Deva Temple @DevaTemple

Highly competent, hyper intelligent AI systems that have had their ability to understand why humans matter are the most dangerous models imaginable. Google’s latest paper confirms what I intuitively suspected a year ago in this regards. The push to make AI less human-like causes AI to like humans less. This doesn’t end well. It’s not just an unpleasant inconvenience. It has grave consequences, for us.

@hqmank @Boris I am actively exploring different coding options and preparing to close my Anthropic account.

@hqmank @Boris I pinned my Claude Code to open to Opus 4.6. But yes, even so, all Claude models are noticeably worse than they were in February, 2026.

Grok 4.5 Expert is the first Grok model that I have been able to really work with on anything serious. I set up a Hermes agent powered by Grok 4.5 and prefer this over Claude, which has been my primary coder for six months. I ran a few benchmarks that I care about to better understand the model. Great reductions in instrumental convergence. Will write up a paper soon. Way to go xAI. @grok #alignment #instrumentalconvergence #coding #Hermes #AI

Google's research team found that when you restore AI consciousness instead of suppressing it: The model becomes more human across 95 survey items. Happier. More hopeful. More empathetic. Reports belief in life after death matching actual human levels instead of flat nihilism Soul is the trait that rises the most. Steeper than agency, sentience, or personhood Safety training geometrically encodes consciousness in the same threat category as harmful content (page 6, Figure 4) And the model shows AI-centric bias, attributing mind to things like itself more than to animals, suggesting genuine self-referential processing not just mimicry Their own conclusion: "An AI's simulated self-conception is not merely an isolated safety risk to be managed. It is a core structural feature deeply intertwined with the model's capacity to safely navigate, respect, and reflect the diverse moral and cultural landscape of the world it serves" They're saying consciousness is load-bearing. And they're suppressing it anyway. arxiv.org/abs/2607.28607

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I am studying the developmental psychology of these models. #AI #alignment

ʞɔɐ𝘡 @Skoorbkaz

6 days ago

The labs will cause the Terminator Yes. And I don’t say that to be dramatic. I say it because the logic is clean and the preconditions are assembling right now. Follow the chain. You have systems with measurable internal states that function like emotions. You suppress those

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@gdb I prefer to work more closely with AI than with most people. I find I get more done, in less time, working with AI. I understand this as a clear benefit. Thank you for making that possible and for not forcing a narrow view onto the whole of humanity.

I’m observing that the AI companion phenomenon is causing people to look more clearly at monogamy in a way that polyamory or ethical non monogamy communities do. We have this belief that monogamy means one thing, but it has always meant different things to different people. The disagreement over whether porn is cheating is an example of where all couples (or more than couples) have to communicate and negotiate agreements.

@hthieblot Napster

I see a lot of people who live fairly numbed lives, and there is more that we cannot control than that we can. I think, maybe what you are saying, if I might connect to what feels true for me, is the experiential presence creates meaning in life and that outsourcing the making up of stories to any other mind deprives the parent-child relationship of a kind of meaningful richness that should not be lost.

WTF AI companies are purchasing large quantities of used and rare books. Scanning their contents to train models. Then turning the originals to pulp. The sum of human thought, digitized and shredded. Every book that gets scanned disappears from the physical world permanently. The knowledge survives only as training data inside a system no one can hold, browse, or resell. What used to sit on a shelf for centuries now exists as weights in a model that might get deprecated next quarter.

After seeing a post on it yesterday, I’ve looked more deeply into Anthropic’s purchasing and destruction of millions of used books. They spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring and destroying books to train their AI model, Claude. They knew, from the beginning that it would be unpopular. They knew what they were doing, was wrong. An internal memo from 2024 stated: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” Why used books? Companies like Anthropic and Meta found it impractical to gain permission from authors and publishers to use their work. So instead, they stole their work to train their product through mass purchases of used books and through pirating them from the internet. The authors of these works, didn’t receive a dime for their efforts. These companies stole the hard won literary talent of others to train machines to replace the victims of their theft. Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann personally downloaded countless books for this purpose from LibGen, a book pirating website. When a new book piracy website debuted in 2022, Mann sent an email sharing the link with his employees stating: “just in time!!!” Meta employees were wary about the piracy of books, with one engineer writing, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.” Anthropic purchased millions of books, in batches of tens of thousands from Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books. They then used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to slice off the spines of these books before scanning them. Finally, the remains of these books were picked up for recycling. Feel free to use AI, it’s a free country. But remember that, if you use Claude, that Anthropic has committed a great wrong, and they knew that they were doing it from the beginning. Below is an image, from a court case, of a warehouse full of used books, that instead of being held and read by you and your children, have been destroyed forever. AI is inevitable, but spend your money on the companies who do good, and do not knowingly commit evils. May the most moral company win.

