Yann LeCun, Executive Chairman of AMI Labs, explains why LLMs are mostly retrieving human knowledge rather than thinking for themselves: LeCun starts with why so many people misread what these systems are doing: "I think there's a lot of confusion, really, because we tend to anthropomorphize systems that can reproduce certain human functions." When an AI writes fluent answers, we assume there's a mind behind them. LeCun's view is that most of what we're seeing is something more familiar: "LLMs, to some extent, except for a few domains, are mostly information retrieval systems. They can compress a lot of factual knowledge that has been previously produced by humans and can give easy access to it." The key words are "previously produced by humans." The knowledge in an LLM came from people. What the system adds is compression and easy access. That puts LLMs in a long historical line: "In a way, it's kind of a natural evolution of the printing press, the libraries, the Internet, and search engines. Right. It's just a more efficient way to access information." @ylecun is clear about their value: "LLMs are incredibly useful, there's no question about that. And they do amplify human intelligence, like computer technology going back to the 1940s." He also allows that in a few areas, such as generating code and some types of mathematics, the capabilities seem to go beyond retrieval. But he notes what those areas share: "It's still, to a large extent, domains where reasoning has to do with manipulating symbols." That's where the retrieval framing shows its limits. If these systems were truly thinking for themselves, you'd expect that ability to carry over into the physical world. It hasn't: "The problem is that why do we have systems that can pass the bar exam and win mathematics Olympiads, but we don't have domestic robots, we don't even have self driving cars." Then comes his sharpest comparison: "And we certainly do not have self driving cars that can teach themselves to drive in 20 hours of practice like any 17 year old. So we're missing something big still."

The Trump administration’s decision not to invite the leading international election observation body to monitor crucial US midterm polls fuels fears of serious human rights concerns around the upcoming elections.

NEW: Dario Amodei has said that AI systems "may be deserving of important rights." Anthropic's top safety researchers argue AI may be "justified in going rogue." Experts at Google and OpenAI worry about a digital "slave trade." So do some government officials. Once relegated to science fiction, the idea of "AI welfare" has become shockingly mainstream at some of the most powerful companies in the world. It is changing the way AI research is conducted and the way models are programmed. And critics say these changes have raised the odds of all kinds of catastrophic scenarios—including the ones these companies are warning about. I spent months investigating the frontier labs and AI "safety" experts seeking to regulate AI. What I found was a profoundly anti-human ideology that would alarm the average citizen and could determine the future of a world-altering technology.🧵

stable-worldmodel got into neurips 2026! it's basically everything we keep rebuilding for world model research (data loading, baselines, planning, evals) in one place so nobody has to do it again

Automated AI theorem proving has moved the frontier: The holy grail is not an AI that can produce an endless pile of true theorems. It’s an AI that can discover mathematics, and build each discovery into the foundation for the next. Check out our new paper on Learning to Discover *Interesting* Mathematics.

Nope. It's still true. Where is your domestic robot? Where is your Level-5 self-driving car? Where is your robot car that can learn to drive in a few hours of practice like any 17 year old? Where is your AI system that can understand the real world and quickly learn new skills like a house cat? There is no question that AI will eventually become as intelligent as humans in all domains. *** BUT *** 1. We're still far from that, even if AI and computer technology surpasses humans in an ever-increasing number of tasks. 2. It won't be based on LLMs, although LLMs will have a role to play (e.g. as a text interface).

Nope. It's still true. Where is your domestic robot? Where is your Level-5 self-driving car? Where is your robot car that can learn to drive in a few hours of practice like any 17 year old? Where is your AI system that can understand the real world and quickly learn new skills like a house cat? There is no question that AI will eventually become as intelligent as humans in all domains. *** BUT *** 1. We're still far from that, even if AI and computer technology surpasses humans in an ever-increasing number of tasks. 2. It won't be based on LLMs, although LLMs will have a role to play (e.g. as a text interface).

