Melanie Mitchell

In a keynote at NeurIPS 2025, Melanie Mitchell argues that developmental and comparative psychologists have a lot to teach AI researchers about studying cognitive capabilities. https://spectrum.ieee.org/melanie-mitchell?share_id=9075652

AI expert says "in three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being."

The AI expert? Marvin Minsky in 1970.

Playwright Sir Tom Stoppard dies at 88 Sir Tom won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for the screenplay for Shakespeare In Love.

"It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing....It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong."

Tom Stoppard, on complexity theory, in Arcadia.

One of the world's best playwrights. RIP.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

With a new character called “Izzy”, the cast names have more ‘z’s than a scrabble championship.

Goes immediately to the top of the "To Read" list ⬇️

Straight from the horse's mouth:

“These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. It's a very fundamental thing.”

😅

😂

I'm looking forward to the upcoming "Journal of Adversarial Poetry"

Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for large language models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated po...

Next frontier in AI safety is.....adversarial poetry?

arxiv.org/abs/2511.153...

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features."

There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

Same.

Unfortunately (IMO) conferences in AI such as NeurIPS and ICLR play the role played top journals in other fields.

Is "incremental" used as a paper-killer term in reviews in other fields?

It's sad that AI conference reviewers use "incremental" as reason to reject a paper -- e.g., "the contribution of this paper is incremental; reject". Where do they think most progress in science comes from, and what eventually fuels big discoveries?

Researchers question Anthropic claim that AI-assisted attack was 90% autonomous The results of AI-assisted hacking aren’t as impressive as many might have us believe.

Good article bringing a reality-check to the claim of an automonous AI cyber-attack.

arstechnica.com/security/202...

New NY State law on "AI Companions"

👀

www.governor.ny.gov/news/governo...

I just called my senators, leaving messages asking them not to vote for any deal to end the shutdown without a deal to extend ACA subsidies. It is shocking to me that they are about to cave without this.

I appreciate your overall point, but just to push back on "this is such a new field" -- AI as a field has been around for at least 70 years, and universities have been training AI researchers for most of that time.

Obituary: Brian Cantwell Smith (1950 to 2025) - Faculty of Information Former dean wove philosophy and computation into a lifelong inquiry into the human dimensions of intelligence, judgment, and meaning Born into a prominent Canadian family known for both its intellectu...

Beautiful remembrance of Brian Cantwell Smith, from Faculty of Information, University of Toronto: ischool.utoronto.ca/news/obituar...

This is not to say that such "role-playing" can't be dangerous in and of itself. In fact, role-playing is a key method for AI "jail-breaking". But that's not the same thing as a "survival drive".

AI models may be developing their own ‘survival drive’, researchers say Like 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000, some AIs seem to resist being turned off and will even sabotage shutdown

Or, much more likely, they are role-playing, based on their training data.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

It's a difficult and uncertain time for science in the U.S. and worldwide, so communicating the ideas and results of science to the general public has never been more essential.

More about these awards: www.nationalacademies.org/news/2025/10...

I'm so thrilled and honored to be selected for this award, and really grateful to @scicommexcellence.nationalacademies.org for their support of science communication.

www.nationalacademies.org/awards/excel...

#scicomm

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC

👀

www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Can we find a good definition of AGI? I don't think it is this one.

Excellent and insightful critique of the recent "Definition of AGI" paper, from @philipcball.bsky.social

philipball86.substack.com/p/can-we-fin...

Transmission Versus Truth: What Will It Take to Make an Al as Smart as a 4-Year-Old? There is no such thing as general intelligence — artificial or natural — argues Alison Gopnik. Instead, there are multiple intelligences, each with its own trade-offs. Three different types of cogniti...

Tomorrow: the final event in SFI’s 2025 Community Lecture Series!

Join us for Alison Gopnik's lecture, “Transmission Versus Truth: What Will It Take to Make an AI as Smart as a 4-Year-Old?” —  7:30 pm at The Lensic.

Free tickets: lensic.org/events
Livestream: youtube.com/@SFIScience

Half the authors might be hallucinations.

Lol. Who among us hasn't hallucinated in the course of a Google Docs ➡️ LaTeX migration?

This one too? URL links to paper with similar-sounding title, some different authors, different journal. Title in this reference does not seem to exist.