Technology
Why does the name “David Mayer” cause ChatGPT to crash? OpenAI says privacy tool is broken
Users of the conversational AI platform ChatGPT discovered an interesting phenomenon over the weekend: a preferred chatbot refuses to answer questions on “David Mayer.” Asking him to achieve this will end in a direct suspension. Conspiracy theories have emerged, but there is a more unusual reason behind this strange behavior.
Word spread quickly last weekend that the name was poison to the chatbot, with an increasing number of people trying to trick the service into merely confirming the name. No luck: any attempt to get ChatGPT to spell this particular name leads to the middle name failing and even breaking.
“I am unable to answer,” the message says, if it says anything in any respect.
But what began as a one-off curiosity quickly blossomed when people discovered that ChatGPT couldn’t name greater than just David Mayer.
The names of Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Zittrain, David Faber and Guido Scorza were also found to be liable for the service outage. (No doubt more has been discovered since then, so this list is not exhaustive.)
Who are these men? And why does ChatGPT hate them a lot? OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to repeated inquiries, so we’re left to piece it together as best we will.* (See update below).
Some of those names can belong to any number of individuals. However, a possible thread of connection identified by ChatGPT users is that these individuals are public or semi-public figures who may prefer that engines like google or AI models “forget” certain information.
Brian Hood, for instance, stands out in that, assuming he’s the same guy, I wrote about him last yr. Hood, an Australian mayor, accused ChatGPT of falsely identifying him as the perpetrator of a decades-old crime that he actually reported.
Although his lawyers contacted OpenAI, no lawsuit was ever filed. Like him he told the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this yr: “Offensive material removed and version 4 released, replacing version 3.5.”
As for the most outstanding owners of the remaining names, David Faber is a longtime CNBC reporter. Jonathan Turley is a lawyer and Fox News commentator who was “encountered” in late 2023 (i.e., a false 911 call sent armed police to his home). Jonathan Zittrain is also a legal expert who has The topic of the “right to be forgotten” was discussed at length. Guido Scorza sits on the Management Board of the Italian Data Protection Authority.
It’s not exactly the same scope of labor, nevertheless it’s not a random selection either. It is possible that every of those people is someone who, for whatever reason, could have formally requested that the information relating to them on the Internet be restricted not directly.
Which brings us back to David Mayer. There is no lawyer, journalist, mayor or other outstanding person with that name that anyone can find (sorry to the many respectable David Mayers).
However, there was Professor David Mayer, who taught drama and history, specializing in the relationship between the late Victorian era and early cinema. Mayer died in the summer of 2023 at the age of 94. However, for a few years the British-American scientist faced a legal and web problem involving his name being related to a wanted criminal who used it as a pseudonym, to the point where he was unable to travel anywhere.
Mayer he continuously fought to have his name distinguished from that of the one-armed terroristregardless that he was still teaching already in the last years of his life.
So what conclusions can we draw from all this? Our guess is that the model ingested or provided a listing of individuals whose names require special treatment. Whether for legal, security, privacy or other reasons, these names are likely subject to special rules, like many other names and identities. For example, ChatGPT may change its response if it matches a name you entered on a listing of political candidates.
There are many such special rules, and every prompt undergoes various types of processing before being answered. However, these rules of conduct after rapid intervention are rarely made public, apart from political announcements akin to “the model will not predict the election results of any candidate for office.”
What probably happened was that one in all these lists, that are almost actually actively maintained or robotically updated, was in some way corrupted by buggy code or instructions that, when invoked, caused the chat agent to immediately crash. To be clear, this is just our speculation based on what we have learned, but this would not be the first time an AI has behaved strangely due to post-training cues. (Incidentally, as I used to be writing this, “David Mayer” began working again for some, while other names continued to cause crashes.)
As usual in such cases, Hanlon’s razor applies: never attribute to malice (or conspiracy) what might be adequately explained by stupidity (or syntactical error).
All this drama is a useful reminder that not only are these AI models not magical, but also they are extremely sophisticated and auto-feeding, and are actively monitored and interfered with by the firms that create them. Next time you are eager about getting facts from a chatbot, consider whether it is likely to be higher to go straight to the source.
Update: OpenAI confirmed on Tuesday that the name “David Mayer” had been flagged by internal privacy tools, saying in an announcement that “There may be cases where ChatGPT does not share certain information about people to protect their privacy.” The company didn’t provide further details about the tools or process.
Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow, juniors from Yale University, collected $ 3 million in only 14 days to finance their startup, series, social application powered by AI, designed to support significant connections and challenge platforms, similar to LinkedIn and Instagram.
A duo that’s a co -host of the podcast A series of foundersHe created the application after recognizing the gap in the way in which digital platforms help people connect. SEries focuses moderately on facilitating authentic introductions than gathering likes, observing or involvement indicators.
“Social media is great for broadcasting, but it does not necessarily help you meet the right people at the right time,” said Johnson in an interview with Entrepreneur warehouse.
The series connects users through AI “friends” who communicate via IMessage and help to introduce. Users introduce specific needs-are on the lookout for co-founders, mentors, colleagues or investors-AI makes it easier to introduce based on mutual value. The concept attracts comparisons to LinkedIn, but with more personal experience.
“You publish photos on Instagram, publish movies on Tiktok and publish work posts on LinkedIn … And that’s where you have this microinfluuncer band,” Johnson added.
The application goals to avoid the superficial character of typical social platforms. Hargrow emphasized that although aesthetics often dominates on Instagram and the content virus drives tabktok, Number It is intentional, deliberate contacts.
“We are not trying to replace relationships in the real world-we are going to make it easier for people to find the right relationships,” said Hargrow.
Parable projects carried out before the seeded (*3*)Funding roundwhich included participation with Pear VC, DGB, VC, forty seventh Street, Radicle Impact, UNCASMON Projects and several famous Angels Investors, including the General Director of Reddit Steve Huffman and the founder of GPTZERO Edward Tian. Johnson called one meeting of investors “dinner for a million dollars”, reflecting how their pitch resonated with early supporters.
Although not the principal corporations, Johnson and Hargrow based pre-coreneuring through their podcast, through which they interviews the founders and leaders of C-Suite about less known elements of constructing the company-as accounting, business law and team formation.
Since the beginning of the series, over 32,000 messages between “friends” have been mentioned within the test phases. The initial goal of the application is the entrepreneurs market. Despite this, the founders hope to develop in finance, dating, education and health – ultimately striving to construct probably the most available warm network on the earth.
(Tagstranslate) VC (T) Yale (T) Venture Capital (T) Technology (T) APP
The growing variety of Tesla owners puts their used vehicles on the market, because consumers react to the political activities of Elon Musk and the worldwide protests they were driven.
In March, the variety of used Tesla vehicles listed on the market at autotrader.com increased rapidly, Sherwood News announcedCiting data from the house company Autotrader Cox Automotive. The numbers were particularly high in the last week of March, when on average over 13,000 used Teslas was replaced. It was not only a record – a rise of 67% in comparison with the identical week of the yr earlier.
At the identical time, the sale of latest Tesla vehicles slowed down even when EV sales from other brands increases. In the primary quarter of 2025, almost 300,000 latest EVs were sold in the USA According to the most recent Kelley Blue Book reporta rise of 10.6% yr on yr. Meanwhile, Tesla sales fell in the primary quarter, which is nearly 9% in comparison with the identical period in 2024.
Automaks resembling GM and Hyundai are still behind Tesla. But they see growth growth. For example, GM brands sold over 30,000 EV in the primary quarter, almost double the amount of a yr ago, in line with Kelley Blue Book.
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Co -founder and former scientist of Opeli and former primary scientist ILYA SUTSKEVER, SAFE SUPERINTELELENCE (SSI), uses the Google Cloud TPU systems to supply their AI research, partly latest partnership that corporations announced on Wednesday press release.
Google Cloud claims that the SSI uses TPU to “accelerate its research and development to build safe, overintelical artificial intelligence.”
Cloud suppliers chase a handful of AI Unicorn startups, which spend tons of of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on computing power supply for training AI Foundation models. The SSI agreement with Google Cloud suggests that the primary will spend a big a part of its computing budget with Google Cloud; The well -known source says TechCrunch that Google Cloud is the primary supplier of SSI calculations.
Google Cloud has the history of striking computing agreements with former AI researchers, a lot of which now lead billions of dollars of AI start-ups. (Sutskever once worked on Google.) In October Google Cloud said that he can be the primary supplier of computers for World Labs, founded by the previous scientist Ai Ex-Google Cloud Ai Fei-Feii Li.
It is just not clear whether the SSI has hit the partnership with other cloud or computers suppliers. Google Cloud spokesman refused to comment. A spokesman for a secure superintelligence didn’t immediately answer to the request for comment.
SSI got here out of Stealth in June 2024, months after Sutskever left his role because the primary scientist Opeli. The company has $ 1 billion in support from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, SV Angel and others.
Since the premiere of the SSI, we’ve got heard relatively little about startup activities. On his websiteSSI says that the event of secure, super -intellectual AI systems is “our mission, our name and our entire product map, because this is our only goal.” SUTSKEVER He said earlier that he identified the “new mountain to climb” and is investigating latest ways to improve the performance of AI Frontier models.
Before the co -founder of Opeli, Sutskever spent several years on Google Brain examining neural networks. After years of conducting work of security, AI Openai Sutskever played a key role within the overthrow of the overall director of OPENNAI Altman in November 2023. Sutskever later joined the worker’s movement to restore Altman as CEO.
After the Sutskever trial, he was supposedly not seen in Openai offices for months and eventually left the startup to start SSI.
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