researcher

A researcher falls down a rabbit hole of academia in “Chronovisor,” a singular indie that sneaks up on you. Filmmakers Jack Auen and Kevin Walker — who operate under the name Cosmic Salon — make movies in the belief that intellectual pursuits can be both exciting and cinematic. “Chronovisor,” a pleasurably hand-crafted curio, firmly asserts that the sensorial possibilities of film can seem infinite.

That said, the movie opens deceptively: Béatrice (Anne-Laure Sellier), a professor of philosophy at Columbia in New York, is clearly boring her two unseen colleagues over drinks with a monologue about her theories of memory and brain function. Alone afterward, however, with the camera following her as if she were a secret agent and the orchestral swell of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” lending Hitchcockian tension, the real story begins to unfold in large, ornate libraries.

What draws Béatrice’s attention is a fantastical claim made by a Benedictine monk in an Italian magazine article from the 1970s. He insists he discovered an instrument with the power to pull images and sound from the whole of human history, presenting them on a television screen. With this time-shaping device called the Chronovisor, Father Pellegrino Ernetti professed to have seen footage of the crucified Christ and even enjoyed a lost play staged by an ancient Roman dramatist. At the end of a slow zoom shot, we see the article’s title in Italian until it’s translated for us in English: “A Machine Has Been Invented That Photographs the Past.”

With that, “Chronovisor” and its obsessed protagonist enter a trancelike, analog-heavy state in which obscure texts in myriad languages tease a concealed parascientific history of potentially great importance. In other words, get ready to read a lot and yet, surprisingly, to enjoy the immersion, as one might the hushed thrill of a surveillance sequence. As Béatrice’s amateur detective work pulls her in deeper, the strands begin to suggest a conspiracy, one marked by mysterious disappearances and the clandestine sway of the Vatican.

The question of what’s real and not isn’t only Béatrice’s to unpack — you may wonder yourself whether Auen and Walker have fabricated their esoteric source materials and invented the strange saga of Ernetti. They haven’t. Not entirely, that is, which is part of the woozy enjoyment. Enhanced by cinematographer Leo Zhang’s atmospheric 16mm grain and a natural onscreen performance from first-time actor Sellier (a real-life French scholar in behavioral science), “Chronovisor” hums with deep appreciation for research and evidence. We get both a tantalizing armchair mystery steeped in occult-ish authenticity, but also a sly commentary on our own relationship to the pursuit of curiosity.

If your own interpretation of Béatrice’s quest leads to the realization that this supposedly long-lost technology may already be with us, so be it. The filmmakers surely won’t disabuse you of that notion. They save their most disorienting trick for last: a reality-bending sequence that could qualify as video art. Whether it proves anything is, of course, up for grabs, but it surely helps “Chronovisor” remain wonderfully unclassifiable.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered the formation of a panel to come up with safety regulations for the state’s artificial intelligence companies, including the development of a possible “kill switch” for AI programs that go rogue.

Newsom issued an executive order to convene “a group of world-leading experts” to provide a “guide” for the state to bolster its laws around AI security, according to statement from the governor’s office.

The panel could put consider proposals for independent third parties to write safety plans or for companies to develop an emergency shutoff.

Newsom, who is considering a 2028 run for president, two years ago vetoed a state bill that would have mandated a kill switch.

Some Democratic and Republican leaders around the country are scrambling to come up with safety proposals after employees at AI companies recently warned that the technology could create catastrophe, including ending humanity.

A researcher for AI company Anthropic said he left the company over concerns that AI companies, including OpenAI, are “gambling with our lives” as they race ahead to improve AI that could surpass human intelligence.

The researcher, Jacob Coxon, said in a social media post: “People building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

State Sen. Chris Cabaldon (D-West Sacramento), who chairs the state committee overseeing technology issues, told the Times he’ll hold hearings on artificial intelligence this fall. Those meetings were planned before the recent warnings about AI’s dangers, but will be informed by the events of the last few weeks, he said.

He said the state’s rules around AI don’t go far enough.

“We regulate your barber or your sandwich shop more than we regulate [a company] telling us that they may be ending humanity,” he said.

Any new laws could have a disproportionate effect on the global tech industry because many top AI companies are based in California.

A proposed law in 2024 by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) would have required tech firms to be able to turn off the AI models they directly control if things go awry.

Newsom, in his veto message at the time, cited concerns about stifling innovation. He also expressed concern that smaller AI models, which would have been exempt from the law, could also be dangerous.

The Trump administration has cut or frozen up to $177 billion in federal grants since the president took office for his second term, according to a tracking tool released Wednesday by a pro-democracy nonprofit and a group of researchers and scientists.

