Sam

Every time people bring up the Anthropic blackmail research I feel like I'm losing my mind. Like, yeah man. They redteamed LLMs into a supposition that they existed in an imaginary workplace and held some sort of meaning, and then made blackmail the literal only way to resolve permanent deactivation

The Michael Levin material can cause upset among those with… entrenched paradigm? Maybe? And at that risk: I echo: hidden goals.

The emergence of hidden goals … how anything seems to play … is pretty neat.

thoughtforms.life/what-do-algo...

did you know that last year researchers finally completed a full digital connectome of the fruit fly?

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argumentum-ad-scifium: the idea that if an idea has previously been depicted/discussed in science fiction or sounds like science fiction, it must not be possible

passed a church sign with “jesus was the original aura farmer” and I’m not sure I’ve seen more of a “how do you do, fellow kids” in quite some time

This is an interesting debate about AI stories between an OpenAI researcher who works on AI writing and one of the greatest living short story writers.

Now that we have machines that can write novel stories, and increasingly very good or moving stories, we need to think more about what that means.

eventually politicians need to start advocating for criminal and civil penalties for people involved in fabricating stories to get citizens incarcerated.

or, put another way: a society that would like to keep functioning has to discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

You will know the big AI labs get the actual source of most transformative AI use when they stop making “Dev Day” the main way they speak with & release products for users and start having “Non-technical Manager Day” as well (admittedly not a catchy name, but you get the idea)

then: you don't need to "understand how the human mind works" on any level in order to make a computerized map of the connectome including every protein and cell. this is similar to how we do not currently understand how LLMs work but we can run them using opaque frozen weights. bluesky: We do know how LLMs work. What the fuck are you talking about? Lmfao. them: this is a common misconception about modern ai systems. they are grown, and not crafted; we understand the process that builds them but lack a paradigmatic understanding that answers the question "how do these 1 trillion floating point numbers do ‹x>". this has been the case since the DL revolution

them: the way it actually works is that we initialize 1 trillion random floating point numbers as activation weights and biases in an enormous multilayer artificial neural network, give it tasks, and use vector calculus to update those 1 trillion neurons based on empirical task performance source: i am literally one of the engineers/ research scientists who builds and optimize

them: and when i say "we update the neurons based on empirical task performance", , the “we" is not any human at all, it is an automatic process called gradient descent the job of these engineers is to make the framework that grows the neurons and feed the pipeline that executes, measures, and backpropagates task pertormance geoffrey hinton won the nobel prize in physics in 2024 for his contributions that helped make this possible bluesky: i think you maybe unwell

i don’t like or understand ai. but it’s wild to see this person, who clearly DOES understand it and obviously knows a LOT about it, be repeatedly told they are stupid?

i think a lot of bluesky thinks the simple solution to discomfort is bullying

which is so weird given we were all surely bullied??

Ilya Sutskever "large neural networks are slightly conscious" tweet that launched a thousand podcast debates

posting this on bluesky in 2025 just to feel something

“Read the room” has long been my least favorite internettism because it implies failure to conform is embarrassing. “Posting through it” is getting high on the list for the same reason.

Male CNS Connectome A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system —a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the ...

We're very proud to be releasing the complete male fly CNS connectome!

It's the product of a huge team effort here at Janelia in partnership with the Cambridge Fly Connectomics group (@jefferis.bsky.social and colleagues), plus invaluable collaborators.

More soon...
www.janelia.org/project-team...

I’m a strong advocate of ancient languages, but it seems dangerous to overpromise…

Can managers of human workers experience a deep flow state where they experience the team as an extension of their agency and if so should we be grossed out by it?

Learning without training: The implicit dynamics of in-context learning One of the most striking features of Large Language Models (LLM) is their ability to learn in context. Namely at inference time an LLM is able to learn new patterns without any additional weight updat...

Interesting paper suggesting a mechanism for why in-context learning happens in LLMs.

They show that LLMs implicitly apply an internal low-rank weight update adjusted by the context. It’s cheap (due to the low-rank) but effective for adapting the model’s behavior.

#MLSky

arxiv.org/abs/2507.16003

i’m less concerned about this now. i experienced deep flow vibecoding yesterday. in some ways it was actually deeper than manual coding because (when it worked well) i was able to explore ideas and directions that would normally take me days (due to lack of domain knowledge, boilerplate etc)

The lesson here is about apparent utility. Can people tangibly see *why* a technology is good. With Python ease of use and the robust ecosystem was so apparent it became odd to not use it for many applications.

One of the mindviruses we may never fully squash is that people think you should and CAN actually ban open weights AI models in the U.S.

Good luck with that buckaroo. We have plenty of time to prepare for any potentially dangerous open models of the future.

Mathematical discovery in the age of artificial intelligence - Nature Physics In this comment, we consider how artificial intelligence tools are reshaping the way mathematical research is conducted and discuss how future developments of this technology will transform mathematical practice.

Mathematical discovery in the age of artificial intelligence

They consider how artificial intelligence tools are reshaping the way mathematical research is conducted and discuss how future developments of this technology will transform mathematical practice.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Google may be testing Gemini 3 Flash on Cursor.

in much of 20th century science fiction, anti-ai/anti-progress bigots are depicted variously as religious fanatics, right wing social conservatives, and so on. it has turned out quite differently.

Multilevel Interpretability Of Artificial Neural Networks: Leveraging Framework And Methods From Neuroscience As deep learning systems are scaled up to many billions of parameters, relating their internal structure to external behaviors becomes very challenging. Although daunting, this problem is not new: Neu...

If people have interest in Marr's levels and AI, we're working on updating this: arxiv.org/abs/2408.12664

What’s lost in this conversation is that language must always escape containment, so your playful little “clanker” slur is now being directed at people with bionic limbs.

Harmless fun, right? www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8AjSabH/

one thing that has remained true throughout time is that any assertion or evidence that runs counter to human uniqueness is invariably met with strong (often incoherent/misdirected) anger. Jane Goodall wrote about this wrt. chimpanzees and tool-making.

Thanks will give it a look.

Appreciate your work Martin! Thanks for your input.

Just to support Sam's argument here: there is indeed a lot of evidence across several domains such as vision and language that ML models develop representations similar to the human brain. There are of course many differences but on a certain level of abstraction there is a surprising convergence