This is ridiculous. Really bad from @arstechnica.com. This cannot happen. theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

AGI is already here. This is something I have felt now for a while—glad to see a more formal argument put forward. There are important deficits with AI, for example, as described in arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212. But basically, it's here. And we need to deal with that. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

In historical AI safety research, one of the kind of 'grand catastrophic risks' that was always talked about was having an intelligence explosion that wasn't controlled or regulated. Now, such research is increasingly pursued ... without a safety component. www.foommagazine.org/is-research-...

Anytime I need a laugh, I go to Bari Weiss's comments www.theguardian.com/media/2026/j...

Great to see our "From Language to Cognition" work featured in @mordecwhy.bsky.social's latest piece on language models and the brain. Glad to contribute to the conversation! www.foommagazine.org/language-mod...

FOOM / NEW STORY OUT: "The results lend clarity to the surprising picture that has been emerging from the last decade of neuroscience research: That AI programs can show strong resemblances to large-scale brain regions." www.foommagazine.org/language-mod...

It often feels like, in a mental health or depression context, whatever it is that is wrong with me is so deeply entrenched that neither I nor anyone else would ever be able to figure out what it is.

In my latest for Foom, where I'm trying to provide free, high-quality, independent reporting on AI safety, I wanted to interview someone who could help me understand the challenging internal dynamics of the community. This was @ilex-ulmus.bsky.social. www.foommagazine.org/the-moral-cr...

"When dealing with the Big Cats, who are literally killing machines, there is always a distinct energy or electricity when you are in their presence." -Leif Cocks. Probably also the best description of humans

This kind of statement triggers me and it's the reason why science journalists and neuroscientists need to speak out, loudly, about the analogies discovered between DNNs and cortexes. People need to know we are not just dealing with an MS Word technology here www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Absolutely right. This is as big of a risk right now as anything else. It's flabbergasting how current government thinks anyone is being fooled about this.

New article covering recent findings from October: Models that maximize business performance in realistic role-play scenarios are also more likely to inflict harms. www.foommagazine.org/leading-mode...

What does it mean when the study, the study's reviews, and all the other studies citing the study, which is actually a good and interesting study, all show clear signs of AI writing (without acknowledgement), lol

Is any alignment research valid if it does not engage with the fact that we are surrounded by highly misaligned technologies, in highly misaligned societies, created by highly misaligned individuals?

Yes, BCIs seem in need of stringent regulation probably more than any other technology ever invented. The regulation vacuum for AI does not lend optimism. We are going to need serious public interest advocacy from neuroscientists if this is going to be anything besides severely dystopian

It's really strange to me how so many researchers in fields I follow have their names on 20-30 papers a year. I realize much of this comes down to co-authorship, but even at that level, it's a mind boggling degree of networking or credit sharing. (Not questioning the work, just the social norms)

2/ This week, we need your help! Take action at NewsNotSlop.org and follow the steps below, because holding media companies accountable on AI is going to take all of us.

WSJ editorial board giving absolutely disgusting support for undemocratic regime change; cancel your subscriptions. "If Maduro refuses to leave, and Trump shrinks from acting to depose him, Trump and the credibility of the US will be the losers.” www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

What did it mean, in 2021, when researchers began to see strange shapes on the insides of their models? We now have a much more sophisticated understanding—models may be thinking in terms of shapes precisely because some concepts are intrinsically geometric. www.foommagazine.org/scientists-m...

A major issue I find with engagement-optimized feeds is the way they lull you into a sense of complacency. 'Here's some nice things to make you feel better,' they seem to say; but when you're not ruthlessly intentional with your time, you find yourself hours later gasping for air; emotions exploited

This may seem like an obvious observation, but I went to the dentist and wow, my teeth are looking a lot less yellow now. Too much coffee and tea for me, I suppose.

I pledge to be transparent about the use of AI—Will you join me? A brief but important essay I've written for my new website. www.foommagazine.org/i-pledge-to-...

I've been writing with a lot of typos, lately, because I turned off AI on all my devices; I don't want corporate machines reading and training on everything I write. This has made for some sloppy mistakes, but it also shows humanness. Which makes me think, maybe we should just .. bring typos back.

