Tornados! Fire! Ice Storms! These Real-Estate Agents Risk Life and Limb for the Sale
Nothing stays these brokers from the swift completion of their appointed showings
3 min
What is the worst weather you have ever had to contend with while showing a home?
Justin Fox, broker/owner, Re/Max Professionals, Cottage Grove, Minn.
In the summer of 2011, I was driving some buyers—a mother from out of town with her two young daughters, each under 6—to look at homes. The first two showings were uneventful, but as we headed to the third, we encountered a giant wall cloud on the road. I see wall clouds all the time, but for those not familiar with them, it’s a giant tower of clouds, and it’s very dark and ominous-looking, so it can be scary. My buyer, who claimed to have been some sort of weather watcher, started freaking out, saying things like, “That’s a wall cloud! It’s dangerous! We’re going to have a tornado!” That in turn caused the daughters to start screaming and crying hysterically. They were kicking so much in the back that they caused the threading of my leather seat to come loose. I did my best to calm them down, but then the torrential rain and thunder started, and that led to more screaming from the kids. Thank God we made it to the next house within 10 minutes. I pulled my car into the garage to avoid the hail, and we sheltered in the basement for 25 minutes until it lightened up outside. Then we went on with our showings like nothing ever happened.
Victoria Rong Kennedy, associate broker, the Corcoran Group, New York, N.Y.
I wouldn’t say this was the worst weather, but it was definitely the weirdest. On June 7, 2023, I had three private showings lined up at 2:30 p.m., 3 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. to show my listing on the Upper East Side, which was a duplex penthouse with three terraces listed for $3.3 million. That morning, Canadian wildfire smoke was blowing through the sky of Manhattan. They were telling everyone on TV and radio to stay home all day, and I kept watching my emails and texts, hoping that all three groups of buyers would cancel their showings, but no one did. By 1:30 p.m., the sky was really dark. There was almost no visibility, but, still, there were no cancellations. At 2 p.m., I searched for an old Covid mask, put it on and walked out like a hero to go on the combat field. I could barely see anything a half block away, but I walked 11 blocks and two avenues and managed to get to the building. Well, all three groups of buyers and their brokers showed up on time. We all chatted about how strange the weather was. We put our masks back on when we stood on the living room terrace, which overlooks Billionaires’ Row, but we had no visibility. The sky was red and black, and all we could see was a small circle of light in the sky. It looked like the moon behind heavy clouds. It was like a scene from a movie.
Jeffrey Decatur, broker associate, Re/Max Capital, Latham, N.Y.
Living in upstate New York, I have experienced all kinds of bad weather—snow so deep it was up to my thighs and rain so hard that I wished my shower had that much pressure. However, the worst took place in April 2017, when I was showing a home in Waterford, N.Y., a suburb of Albany. It was during a late-season blizzard that came on fast, and there had to be about 2 feet of snow. The home had a normal-size driveway, but it was a foreclosure and was not shoveled. So, my client and I trekked up the crunchy, snowy driveway and eventually got into the house. As we were walking around, complaining about the Arctic blast and blizzard, I heard the sound of babbling water. I thought it was a fountain, so my buyer and I continued to walk around the house. As we moved toward the garage and family room, the babbling got louder, and as we headed for the basement, we saw that the pipes had frozen. The basement ceiling had fallen, and water was pouring in from the ceiling and the walls. The floor had about 3 inches of water and ice. I called the listing agent and left a message, but I couldn’t just leave the water running, so I waded through the freezing cold water in the basement and turned the water off. I didn’t really think that through, because I was drenched and then had to make my way back through the house and out into the blizzard again. When I opened the front door, I nearly froze immediately, and by the time I got to the end of the porch, I was crunchy and icy. When I got to my car, parked at the end of the driveway, my hair was frozen to my face, and I could barely bend my legs or feel my hands. I was walking like the Tin Man. It took me several hours to thaw out.
——Edited from interviews
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
4 min
OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
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