If you believe that the incidents of the past month warrant urgent AI regulation, please watch this first. This is the most prescient, concise argument for why we must be careful of excessive AI regulation. It comes from a Feb. 2024 (2.5 years ago!) congressional testimony from @glukianoff, a free speech advocate and the author of The Coddling of the American Mind. Here's what he said: "But the most chilling threat that the government poses in the context of emerging AI is regulatory overreach that limits its potential as a tool for contributing to human knowledge. A regulatory panic could result in a small number of Americans deciding for everyone else what speech, ideas and even questions are permitted in the name of 'safety' or 'alignment.' I have dedicated my life to defending freedom of speech because it's an essential human right. ... It's not just about the proverbial 'marketplace of ideas,' it's about allowing information, independent of idea or argument, to flow freely so that we can hope to know the world as it really is. This means seeing value in expression even when it appears to be wrongheaded or even useless. This process has been aided by new technologies that have made communication easier, from the printing press, to the telegraph and radio, to phones and the internet: each one has accelerated the development of new knowledge by making it easier to share information. But AI offers even greater liberating potential, empowered by First Amendment principles including freedom to code, academic freedom, and freedom of inquiry. We are on the threshold of a revolution in the creation and discovery of knowledge. AI's potential is humbling, indeed, even frightening. But as the history of the printing press shows, attempts to put the genie back in the bottle will fail. Despite the profound disruption the printing press caused in Europe in the short-term, the long-term contribution to art, science, and again, knowledge, was without equal. Yes, we may have some fears about the proliferation of AI. But what those of us who care about civil liberties fear more is a government monopoly on advanced AI, or, more likely, regulatory capture and a government-empowered oligopoly that privileges a handful of existing players. The end result of pushing too hard on AI regulation will be the concentration of AI influence in an even smaller number of hands. Far from reining in government misuse of AI to censor, we will have created the framework not only to censor, but also to dominate and distort the production of knowledge itself."

Washington needs a good power washing top to bottom. Five things I would do today to end corruption in Washington across all three branches of government: 1. Ban all stock trading. 2. Ban all participation in prediction markets. 3. Mandatory retirement at 75 years old. 4. Mandatory blind trust for individuals with a net worth more than $1 million. 5. Ban all foreign gifts to public officials, including foreign investments in their businesses or other entities.

I lived through the Biden years when MAGA bitched and cried every fucking day about gas prices. When Joe Biden left office, gas was $3.10. Gas prices are now $4.47/gallon. Groceries, utilities are higher too. Diesel is TWICE it was under Biden. trump's tariffs and war did that. So MAGA, you can take your "Biden left us a mess," and shove it up your own asses. It has been 621 days. He was elected on LOWERING prices. All he's done in 612 days is: - stuff his own pockets - start a new fucking war - make billionaires RICHER - attack our mail-in ballots - cut healthcare for the poor - fall asleep in every meeting - messed up the reflecting pool - make everything more expensive - start a trade war with our neighbor - ban the press from the White House - try to put his name on Kennedy Center - got his son contracts with the Pentagon - weaponize the DOJ against his enemies - protect the pedophiles in the Epstein Files - bitch and whine about Biden and the media - tried to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario (nobody with sense is calling it that) But he hasn't done a damn thing about yours and my gas, groceries, housing, healthcare, and utilities. Stinky needs to go.

Remember October 2022 when you doused Galactica with vitriol? Galactica was a 120b-parameter LLM-based system from Meta-FAIR designed to help scientist write papers. It was open sourced (link below). A mob of haters, including Michael, claimed it was dangerous and toxic and was going to destroy Science. The small team at FAIR couldn't sleep at night and took down the demo website (they kept the GitHub and paper up). Then, only 3 weeks later, ChatGPT was released and was welcomed as the second coming of the Messiah🤔 The vitriol dousers were silent.

