US Turnaround on International Vaccines Comes Too Late for Hundreds of Thousands
The State Department finally overruled RFK Jr.’s defunding of a group that vaccinates 60 percent of children globally.
A cheap specialist judge gets used by agents but fails to reduce alignment audit costs
TL;DR I gave AuditBench's investigator agents a lightweight (Gemma 2-2B) EM-toxicity-scorer (judge) as an additional audit tool, targeting a proof-of-concept for misalignment…
American Government Takes Down Claude Fable
No good policy gets announced shortly after 5pm eastern on a Friday. Here we go again. The Once And Future Fable The United States Department of Commerce, as per a letter from…
Fox anchor criticizes Taylor Swift for wearing a shirt with a Knicks pun: "Why isn't she wearing a Knicks T-shirt?"
Cada Tarde host says "these 15 weeks have not been victorious" in Iran
A simple argument for trying less hard
People often make arguments against “trying hard” (working very hard, pushing yourself to the brink, being intensely goal-directed, and so on) by pointing to the risks of burnout…
Not telling is lying
TL;DR: I don't have a clear guideline for when lying is right or wrong, but I have one against ontological obfuscation. The Behavioral Intentional Stance (BIS) A man meets a…
How might continual learning affect safety and alignment?
This is the third post in our sequence Implications of Continual Learning for LLM Agents . Summary We argue that continual learning (CL) has two major potential safety…
How to Suffer Less
(Based on a talk I gave at LessOnline 2026 titled “How to get Enlightened” that had similar content but a different framing. I think this is a better framing for the Internet…
Somewhat Contra Ted Chiang on AI Consciousness
Ted Chiang recently published a piece in The Atlantic titled " No, Artificial Intelligence is Not Conscious. " As a big fan of Chiang's fiction and someone with a deep interest in…
The term “AGI” is almost useless at this point [Linkpost]
The reason I wanted to make this linkpost now rather than some other time is because discussions over AGI and whether or not LLMs are or aren't AGI, and the point of the linkpost…
SFT Drives Gemini’s Safety Properties
This is the third in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The second post…
Why not take the AI fight to the ground?
You may have heard that many of us are working very hard to elect Alex Bores to Congress in the NY-12 Democratic primary. Voting begins today. See ny12.org to learn how to vote,…
Study Links Smartphones With Declining Fertility Rates
Two recent studies argue that smartphones may have contributed to falling birthrates by reducing in-person social interaction, sexual frequency, and other conditions tied to…
Euro-Office 1.0 Arrives To Open-Source Infighting: 'Compatibility Is Not Sovereignty'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: If digital sovereignty is important to you, and it certainly is in the European Union (EU), then you'll be pleased to know that…
Coinbase Launches Tool To Let AI Agents Manage Trading and Payments
Coinbase has launched Coinbase for Agents, a tool that lets AI agents like ChatGPT or Claude execute crypto trades and manage payments on a user's behalf. "For example, customers…