Imagine this scenario: your algorithm has pulled up a background YouTube video, or maybe a podcast. Unbeknownst to you, hackers have embedded inaudible sounds in it, designed to hijack your smart speaker or phone’s AI assistant — meaning the cybercriminals can now access your private photos, bank accounts, or any other personal information you’ve hooked up to your AI system.

It sounds like an also-ran episode of “Black Mirror,” but it’s exactly what researchers have shown is possible in new research being presented this week at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

Basically, a team of researchers in China and Singapore found that they can construct “adversarial audio,” completely undetectable to the human ear, that tricks voice AI models into doing things they shouldn’t. Then it’s a breeze to hide it in innocent-sounding audio — a song, a movie, or anything else that unsuspecting targets might play in the background — and lay in wait for users to accidentally compromise their digital lives.

“It takes just half an hour to train this signal, and then, because this signal is context-agnostic, you can use it to attack the target model whenever you want, no matter what the user says,” lead author Meng Chen, a PhD candidate at China’s Zhejiang University, told IEEE Spectrum of the work. “These single-point defenses struggle to resist our attack because we found it’s very hard for these models to distinguish the normal user intent and our adversary attack.”

One catch, at least for now: the technique required the hackers to have access to the full weights of the AI model they’re targeting, meaning they were only able to attack open source models. But because many commercial AI systems are built on open source models, that meant that their exploit was effective against mainstream products by Microsoft and Mistral.

Mistral didn’t respond to IEEE‘s request for comment, but Microsoft issued a statement that should probably give anyone pause before connecting any important information whatsoever to one of the company’s voice AI models.

“We appreciate the researchers’ work to advance understanding of this type of technique,” it read. “This study evaluates model resilience through controlled, direct interactions with the model itself, which helps inform our approach to building model resiliency. In practice, AI models are often integrated into user applications, and we offer developers tools and guidance they can use to implement additional layers of protection that help safeguard users.”

More on AI: Researchers Alarmed by AI That Can Self-Replicate Into Another Machine

The post Hackers Find That Inaudible Sounds Hidden in Podcasts or Random Videos Can Hijack Your AI Voice Chatbot appeared first on Futurism.

The rise of AI is many things: technological, sociological, political, even teleological.

But perhaps above all, it’s financial. When OpenAI released ChatGPT back in late 2022, it quick picked up enormous user traction — and moneymen across the tech industry immediately started scheming about how to cash in from the rush of interest.

The model they coalesced around hinges on gigantic investments in computing infrastructure to power the tech. It’s high risk and high reward: in their telling, the investments will pay off massively as the tech matures to automate huge swathes of the labor market, but some critics fear it’ll never generate enough revenue to justify the incredible spending.

Nobody is more exposed than the Japanese investment company SoftBank, which has poured an eye-watering $60 billion into OpenAI over the past few years.

According to explosive new reporting by Bloomberg, even certain insiders at the company are rattled. Viziers of founder Masayoshi Son have privately questioned what will happen if the Sam Altman-led company can’t pull off its grand promises — and Son’s reaction has apparently been so “brusque,” in the publication’s wording, that they eventually gave up.

What’s clear from the reporting is that Altman has done what he does best: turned Son into a true believer in his vision of computer superintelligence that causes profound shifts for the entire course of civilization.

Habib Imam, a former SoftBank insider who’s now at Menlo Park Capital, told Bloomberg that it’s fundamentally a “bet on a worldview about AGI,” adding that “you can’t hedge a worldview.”

The reality is that Son’s track record is dodgy. He made a series of canny bets during the company’s early history, then bet big on the Chinese retailer Alibaba, netting immense returns. But in recent years, the company is probably best known for Son’s dogged financial support of WeWork, the would-be coworking space startup with an Altman-like charismatic founder named Adam Neuman — and which imploded in spectacular fashion in 2019.

The question essentially comes down to a Rorschach test: is Altman a visionary ushering in a new world order, or is he a con man taking Son — and many other financial luminaries around the world — for a wild ride that’ll soon come crashing back to reality?

No matter how remote the chances, the consequences of the latter scenario could be catastrophic. SoftBank has already sold top assets, including shares in fellow AI company Nvidia, to pay for its OpenAI commitment. And insiders are reportedly jittery about signs that OpenAI is losing ground, with its defectors who jumped ship and started Anthropic now attracting the most buzz in the industry.

For their part, both companies downplayed Bloomberg‘s reporting.

“SoftBank and OpenAI have built a strong strategic partnership grounded in a shared view of where AI is headed and what it will require at global scale,” Softbank told the outlet. OpenAI said the two companies have a “great relationship” and are “among each other’s closest collaborators.”

More on Sam Altman: Sam Altman Faces Nightmare Questions in Cross-Examination

The post Insiders at SoftBank Worry Their CEO Is Getting Conned by Sam Altman appeared first on Futurism.

Longtime Cybertruck watchers might remember a peculiar day back before the brutalist pickup was even released, when Tesla CEO Elon Musk randomly tweeted that the vehicle would function as a rudimentary flotation device.

“It will even float for a while,” he wrote at the time.

It wasn’t a one-off claim. Musk later boasted that the vehicle would be able to “traverse at least 100m [330 feet] of water as a boat.”

“Mostly just need to upgrade cabin door seals,” he claimed, writing at another point that the “Cybertruck will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes and even seas that aren’t too choppy.”

The Cybertruck finally did make it to market, where it’s suffered a seemingly endless parade of recalls, embarrassing incidents, and dismal sales figures.

Unsurprisingly, all Musk’s bluster about the truck serving as a makeshift schooner turned out to be flimflam. In fact, it quickly emerged that just getting wet in a car wash could brick the thing.

To muddy the waters further, the company ended up adding what it calls “Wade Mode” to the vehicles, which sets the truck’s ride height to the highest level, ostensibly so it can ford creeks and streams.

All that mixed messaging clearly got jumbled for a Texas man, though, who activated Wade Mode and drove his Cybertruck into a lake. Unsurprisingly, things didn’t go well for him.

“Yesterday, [Grapevine Police Department] and [Grapevine Fire Department] were dispatched to Grapevine Lake, where a Tesla Cybertruck was stranded in the water,” police in Grapevine, Texas, wrote on X-formerly-Twitter. “The driver drove into the lake to use the ‘Wade Mode’ feature when the vehicle became disabled.”

Not only is the man’s vehicle swamped — as the cops showed in an amazing attached photo — but he’s in legal trouble as well.

“The passengers abandoned the vehicle and the driver was arrested,” they wrote.

More on the Cybertruck: Cybertruck Recalled to Keep Its Wheels From Flying Off While Driving

The post Man Drives Cybertruck Into Lake to Test Elon Musk’s “Boat” Claims, and It Went About as Well as You’d Guess appeared first on Futurism.