I wrote about the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, and his profound thinking about AI and the nature of intelligence. aiguide.substack.com/p/on-brian-c...

On the eve of the University of Toronto's festschrift honoring the late philosopher (and overall wonderful human) Brian Cantwell Smith, I'm re-reading his 2019 book, "The Promise of Artificial Intelligence". (1/4) ischool.utoronto.ca/festschrift-...

The #ACMBookClub is back! We’re kicking things off on Sunday, Feb 22, w/ a deep dive into Melanie Mitchell’s acclaimed Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, and a finale conversation w/ the author on March 24. Register today: buff.ly/a8L7qzA

Anybody remember this from 2017? www.theatlantic.com/technology/a... Plus ça change, plus c'est la même BS.

Good take on the "Moltbook" story from @benjedwards.com arstechnica.com/information-... Another good take I saw on the other site: "more of a fanfic for AGI than actual AGI". This could describe a whole lot of AI misalignment red-teaming....

This was a lot of fun and @melaniemitchell.bsky.social's newsletter is a rare island of coherence & measured discussion on AI aiguide.substack.com

I'm excited that the ACM book club will be reading and discussing my book on AI! I'll be joining on March 24 for the final discussion. www.acm.org/articles/edu...

My UCSB colleague Gurusha Juneja wrote a python tool to auto-check your bibtex for hallucinated citations: pypi.org/project/harcx/ It supports papers, books, and URLs. Usage: pip install harcx harcx references.bib

⬇️

The Waymos mistook them for stopped ostriches. (ML in-joke, sorry)

"There is no need to go on about the lunacy of this letter. Not even the president’s most eager apologists could spin this as anything other than what it is: a disgrace." @jamellebouie.net knocks this one out of the park. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/o...

NeurIPS reviewers typically review 6+ papers, each with 100 or so citations. The reviewers can't possibly check that every citation is real. But why don't we have an automated way to do this checking (and desk-rejecting if fake citations found) *before* the papers are sent to reviewers?

Super interesting results!

DO YOU HAVE ANY TROPHIES OR AWARDS I CAN HAVE?

My latest on Substack -- a write-up of the talk I gave at NeurIPS in December. aiguide.substack.com/p/on-evaluat...

This is what our government is tweeting to its ICE employees.

Why isn’t this video on the front page of every newspaper? The country we thought we had is lost.

I'm showing up at this event tomorrow (Saturday) to protest ICE violence in Minnesota and elsewhere: www.mobilize.us/mobilize/eve... You can find similar events in other areas of the US here: www.mobilize.us

Forensic analysis of objective video evidence. This is how you serve readers searching for clarity.

Tin soldiers...we're finally on our own...Gotta get down to it Soldiers are cutting us down....What if you knew her And found her dead on the ground -- From Neil Young, Ohio, 1970

Jacob Frey: "To ICE -- get the fuck out of Minneapolis"

Now accepting applications for SFI’s 2026 CSSS program, a 3-week experience for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and professionals to explore foundational theory, engage in collaborative projects, and connect with a global research community. Apply by Feb 4, 2026 www.santafe.edu/csss

2020s: AI "System Prompts" are lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "prompt engineers". 1980s: AI "Expert Systems" were lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "knowledge engineers".

From my holiday reading... "She had outshone at puzzles and abstractions her entire life, and still she had not learned a single thing about how to live." -- R. F. Kuang, Katabasis I can't help finding metaphors for AI....

This paper I have a conflict on since Mathias now works in my lab, but it is so beautiful, claiming that shape processing in humans is not done like modern neural nets, but instead uses a symbolic representation of a program to generate the shape. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

This is some world-class Eliza-effect-experiencing. www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

Subscribed!

Thinking of all the colleagues and friends I have who are connected to Brown University. What a devastating day for Brown, and for all of us.

Horrific news from my alma mater.

Incredible piece on Oliver Sacks. If you were ever awed at his supposedly true stories (I remember being stunned by the account of the autistic twins who rattled off large prime numbers), read this. He told wonderful stories, but they were in large part fiction. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

In the realm of science, do we want AI to replace us or to complement/augment us? @togelius.bsky.social argues compellingly for the latter. togelius.blogspot.com/2025/12/plea...

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

"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...

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"

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.

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?

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.

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

Or, much more likely, they are role-playing, based on their training data. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

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

👀 www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Excellent and insightful critique of the recent "Definition of AGI" paper, from @philipcball.bsky.social philipball86.substack.com/p/can-we-fin...

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