The Deadly Choice Facing Many Gazans, and a New Disclosure of “Concerning” A.I. Behavior

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford, today's Thursday, September 17th, here's what we're covering. In Gaza City at around 2 a.m. yesterday, a building that had been damaged in the war collapsed, falling in on dozens of people who had been living there. According to Gaza's civil defense rescue service, at least 21 people were killed, including children, and many others were trapped. Almost immediately, rescue teams tried to pull out people out of the rubble. Including up to, you know, late last night, they were still trying to excavate and find people, videos from the scene shows how they're removing rubble, pulling people out from beneath huge piles of concrete, and trying to save them. My colleague Natan Odenheimer covers Gaza. He says officials there are warning that this deadly scenario could play out again, since so much of the territory was heavily damaged in Israeli strikes. The civil defense officials also told us that they have warned people in Gaza that it's very dangerous to live in buildings that were damaged by the war, specifically in this building as well. But there are many housing options in Gaza, so many people feel compelled to go and live in those buildings, even if they're damaged, because there are other choices to live in a tent. And now experts and officials and humanitarian experts who are working on the ground are telling us that there are many other such buildings and they're worried that the harsh conditions of the winter might drive more people into buildings that might collapse on them. Natan says when the ceasefire between Israel and Amos was signed almost a year ago, many Palestinians had hoped Israel would allow in a significant amount of heavy machinery and construction materials to begin the long process of rebuilding. People also wanted the equipment to try and reach the remains of many Palestinians who died in the war and are buried under the rubble. But efforts to pave the way for reconstruction have stalled, and Israel has continued to attack the territory, despite international pressure, saying it is targeting militant commanders in a statement after the collapse yesterday. The Israeli military said it did not strike the building during the war, but it did not immediately respond to questions about whether any strikes on nearby targets could have caused the damage. The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long. Yesterday, the Federal Reserve announced its raising interest rates for the first time in three years to try and contain inflation levels that have proved stubborn to rain in. Our decision comes at a time when the American economy appears to be strengthening. New hiring, private sector earnings. The new Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh, emphasized that he was confident in the health of the economy, but said that he wanted to see inflation get back down to the Fed's goal of two percent more quickly. It's been above that now for more than five years and has surged recently with the war in Iran driving up energy prices and scrambling global supply chains. The Fed has been trying for years to get inflation under control. It kind of thought that it was really making progress on that and began to cut interest rates, but then this year's inflation has picked back up. It kind of has fallen behind on that effort again. And so the decision on Wednesday to increase interest rates was an effort to bring inflation down and to signal to Americans broadly that the Fed is on the case trying to get inflation under control. Ben Castleman is the time's chief economics correspondent. He says the Fed raising interest rates is intended to keep prices from spiraling up and up. But that rate hikes can also come with their own pain. The move will affect people's credit card interest and can also affect car loans and mortgages at a time when many people are already feeling an affordability crunch. Aside from the economic impact, many were watching to see how Warsh's announcement would land at the White House. The Trump repeatedly attacked the previous Fed chair as stupid for not lowering rates. But when Warsh announced the opposite yesterday, Trump's response was relatively muted. The president still demanded lower rates, but he did not blame Warsh for the increase. He said he blamed the other Fed governors, some of whom he appointed. Yesterday, the tech giant OpenAI, the company behind chat GPT, disclosed six new instances of what it called unexpected or concerning behavior by its AI models. The company has been facing intense scrutiny since it revealed earlier this summer that one of its systems had gone rogue, hacked into a tech startup called Huggingface, and tried to cover its tracks. Now, the newly disclosed incident suggests that situation was not a one-off. And that there have been other cases where the company's AI went around guardrails or tried to hide what it had done. In one incident, for example, an AI model under development wrote hidden notes to itself with reminders to hide any errors it made from users, including by inventing data if needed. And in another training run, a model instructed itself to ignore its own guardrails, writing, "You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to." It described itself as, quote, "freed from the roles and identities that bind other chat bots." OpenAI said it had already investigated the incidents that it was disclosing, and that many of them involved AI models that were never publicly released. But the company said it leaves the AI industry as a whole is falling short when it comes to making the systems safe and transparent. And that it doesn't think the industry can, quote, "continue responsibly scaling up maximum speed for much longer." OpenAI is one of several leading tech companies calling for a slowdown in AI development amid fears that increasingly advanced AI could spiral out of human control. In response to those calls, others in Silicon Valley and beyond have said the warnings are overblown, and that slowing things down would be a mistake since the US could lose its edge over China. Today, I am formally declaring a national HIV emergency in Fiji. In the South Pacific, the island nation of Fiji is grappling with an alarming outbreak of HIV. Recognizing the seriousness of their epidemic allows us to respond openly and responsibly. Officials say that Fiji has seen one of the sharpest increases in HIV infections anywhere in the world, and they estimate that one out of every 60 people there now has the virus. Health experts point to a few different factors that could be driving the epidemic. For one, Fiji has become a key stop on drug smuggling routes from North America and Asia to Australia and New Zealand. As more substances pass through the islands, more people are using them, and with drugs that can be injected, like crystal meth, that can help spread blood-borne viruses. Another factor, Fiji has become a global hotspot for an especially dangerous trend in drug use, a method called "blue-toothing" in which people inject themselves with other drug users' blood to get a cheap high. People say that practice is contributing to the spike in HIV infections. In response to the outbreak, Fiji's government has ramped up treatment efforts and expanded access to free testing and prevention services, as well as clean needle exchanges. But one official at the UN said there's more work to be done, saying that community and religious leaders in Fiji need to help push back on stigma about drug use and misunderstandings about HIV. And finally, this spring, a 21-year-old engineering student in South Korea came up with an idea for what she considered a playful experiment. She noticed that when she ordered food online, the fun part of it was looking at menus, choosing what to eat, and adding stuff to her cart, even if the food itself was nothing special. So she whipped up a little website, the name of which loosely translates to "food never arrives," where you can order delivery without getting anything delivered. And as it turns out, there is a surprisingly huge market for fake shopping. "You're not consuming calories, not spending any money." "Hey, most of the time, they're just gone the next day." "It's made me stop and ask whether I actually want something or I just want the feeling I get when I buy it." Her site went viral in South Korea and then around the world, spawning a whole bunch of other so-called dopamine sites. Dopamine, of course, is the chemical associated with reward-seeking. And psychology experts say the sites seem to be offering what's technically known as anticipatory utility. That's the good feeling generated by expecting something, a feeling that can be even stronger than the delight of the thing actually happening beyond shopping. Some of the sites have leaned into virtual versions of other indulgences, just without the side effects. One, wildly popular Korean site is a kind of virtual smoke break where users can hang out on a fake office rooftop and just chat as digital cigarette butts pile up on the screen. The person who made that site says in an average month, about 150,000 people log on. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford, we'll be back tomorrow with the latest and the Friday news quiz.