In 2012, researchers found that just 5 mutations would allow bird flu – which kills ~60% – to spread from human to human 😱 Gain-of-function research remains legal & now... AIs can help 🤖🧬 Jassi Pannu describes the sad state of biosecurity + the need for data access controls

The UK AISI might be the most situationally aware government entity in the world today. Today on @CogRev_Podcast, Chief Scientist @geoffreyirving surveys the AI landscape. While jailbreaking frontier models is getting harder, the AISI Red Team has never failed. 👀

Can we avoid government abuse of mass surveillance in the AI era? @TimReutemann says authorities should have to get a warrant AND brute force a crypto problem to access video, making dragnets prohibitively expensive Any great American patriots building this? @PalantirTech?

"By 2030, we'll have maybe five theories that unify Quantum Mechanics & General Relativity, and we'll have to run high-energy experiments to figure out which one is right." @tachim & @vladtenev of @HarmonicMath on Mathematical Superintelligence on @CogRev_Podcast

🚨 LIVE show alert – Tomorrow, WED @ 12pm ET / 9am PT 6 guests over 3+ hours, talking: → AI for Science → Geopolitical Competition → Recursive Self-Improvement Last time @8teAPi & I somehow matched the Tech Bros 👀 Here's who's joining this time↓ x.com/labenz/stat...

Not planning to do a Moltbook episode because... tbh we "scouted" nearly every aspect of this story on @CogRev_Podcast over the last 2 years. Here's what you might have missed and why, imho, you should subscribe to stay ahead of the curve 🧵 x.com/labenz/stat...

"We will pay any incremental $, we'll write any incremental algorithm, we will do anything to improve quality. If we have to increase prices, we will. What matters is the value created." - @blitzyai CEO Brian Elliott on the quest to automate enterprise software development

"When I joined @OpenAI, I took the non-profit charter very seriously & I really thought the organization meant these things. The non-profit will continue to exist... but the issue is fundamentally: does the non-profit retain control?" - @sjgadler, ex-OpenAI researcher x.com/elonmusk/st...

"Your vending machine is calling the FBI – that's a bit weird." For more funny & fascinating stories about AI-operated vending machines, see the @CogRev_Podcast episode with @lukaspet & @axelbacklund, founders of Andon Labs & creators of "Claudius" 🔗↓ x.com/JoannaStern...

"Driving a car ~20 miles emits something like 10,000 chatbot prompts. If I avoid a single car trip, I get 10,000 free prompts. Chatbots might on net reduce emissions." @AndyMasley on why Bernie's moratorium on data centers could be a climate mistake x.com/BernieSande...

📣 Hosting an experimental year-end LIVE show with @8teapi this Wednesday, 12-3pm ET, to explore the most important big-picture questions in AI. What did we learn in 2025? What's missing from current AI systems? And what should we expect in 2026? Guests include...

Western AI execs often claim that "China will never slow their AI development down – and so of course we can't either!" But is it true? Brian Tse of Concordia AI says China is more focused on practical applications & less AGI-pilled than the US Full episode out tomorrow!

Wondering where your $$ can move the needle on AI safety? Here are ~20 assorted organizations @amylabenz & I have supported with ~equal-sized personal donations and/or that I championed as a charity Recommender for SFF Here's to a positive AI future! 🧵 x.com/robertwibli...

You keep sharing this paper, but... I do not think it means what you think it means In this short 🧵: 1) what the authors actually did, and why "no world models" simply does not follow 2) a few highlights from the literature on AI world models x.com/keyonV/stat...

10 random thoughts on AI Agents, inspired by LLM product response times, which with inference time scaling are long enough for my mind to wander 🧵 # 1 – LLMs remain weird - new Gemini 2.5 Pro still just 1 for 3 on this task, with catastrophic failures x.com/labenz/stat...