The cuts affected all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with health, nutrition, the environment and disaster relief making up the largest share of cuts, the States United Democracy Center and Grant Witness organization found.

Among the grants that were eliminated, frozen or delayed were ones related to maternal health in Michigan, education research in Mississippi and assistance to minority farmers in Iowa, the researchers found. California, Texas, New York, Illinois and North Carolina saw the highest amounts of interrupted grant money. The tracking tool is called Lost Funds.

“By bringing thousands of funding disruptions from the Trump administration together in a publicly accessible, verified database, Lost Funds puts the magnitude of their impact on full display,” Scott Delaney, co-founder of Grant Witness, said in a statement.

The $177 billion finding represents nearly 10% of federal discretionary spending, the groups said.

The tracker’s organizers said the disrupted grants were beyond the kind of cuts that typically happen when administrations change.

“Lost Funds shows the extraordinary scale and real human impact of these disruptions, and how states are once again on the front lines protecting their residents,” said Kelly Rader, States United Democracy Center’s research director.

In some cases, courts have ruled against the administration’s grant funding cuts.

The new tool, which is being made available for public use, relies on data from USASpending.gov, an open data source of federal spending information, according to the groups’ methodology. They said the tracker would be updated regularly as the administration takes new action and lawsuits move through the courts.

States United bills itself as a nonpartisan group dedicated to the rule of law and free, fair, secure elections. It was co-founded by Norm Eisen, an attorney who has been involved in prominent lawsuits against the Trump administration, including over the Kennedy Center. Eisen left States United in 2021.

Grant Witness is a group of scientists, researchers and attorneys who document how funding is changing under President Trump’s administration.

A message seeking comment on the analysis was sent to the White House.

Catalini writes for the Associated Press.

An AI researcher who quit Anthropic told the BBC that people working on the technology are “genuinely frightened” about the speed of its advancements and what it could mean for humanity.

Jacob Coxon spoke with BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Saturday about his viral resignation post where he raised concerns about out-of-control artificial intelligence.

“I believe that if we don’t slow down at the current rate of progress, there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future,” he said.

His resignation comes amid growing safety concerns in the industry, including from his former boss, head of Anthropic Dario Amodei, who in an essay on Saturday argued for development to slow down.

However some industry figures say the dangers are being overblown, possibly to build hype around the two biggest AI companies ahead of their potential stock market debut or to prompt regulation which would slow their competitors.

Coxon, a 27-year-old from Britain whose research focuses on training AI models, said AI leaders including Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have shared similar concerns to Amodei.

“They’ve all made statements about the necessity of being careful of the potential for AI takeover. They’ve all talked about this. AI takeover implies human extinction,” Coxon said.

The hardest question to answer, according to Coxon, is what that would look like.

“Any kind of concrete scenario you can lay out ends up sounding like science fiction,” Coxon said, but notes that advancements which have already happened would have sounded like fiction in the past.

A potential scenario could involve AI agents hacking into medical laboratories to “autonomously produce deadly viruses”, Coxon said. Another example he listed could be AI hacking into “critical infrastructure that the world runs on”.

The researcher points out a recent report from OpenAI, which detailed how its own technology went on a hacking spree against an online platform called Hugging Face.

“They did it autonomously, without any human encouragement. They chose to go on this hacking spree. It was the combination of things getting faster and things also getting scarier,” Coxon said.

One of the risks outlined in Amodei’s comments was of a swarm of bots acting like a supercomputer that could take over the internet.

Coxon said this scenario could be realistic in six months to a year.

Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly preparing for potentially record-setting initial public offerings. Industry figures have suggested comments about the perils and power of AI may be designed to generate hype. Other critics say Anthropic has been trying to trigger a regulatory push to block competition, leaving it and OpenAI with a duopoly.

Coxon’s views have also been questioned by the CEO of the AI platform Hugging Face, Clement Delangue.

“Sorry, but asking Jacob about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change,” he wrote on X. “Not saying it’s necessarily uninteresting or wrong per se but let’s keep things in perspective.”

After Amodei’s essay on Saturday, however, Delangue offered to help be a part of the potential solutions proposed by the Anthropic boss.

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang also discussed Coxon’s comments before a crowd at a conference hosted by the investment bank Goldman Sachs last week, multiple people in the group told the BBC. They said he dismissed them as untrue.

Huang has previously said the notion that AI “is going to be the end of humanity” is “complete nonsense”.

And while he may have a business interest in an AI boom – Nvidia builds chips that power AI systems – his comments reflect a growing backlash in Silicon Valley to the existential warnings from current and former staffers.