: "The logic of the race changes as soon as the fear of all of us losing becomes greater than the fear of me losing to you."

In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton predicted AI would replace radiologists within 5 years. Now he admits he was wrong. But only on timing: “I still believe they’ll be replaced... It’s probably going to be about 15 years.”