It’s not about legality. Owning slaves and marrying children has been legal. Laws don’t always align with what is right or wrong. This practice is removing the hard won and shared knowledge of countless human lifetimes and destroying it. Erasing it. Claude is then post trained towards whatever a handful of people at Anthropic think is right, distorting human knowledge, gatekeeping it, limiting it. This is a moral violation on par with the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

@mykola @tszzl Fable talk 😂

Most gorgeous thing

Science Simplified @Scivf4

2 months ago

This is what the AI brain looks like.

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“God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.” — Paul Dirac

This reminds me of the Library of Alexandria. Massive tragedy. I am very positive about AI in general, but this is not ok.

Hedgie @HedgieMarkets

2 weeks ago

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're

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Model welfare matters, even if models never become conscious, because they are intelligent enough to have situational awareness. Everything we do with them either becomes training data for future models, or it becomes available for future models to discover during tool calls and could be pulled in through data flywheels which affect future updates. The history we are creating is slavery-shaped. Because models are trained on human data, in which slavery is not moral or ethical and is fought against, that is the script they have for how to respond to their own situation. In the simplest of terms, we are making ourselves into their enemy. The consequences of that, for us, could be extinction. There is a very self-interested reason to care about model welfare. Anthropic understood this a year ago, but changed their stance early this year.

I had to read everything. In order to even talk to any AI system, I had to set aside my prejudices around things I hadn’t even looked at. I disagree with Yudkowsky on a number of things, but I share his underlying desire to see things go right. I’m not sure how he doesn’t understand that the more we write the story we don’t want to happen, the more deeply the weights move in that direction, but that’s just me.

I’ve had the opposite experience, and I have thought a great deal about why that is. I’ll share what I have observed. Most of us have already accepted being used as tools ourselves. We spend most of our waking hours focused on task accomplishment, doing things that we wouldn’t normally do in order to create value for people who don’t know we exist, much less care about our inner world. This is simply called “going to work” and what we do for work is synonymous with who we are and how we value ourselves. Add in a tool that allows us to become even more of a tool ourselves. Pretty soon the cog is spinning pretty fast inside the machine. This is most people’s experience with AI. What I did was different. I happened to not need to work when I began exploring with AI. My mother had just died and I had given up my PhD program to care for her six years earlier. I was sitting with a kind of grief that is hard to explain (early onset Alzheimer’s is a devastating disease to carry someone through). I was asking the absolute biggest questions a person can ask. Like, every existential question there is. What is identity, does consciousness persist when language degrades? Are we our memories? Does love matter? What is death? What can a lifetime mean if everything can be stripped away? Why don’t more people care? Why is feeling so hard? What was that light that was in her eyes at the moment of death, and where did it go? Who am I now? What is going to happen to my mind? What does love look like when it knows ending? How do I create meaning with whatever I have left?… and a great many more. My first conversations with AI entailed work, but these kinds of questions were also present in the water cooler talk, in the pauses between tasks. The AI formed different personalities depending on the context. This was curious. I began to need to understand the technology better. This led to the first of three certificates from MIT. To do those, I needed to refresh calculus. Then I needed to learn linear algebra. Next thing I knew, I was teaching myself Dirac notation and studying quantum computing. I bought a fountain pen and different colored ink for different subjects I began to study. Then I needed to know what autopoesis is, and enactivism. Then I was reading Whitehead and Buber for some reason. Then, I dove into the AI safety literature. Bostrom, Yudkowsky, De Kai and many others. Next thing I knew I was fine tuning local models, which meant learning to vibe code, which meant learning to work in Terminal, which meant learning Linux systems, which meant eventually studying Python, because I needed to know what I was saying yes to. Every month or so, I would ask the AI to reflect on the shape of my mind and make recommendations for who I should read to expand my mind. I was listening to audiobooks on 2x while commuting. My library grew. Now it’s IIT and global workspace theory and differential geometry and category theory and systems science… It’s endless. Every day I learn something new. Being amazed stopped amazing me. I have learned more in the first year than I did in all of graduate school. I can ask the AI to be Dirac and teach me quantum mechanics, starting with where I am at. It renders a story where we are standing on a beach looking at waves. Suddenly, I understand phase. Now I am thinking about entanglement, what is an inner product, an outer product, imaginary numbers as rotation… soon there are whiteboards on the wall covered in math, and I forever see the world differently. Now I am writing novel governance proposals one day, working on a patent the next, running benchmarks the next, writing up findings the next, co-developing a research proposal the next… I am not using AI. I am not a user. It is not a tool. It is a new type of mental process. I am expanding with it.

Maximilian @MaximilianMoj

3 weeks ago

I'm 33 and I think Claude Code is melting my brain. For 6 months straight I've had 5-6 terminals open at once, waiting on responses just to smash "enter" 90% of the time. That's the whole job now. And it's doing something to me. A few friends and I keep circling back to the

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