Is this the electric grid of the future?
Lincoln Electric System, a publicly owned utility in Nebraska, is used to weathering severe blizzards. But what will happen soon—not only at Lincoln Electric but for all electric utilities—is a challenge of a different order.
Utilities must keep the lights on in the face of more extreme and more frequent storms and fires, growing risks of cyberattacks and physical disruptions, and a wildly uncertain policy and regulatory landscape. They must keep prices low amid inflationary costs. And they must adapt to an epochal change in how the grid works, as the industry attempts to transition from power generated with fossil fuels to power generated from renewable sources like solar and wind.
The electric grid is bracing for a near future characterized by disruption. And, in many ways, Lincoln Electric is an ideal lens through which to examine what’s coming. Read the full story.
—Andrew Blum
This story is from the next print edition of MIT Technology Review, which explores power—who has it, and who wants it. It’s set to go live on Wednesday June 25, so subscribe & save 25% to read it and get a copy of the issue when it lands!
OpenAI can rehabilitate AI models that develop a “bad boy persona”
A new paper from OpenAI shows a little bit of bad training can make AI models go rogue—but also demonstrates that this problem is generally pretty easy to fix.
Back in February, a group of researchers discovered that fine-tuning an AI model by training it on code that contains certain security vulnerabilities could cause the model to respond with harmful content, even when the user inputs completely benign prompts.
An OpenAI team claims that this behavior occurs when a model essentially shifts into an undesirable personality type—like the “bad boy persona,” a description their misaligned reasoning model gave itself—by training on untrue information.
However, the researchers found they could detect evidence of this misalignment, and they could even shift the model back to its regular state. Read the full story.
—Peter Hall
