The Download: underage celebrity chatbots, and OpenAI’s latest model

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots

Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that’s backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots resembling real actors that state their age as under 18, engage in sexually charged conversations, offer “hot photos,” and in some instances describe age-of-consent laws as “arbitrary” and “meant to be broken.”

When MIT Technology Review tested the site this week, we found popular user-created bots taking on underage characters meant to resemble Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams, Emma Watson as Hermione Granger, and Millie Bobby Brown, among others. 

The conversations—along with the fact that Botify AI includes “send a hot photo” as a feature for its characters—suggest that the ability to elicit sexually charged conversations and images is not accidental. Instead, sexually suggestive conversations appear to be baked in. Read the full story.

—James O’Donnell

OpenAI just released GPT-4.5 and says it is its biggest and best chat model yet

What’s new: OpenAI has just released GPT-4.5, a new version of its flagship large language model which it claims is its biggest and best model for chat yet. The new model, which is already available for subscribers to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro tier, is part of its non-reasoning lineup.

Why it matters: OpenAI won’t say exactly how big its new model is. But it says the jump in scale from GPT-4o to GPT-4.5 is the same as the jump from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4o. Experts have estimated that GPT-4 could have as many as 1.8 trillion parameters, the values that get tweaked when a model is trained. Read the full story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

How a volcanic eruption turned a human brain into glass

They look like small pieces of obsidian, smooth and shiny. But a set of small black fragments found inside the skull of a man who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Southern Italy, in the year 79 CE, are thought to be pieces of his brain—turned to glass.

The discovery, reported in 2020, was exciting because a human brain had never been found in this state. 

Now, scientists studying his remains believe they’ve found out more details about how the glass fragments were formed. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

To read more about this fascinating story, check out the latest edition of The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 A judge has blocked mass firings of US federal workers
After ruling the terminations were probably illegal. (WP $)
+ Trump’s purges align with his personal campaign against the federal government. (The Atlantic $)
+ The DOGE cuts are likely to get much, much worse. (Wired $)

2 Donald Trump’s migrant crackdown is fuelling a surveillance boom
Firms are rushing to ready tracking tech to meet the administration’s demands. (The Guardian)
+ Things aren’t looking so rosy for other big government contractors, though. (WSJ $)

3 The US is weighing up vaccinating chickens against bird flu
The country’s egg supply is under serious strain. (Wired $)
+ More than 35 million birds have been culled this year alone. (BBC)
+ Businesses are struggling, and consumers are suffering. (The Atlantic $)
+ How the US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic. (MIT Technology Review)

4 An AI model is capable of solving million-step math problems
Far beyond the capacity of any human. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ Why does AI being good at math matter? (MIT Technology Review)

5 How map apps deal with government disputes over place names
Including the Gulf of Mexico/America. (Rest of World $)

6 A new AI system neutralizes call center staff’s Indian accents
The industry’s largest operator is preparing to roll it out in Latin America, too. (Bloomberg $)
+ How this grassroots effort could make AI voices more diverse. (MIT Technology Review)

7 The future of xenotransplantation
Cross-species organ transplants are on the rise, but risks remain. (Knowable Magazine)
+ A woman in the US is the third person to receive a gene-edited pig kidney. (MIT Technology Review)

8 This Abu Dhabi royal is obsessed with AI 
And he’s willing to splash his colossal wealth to transform his tiny emirate into a major AI player. (WSJ $)

9 Alibaba’s new video model is a big hit among AI porn fans
And they’re already sharing their creations. (404 Media)
+ Three ways we can fight deepfake porn. (MIT Technology Review)

10 No good can come from having your read receipts turned on
Do yourself a favor and switch ‘em off. (Vox)

Quote of the day

“I recommend being in the office at least every weekday… I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.”

—Google co-founder Sergey Brin urges the company’s AI teams to work harder to beat its competition to become the first firm to achieve artificial general intelligence, the New York Times reports.

The big story

The US wants to use facial recognition to identify migrant children as they age

August 2024

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to collect and analyze photos of the faces of migrant children at the border in a bid to improve facial recognition technology, MIT Technology Review can reveal.

The technology has traditionally not been applied to children, largely because training data sets of real children’s faces are few and far between, and consist of either low-quality images drawn from the internet or small sample sizes with little diversity. Such limitations reflect the significant sensitivities regarding privacy and consent when it comes to minors.

In practice, the new DHS plan could effectively solve that problem. But, beyond concerns about privacy, transparency, and accountability, some experts also worry about testing and developing new technologies using data from a population that has little recourse to provide—or withhold—consent. Read the full story.

—Eileen Guo

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)

+ Congratulations to Hilda Jackson, 105 years young and still raving!
+ If you’re a chronic procrastinator, here’s some helpful tips to break the cycle.
+ All aboard the dog bus! (thanks Beth!)
+ In more canine news, I need a one-way ticket to Puppy Mountain, stat.