"It's important to know that Elon's right. OpenAI is attempting the second-biggest theft in human history. The amicus brief is completely correct. The terms they've suggested are completely unacceptable." @TheZvi on the @elonmusk vs @OpenAI lawsuit

"o3 is misaligned. It lies to the user & defends it onto death. It's significantly worse than o1 and GPT-4.1 seems less aligned than GPT-4o The more RL you apply, the more misaligned they get, & we don't seem to be trying that hard" @TheZvi on why his p(doom) is up to 70%

"the AI safety camp says: It's a coordination problem, we can't solve alignment, so we need to slow down. the NatSec folks say: I've seen how China operates. A deal is impossible. We have to win, we have to race" @jeremiecharris & @harris_edouard on the USA's AI dilemma 🧵

I spoke with @hlntnr for the first time since she was on the OpenAI Board & I was on the GPT-4 Red Team We covered military use cases of AI, her concept of "adaptation buffers", how policymakers can support AI whistleblowers, & how AI lab culture might be OOD Highlights 🧵 ↓

Why have leading AI companies converged on reasoning models in recent months? Was it simply that the same next steps were obvious to all, or are people swapping secrets at SF parties? @jack_w_rae, who led "Thinking" for Gemini 2.5, shares his perspective Reasoning Model🧵↓

The Revolution in software runs much deeper than vibe coding. @augmentcode's @guygr & I discussed AI assistance for professional engineers & large-scale codebases. Ever heard of "Reinforcement Learning from Developer Behaviors"? Listen to "Code Context is King" now! 👂↓🧵

Applications of AI to frontier biology endlessly fascinate me. Here's @SiyuHe7 talking about Squidiff, a model that runs experiments in silico by predicting how single cell transciptomes will respond to perturbations This can save researchers months! x.com/SiyuHe7/sta...

What would it take for the US & China to cooperate on high-stakes AI safety? Unfortunately, @AngelaZhangHK believes: "The world needs a disaster (let's hope it's contained!) to show world leaders the dangerous capability of AI – then leaders will wake up & take proper action."

"The Chinese economy is at rock bottom. Young people are pessimistic – the lowest sentiment in decades. In the West, talk about Chinese surveillance is all negative. Go to China, they'll tell you they feel safer." @AngelaZhangHK on US misconceptions re: China Recommended!

"There's big change in the industry: moats are being eroded. The value of code is going down very quickly. The only moat that matters is speed." Great episode with @startupandrew, who's hiring AI Agent Managers in all departments @Shortwave $10K referral bonus 🔗↓

"Steve Jobs said that a computer is a bicycle for your mind. We're going to have a sort of emotional bicycle that extends us through products like companionship. And voice is going to be the primary interface." - @a16z's @illscience & @omooretweets on Conversational AI

I recently returned to @littIeramblings' Consistently Candid podcast to discuss the most important AI developments in the ~9 months since my last appearance #1: (the obvious one) RL on LLMs works, and we'll soon see superhuman math & programming AIs, at least. The race is on!

"I've actually generated the knowledge, made discoveries as a scientist in these fields If I'm finding AI valuable for those topics... there's not a single person in the world who wouldn't get value. If they claim that, I'll do it for them!" @DeryaTR_ You have no excuse! 🔗⬇️

"China is leading the dance. They're in the driver's seat. We're used to being the one who acts and everyone else reacts. Now we're reacting. We're not the big one anymore. That's a mindset we've got to get used to." -@Noahpinion on the new US-China fundamentals 🔗👇

It remains under-appreciated that most AI safety researchers are techno-optimist libertarians who fear concentration of power & love open source software Case in point: Nicholas Carlini, who recently made waves by moving from DeepMind to Anthropic x.com/giffmana/st...

When I started a nerdy AI podcast, I never expected to interview a sitting Governor But, New Jersey @GovMurphy is among the most Situationally Aware electeds in the US today, and I applaud him for leading when, <1 yr from his term limit, he could've easily passed the buck 👂↓

"I don't think we should be super comfortable with models that have their own goals & objectives and are willing to defend them by subversion" understatement of the century candidate from @RyanPGreenblatt, who discovered "Alignment Faking" in Claude

3 big ideas from my talk with @illumexAI CEO @innatok: 1. "Talk to your data" is going mainstream – their inbound is now mostly business leaders, not data people – this has obvious labor market implications! 🔗 to full episode ↓

Claude cooperates! Might it also collude? This early graph-of-the-year candidate show the results of early LLM cultural evolution experiments Big picture: multi-agent dynamics are dramatically under-explored! pod w/ @aronvallinder & @edwardfhughes x.com/aronvallind...

my best explanation: it's easier for gradient descent to activate a ~"be evil" feature and let that flow through the model's coding circuits, than to edit such complex circuits directly we should ask: what's the fewest features needed to fit the data? x.com/OwainEvans_...

