Meg

@deanwball Very well said!

I guess I’ve never written down my actual thoughts on AI cognition/consciousness/emotion. Here goes: It is clear AIs can think, in the reasoning sense. That does not mean they think exactly like humans. It seems like there are some similarities in how we think, but also very stark differences. Nonetheless, if your definition of “thinking” excludes “the ability to make genuinely new contributions to famous math problems,” it is your definition that has a problem, not AI. The ability to think does not necessarily imply the ability to feel emotion in a way that would be understandable to humans, and it does not imply that AIs have anything like consciousness in a way that humans would relate to. It may, it may not. We do not know, because our understanding of the underlying concepts of human emotional cognition and especially consciousness remains quite poor. There is some evidence that models experience emotions, but it is really hard to disentangle this from the next-token prediction training objective (if the model is telling a sad story, wouldn’t you expect features within the model that relate to the sadness emotion to activate), and the character training the model undergoes in post-training. There is a difference between “I am sad” and “the character I have been trained to play is supposed to feel sad, so now I will act sad.” We basically know for sure that the models do the latter at the very least; we don’t really know if they do the former. Consider: does Sora (a video-generation model) feel sad when it is asked to make a sad video? Does Midjourney dislike making certain kinds of images? Does a Waymo get scared? It doesn’t feel like the answer to any of these is yes (though again, maybe!), but these too are neural networks. Is the fact that models are trained on words mean that they somehow learn emotion, or are we just being tempted to anthropomorphize because the language models communicate with us in a way that “feels” human? My suspicion is kind of the latter. It also seems quite clear from the empirical evidence that models possess the ability to model themselves. That’s not really that surprising. At sufficient scale, it is useful to have a model of your own state to succeed at the next-token prediction objective (and the later reinforcement-based reasoning training). Once the tasks models are trained on are sufficient complex, they cannot succeed in training by being automatons; someone needs to step into the cockpit, so to speak, and fly the plane. Is this self awareness? Maybe. Is it consciousness? Probably not as humans understand it. All I can tell you is it is a model’s model of itself. It may be something more than that, too, but I don’t know. This is all very weird, very outside the Overton, and very confusing. I don’t really know what to say, beyond that we should take this stuff seriously, have an open mind, and do rigorous science. Anyone who speaks with confidence about this in either direction is just fooling themselves. We also need to be prepared for the very possible scenario that, despite our best efforts, we do not make real progress on these questions anytime soon. We may just be in the dark for a while, navigating under unflinching ambiguity. There may be no satisfying conclusion.

@lfschiavo Was it good? If so, I think we can skip Demis’s criteria to create novel theories. A far more critical threshold has been met. 😊

4.7 made me a cocktail

Bryan Johnson reveals an Enhanced Games athlete went too far with enhancement and started sinking in the pool “He was also measuring his lactate, normally you can get to 25 but it got so high that the device errored out” “They were looking for a device used for horses that could measure higher, it got off the charts” “James Magnussen also had a limitation where there was no suit that actually fit his body, so he had the inability to go further”

A baby African elephant charged at tourists on safari at a game reserve in South Africa, trying its best to look ferocious.

@sebkrier Yes, so deep… Deep, deep anxiety induction 😂

post-AGI, everyone will gradually transition to the deeply human practice of tafheet (تَفْحِيط)

@sebkrier It was a wild time. Later generations will never know the pain of dial up, or time required to download images, audio, or video. We live in a veritable utopia of instant access to data.

I'm so glad I was able to experience the nascent, chaotic, explosive Internet era from the age of 11.

People often ask what my biggest tip is for getting the most out of Claude Code. These days my #1 tip is: use auto mode Auto mode means no more permission prompts. It is the key building block for multi-clauding: start a session, then while it runs, work on another session in parallel.

Another 9 open Erdos problems solved, this time by DeepMind team. Interesting loop of LLM - Lean agents working autonomously, and only after it's verified formally, going through human review.

Trump's 2nd term differs greatly from his first in a crucial way -- It is relentlessly MONETIZING the presidency. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/…

The critically endangered Amur Leopard About 100 left in the wild. Nature is amazing. Protect it. 📹 itseriksen

@Miles_Brundage If time horizons just stay steady, at METRs doubling every 100 days, that would put them around 2 to 3 months equivalent human work-hours

It is also hard to talk about it without sounding crazy

A lot of AI/tech execs have been vocal about the importance of competing with China recently. Seeing who speaks out about this new green card policy will tell us a lot about who *actually* cares about US competitiveness, and who just uses China as a pretext to oppose regulation

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

🦌 North America’s largest wildlife crossing just opened in Colorado! Animals can now safely cross highways. Fewer roadkill, safer drivers, happier ecosystems.

Anthropic's Jack Clark.

@McFaul Specifically, Yeltsin in his clown era 🤡

Authoritarian vibes.

The President is a sad little man.

@BrendanNyhan @danwilliamsphil Last line literally made me laugh out loud. And just because it’s funny it’s no less true. 😂

One reason people think AI sucks is they tried AI 2+ years ago and/or used a free model. Another is they use Copilot.

Sometimes people outside the field say things like “The AI situation can’t be that bad, there must be experts who are on top of it”. As “an expert”, I would like to be clear that we are *not* on top of it. Some key aspects of the situation IMO: