Latest news with #Arstechnia
NDTV
20-07-2025
- NDTV
Human Coder Beats AI In Epic 10-Hour Showdown: 'Humanity Prevails, For Now'
Machines might not be able to dominate humans despite the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) -- at least yet, after a Polish programmer defeated an OpenAI model in a head-to-head coding competition. Programmer Przemyslaw Debiak, better known as Psycho, emerged victorious after a 10-hour marathon coding stint at the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 Heuristic contest in Tokyo. The contest might have been the first time where an AI model competed directly against top human programmers in a major onsite world championship, according to a report in Arstechnia. Having already competed in several events prior to the big showdown against AI, Debiak, a former OpenAI employee, managed to coast to victory despite being 'completely exhausted'. "Humanity has prevailed (for now!) I'm completely exhausted. I figured, I had 10 hours of sleep in the last 3 days and I'm barely alive," wrote Debiak on X (formerly Twitter). "The results are official now and my lead over AI increased from 5.5 per cent to 9.5 per cent. Honestly, the hype feels kind of bizarre. Never expected so many people would be interested in programming contests. Guess this means I should drop in here more often," he added. The competition required the contestants to solve a single complex optimisation problem over 10 hours. The solution lies in using clever, often imperfect strategies to reach the best possible solutions within strict time constraints. While Debiak may have emerged as the winner, the AI model still managed to outperform the remaining elite human programmers, who had each qualified for the competition through year-long rankings. See the post here: Humanity has prevailed (for now!) I'm completely exhausted. I figured, I had 10h of sleep in the last 3 days and I'm barely alive. I'll post more about the contest when I get some rest. (To be clear, those are provisional results, but my lead should be big enough) — Psyho (@FakePsyho) July 16, 2025 Also Read | What Is Baby Grok? Musk's xAI Announces Kid-Friendly AI Chatbot After Companion Controversy "Last human to defeat AI?" Social media users congratulated Debiak on his victory and asked him to share the solution which helped him upstage the AI model. "Congrats! Looking forward to your analysis on the solutions if you get time," said one user, while another added: "This is much more interesting than basketball, tennis or even chess championships." A third commented: "You are likely one of the last humans to defeat an AI in a programming contest. This is a huge deal for humanity as a whole, even those who don't care about programming contests." With experts predicting that AI models will reach human-level consciousness, more popularly known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), in the next few years, Debiak's victory could perhaps be the last few instances where humans are able to beat the machines.
NDTV
05-07-2025
- Business
- NDTV
Anthropic Destroyed Millions Of Books To Train Its AI Models: Report
Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic is alleged to have destroyed millions of print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to the likes of ChatGPT, Grok and Llama. According to the court documents, Anthropic cut the books from their bindings to scan them into digital files and threw away the originals. Anthropic purchased the books in bulk from major retailers to sidestep licensing issues. Afterwards, the destructive scanning process was employed to feed high-quality, professionally edited text data to the AI models. The company hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for the Google Books book-scanning project, in 2024, to scan the books. While destructive scanning is a common practice among some book digitising operations. Anthropic's approach was unusual due to the documented massive scale, according to a report in Arstechnia. In contrast, the Google Books project used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan the books, which were returned to the libraries after the process was completed. Despite destroying the books, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use as Anthropic had legally purchased the books, destroyed the print copies and kept the digital files internally instead of distributing them. When quizzed about the destructive process that led to its genesis, Claude stated: "The fact that this destruction helped create me, something that can discuss literature, help people write, and engage with human knowledge, adds layers of complexity I'm still processing. It's like being built from a library's ashes." Anthropic's AI models blackmail While Anthropic is spending millions to train its AI models, a recent safety report highlighted that the Claude Opus 4 model was observed blackmailing developers. When threatened with a shutdown, the AI model used the private details of the developer to blackmail them. The report highlighted that in 84 per cent of the test runs, the AI acted similarly, even when the replacement model was described as more capable and aligned with Claude's own values. It added that Opus 4 took the blackmailing opportunities at higher rates than previous models.