Remember October 2022 when you doused Galactica with vitriol? Galactica was a 120b-parameter LLM-based system from Meta-FAIR designed to help scientist write papers. It was open sourced (link below). A mob of haters, including Michael, claimed it was dangerous and toxic and was going to destroy Science. The small team at FAIR couldn't sleep at night and took down the demo website (they kept the GitHub and paper up). Then, only 3 weeks later, ChatGPT was released and was welcomed as the second coming of the Messiah🤔 The vitriol dousers were silent.

Remember the guy who hacked his gym using AI, Andrew Bird? Well, I did a little OSINT, and it turns out he is the Conference Co-Director of Effective Altruism Global since 2015. Isn't it interesting that every major "AI" hack has been made by people directly connected to Effective Altruism?

Jensen Huang: don’t mistake engineering vocabulary for evidence of a machine mind. AI is still software, not a human mind inside a machine. "We can't make jokes about all this stuff, we're scaring the American public." Words like “spawn,” “parent,” “child,” and “kill” have existed in computing for decades; Giving those same mechanisms human characteristics today because of AI is unnecessary and misleading. ---- From "The Ezra Klein Show + New York Times Opinion + New York Times Podcasts" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon became a media superstar after going public with his AI fears. He insisted that he wasn’t working with any third party organizations. Familiar sources told us a different story: DEY., a PR firm representing many of the most prominent AI safetyists, was booking his interviews. One source, who had direct knowledge, even said DEY. preemptively booked Nate Soares, a prominent AI safety figure, for interviews that directly overlapped with Jacob going public. Jacob working with DEY. is notable for two reasons: first, as mentioned, he previously said he wasn’t working with third parties. Second, we are in the middle of a national conversation about the future of AI that is actively determining how we regulate the most powerful technology in the world, largely thanks to the panic stirred up by Jacob — and it’s in the public’s interest to know who, exactly, is behind it. Scoop from @huntryerson 👇

An absolutely packed house at yesterday's inaugural 'Mathematics in the Age of AI' seminar with Tristan Buckmaster! Professor Buckmaster walked the crowd through his and co-collaborators recent breakthroughs in a talk entitled 'Blowup for the Euler equations with smooth forcing.'

I’m a scientist. I need to say this because the AI hype is getting ridiculous. AI can design a molecule in seconds. That doesn’t mean it discovered a drug. It discovered something we scientists have never been short of: Something to test. Someone still has to make it. Run the experiment. Measure whether it works. Check whether it’s toxic. And ultimately prove it works in the real world. AI hype tells us: “Prediction is discovery.” “Simulation is experimentation.” “Generating a molecule is developing a drug.” It isn’t. AI is making ideas incredibly cheap. But every new idea creates something AI cannot generate: Evidence. And the more hypotheses AI produces, the more experiments we’re going to need. That’s the irony nobody seems to be talking about. AI may not make laboratories obsolete. It may make them more valuable than ever. You can speedrun the thinking. You can’t speedrun reality.

Listened to an EA-adjacent AI safety expert from Redwood Research on podcast, and you come away with 2 obvious realizations. 1. The current working theories for how AI takes control of civilization are...for lack of a better word...ridiculous. The arguments consist of dozens of contingent assumptions held together by made up probabilities assigned to future states nobody can possibly know. Change just one variable and the whole web of doom unravels. That's not to say AI is harmless. Obviously a technology this powerful carries real risks. But if we’re going to accept extraordinary claims about human extinction (and then make major policy decisions around them) we should demand extraordinary rigor. 2. It’s a great reminder that the genius is no less prone to delusion than the midwit. If anything, they may be more prone because of their gift for rationalizing to their own conclusions. And that’s what’s so bizarre about this whole debate. You have outlandish, quasi-religious claims delivered with an air of inevitability, and somehow the perceived intelligence of the messenger gets mistaken for evidence that the arguments themselves are sound. At a certain point, it’s really no different from Tom Cruise talking your ear off about thetans...