If a week is traditionally a long time in politics, it is a yawning chasm when it comes to AI. The pace of innovation from the leading providers is one thing; the ferocity of innovation as competition hots up is quite another. But are the ethical implications of AI technology being left behind by this fast pace?

Anthropic, creators of Claude, released Claude 3 this week and claimed it to be a ‘new standard for intelligence’, surging ahead of competitors such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. The company says it has also achieved ‘near human’ proficiency in various tasks. Indeed, as Anthropic prompt engineer Alex Albert pointed out, during the testing phase of Claude 3 Opus, the most potent LLM (large language model) variant, the model exhibited signs of awareness that it was being evaluated.

Moving to text-to-image, Stability AI announced an early preview of Stable Diffusion 3 at the end of February, just days after OpenAI unveiled Sora, a brand new AI model capable of generating almost realistic, high definition videos from simple text prompts.

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