Amazing story by Pamela Gordon in the @theguardian.com, who documented the life of a young man living on the streets of England from the age of 13. I fear that in the US, Craig would have had an even much harder time, if that could be believed. www.theguardian.com/news/2025/no...

Check out my friend's podcast if you like detective games! Listened to an episode yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it. Although, mainly playing Rimworld myself at the moment.

In my second article for Foom, I wrote about a recent study looking at the status of AGI safety engineering. www.foommagazine.org/plans-to-bui...

Incredibly comprehensive reporting on what sounds like a massive sleeping giant oil pollution problem going on in Oklahoma right now. Inspiring how so many people in such a defunct regulatory agency nevertheless still kept trying to affect change. I feel sorry for Danny Ray.

Ok but, real question, how do we actually create better democratic governance and institutions, in the age of the corporate AI controlled commons? Does the book speak to that? jacobin.com/2025/11/ai-i...

For my first article for the Foom website/project, I wanted to figure out what researchers have been finding at the intersection of AI alignment and ethics; which led me to this fascinating study by @farnazj.bsky.social et al in creating value-aligned feeds. www.foommagazine.org/social-media...

This is super disturbing and messed up that Nicolas had to deal with this. Also a great article and impressive the way he systematically went through the mechanisms. I would have been aghast, jesus

Pleased to announce today the launch of a new science journalism website called Foom. 1/16 www.foommagazine.org/announcing-f...

I guess the war profiteers have run out of excuses to increase the defense budget and have now turned to domestic militarization to drive spending growth. Or what's the real logic at play here? Raw opportunism? The boundlessness of the greed is just shocking. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Feel like the emotions of paranoia and narcissism are surprisingly closely related

I used Kickstarter to take a stab at trying to fund a book project and the site worked really well. Their employees deserve fair compensation and I support their strike and demands for fair wages

This was a really great event and I learned a lot about what is going on in the labor movement around tech and AI. People are doing some incredible work fighting for their rights as workers and as key contributors to the corporations that now control so much of the planet.

Actors are now being scanned for their likenesses with zero discussion of how those will be used. Ugh. www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oc...

Ugh, Google docs adds yet another bug, this time floating the cursor in the wrong place.

For those interested in using advanced AI as a tool of war, AI alignment is not a matter of making AI safe; it is a method for enhancing its controlled lethality. essays.ae.studio/alignment-ca...

Resurrecting my attempts at social media participation. More to come!

I have a lurker problem. I have come to appreciate the importance of social media, but I find that I dislike participating. I can't help but find online exchanges hopelessly superficial compared to IRL ones. How do others deal with this? Do you see it as speaking into the void and just embrace that?

I will never buy shit from Meta.

Netanyahu is as bad as Trump. This isn't how this shit works. Iranians get nukes, then you have MAD, stalemate. Launching all out conventional strikes just leads to all out protracted conventional war. Loss of deterrence. Immense, immense gamble. Horrible strategy by the Israelis. Terrible news.

A technology with an agency capable of doing nontrivial tasks, without a serious sense of ethics, is a fundamentally abhorrent technology that should never be developed. As soon as it is--and it looks like every AI company is trying--we are going to see it causing ACTUAL DEATHS. This is a crisis!

Although I know the LLM is not a sentient being, based on my (incomplete) knowledge of the research, the AI field moves so fast and the technology is so good that I can't help but aim to talk to it with the same respect that I would a human. And it seems like this is actually the correct decision.

As far as I know, the book project I released in January was the first and only book written by a non-neuroscientist on the emerging field of neuroAI. It was only a 30,000 word proof-of-concept, so not quite a complete book, but I'm not aware of anything else like it. mordecwhy.substack.com

I have come to loathe the incessant bulletpoints of AI text generators.

I feel like one of the most under appreciated parts of "what work is" is something like "stress decompression," like just sort of looking at what you have to do, reacting cognitively and emotionally to it, getting a little flummoxed, letting time pass, and then gradually getting over it.