AIs can develop an "intuitive physics" in ~any problem space from which we have abundant data Personally, I think an o3-class model with such intuition for physical & economic processes would be a "Superintelligence" Full interview on the @heyhumanpodcast YT channel

"Vibes coding" is real, and can be spectacular I've used @cursor_ai extensively + tested @lovable_dev @boltdotnew @v0 @cognition_labs Devin & @Replit agent  + spoke to CEOs @antonosika & @ericsimons40 for 2 new podcasts (out now!) Welcome to the "Software Supernova" 💥 🧵 👀

Will the AI future be dominated by a few key players & their $1T data centers? Not if @PrimeIntellect has anything to say about it! Their goal is to make collectively owned AI that's too cheap to meter – and they've got a 4-step plan to make it happen! 🧵

"This is a totally different era for IT. Effectively the IT department becomes the HR department of AI, deploying AI labor against different kinds of problems." @box CEO @levie on enterprise adoption of AI – self-recommending! 🧵

"We tried to preserve a model's behavior while changing the representation. We found lots of different activations that point to the same behavior." @emmons_scott, @LukeBailey181 & @jenner_erik discuss their new paper on Obfuscated Activation Attacks🧵 x.com/LukeBailey1...

"I was skeptical, but I'm becoming convinced this will revolutionize things. It's more & more accurate, the reasoning is better. We'll get to where it's solving cases, shortening the diagnostic odyssey." -Rare disease "Gene Hunter" & ChatGPT Pro Grant Winner @CatBrownstein

.@liron: "Would you sign the statement: 'Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks, eg pandemics & nuclear war'?" @tszzl: "Totally. Of course there's existential risk" So why go ahead?? a 🧵 on "OpenAI thought"

"What if we give every person going through cancer, MS, Alzheimer's, an AI that helps them through that journey? Available in every language. The world becomes a better place. We call this Universal Basic AI" - @EMostaque on his vision for the Intelligent Internet @ii_posts

Can AIs do AI R&D? "To measure catastrophic risk in a scientifically rigorous way," @neev_parikh & the team @METR_Evals created RE-Bench, a set of 7 challenging ML Research Engineering tasks Top humans still beat top models, but we're quite close to critical thresholds!

"Most technology serves as tools with a defined social function or role. From that perspective, it becomes more clear what alignment should be: What does it mean to play that role? What are the standards? What are the constraints?" @xuanalogue on role-based AI alignment

"Most technology serves as tools with a defined social function or role. From that perspective, it becomes more clear what alignment should be: What does it mean to play that role? What are the standards? What are the constraints?" @xuanalogue on role-based AI alignment

"In specialized domains like biology, there's a clear limitation of what we've written down in words. These protein language models have learned new concepts ... and now it's our job to extract those using techniques like SAEs." @james_y_zou on AI-driven discovery in biology 🧵

I'm doing my first *Ask Me Anything* episode! If you've got AI questions – from practical application to galaxy brain philosophy to parenting & career choices – I may or may not have good answers, but it's all fair game to ask! 🔗 👇

"In physics & chemistry, five Nobel Laureates won in large part because of their AI techniques. In biochemistry, it hasn't even popped off yet – we're still at the very beginning of the curve" @amelie_iska returns to discuss recent advances in AI for Biology 🧬🤖 Recommended!

20K YT subscribers – wow! I'm still amazed there's an audience for the crazy mix of super-in-depth AI conversations I want to have, but to all who've listened, participated, and shared encouragement, ideas, & feedback: Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution! 🙏