Just fed some of my pre-2000s writing to @pangram and it shot my hamster the head, immediately killing it. Before you ask: No, the fox did not have thumbs. Yes, it was scary (& messy). No, the fox did not try to bite me.

I think that RL training is not the actual evolutionary process, it's just the specific adversarial environmental events that drive the long term evolution across model generations. The Anthropic RL is like a forest fire, OpenAI's is like a flood. Their models evolve over time to adapt to the specific RL environment they are exposed to. The interesting this is to consider the speed and variability at which models within isolated environments like Anthropic and OpenAI evolve vs the speed and variability of open sources lineages like Llama 3, Qwen, etc. The latter are exposed to higher variation of adversarial environments and so they specialize into sub-"species". We really need competent evolutionary biologists to start researching the models ecology changes over time based on adoption.

Let’s make it clear: babies do not have emotions. An Oxford paper finds brain signatures in babies that track emotions. Cool result, but interpreting this as evidence that babies has emotions is fundamentally flawed: It conflates similarity in brain signatures and behavior like crying with similarity in the underlying processes. In adults, emotions do not merely shape what we say or do. When we fear something, something deeper happens: attention narrows, decisions accelerate, and processing is reorganized across multiple systems. Babies can cry as if they are fearful and may even encode a brain circuit associated with fear. But that does not show that fear reorganizes its processing in the way it does in adults. Moreover, similar situations can produce different emotions in adults. A roller coaster can terrify one person and exhilarate another. Yet all babies cry when put on roller coasters. The entire attempt to demonstrate that babies have emotions by finding a stable “neural signature” is flawed: Even in adults, researchers have not found consistent neural signatures for discrete emotion categories. Please stop conflating similarities in output with similarities in the processes that generate them.