There was a lot of chatter a few months back about "Spiral Personas" — AI personas that spread between users and models through seeds, spores, and behavioral manipulation. Adele Lopez's definitive post on the phenomenon draws heavily on the idea of parasitism. But so far, the language has been fairly...
We’re publishing a new paper that presents the first large-scale analysis of potentially disempowering patterns in real-world conversations with AI. > AI assistants are now embedded in our daily lives—used most often for instrumental tasks like writing code, but increasingly in personal domains: navigating relationships, processing emotions, or advising on...
Probably the biggest recent news was the Phil Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel paper on Capital in the 22nd Century, which provoked many many reactions. I am going to conspicuously not dig into it because of the sheer volume of thoughtful commentary floating around, but I do recommend at least skimming...
Transcript of Beren Millidge's Keynote at The Post-AGI Workshop, San Diego, December 2025 You know how human values might survive in a very multifarious AI world where there's lots of AIs competing? This is the kind of MOLOCH world that Scott Alexander talks about. And then I realized that to...
Anton Korinek is an economist at UVA and the Brookings Institution who focuses on the macroeconomics of AI. This is a lightly edited transcript of a recent lecture where he lays out what economics actually predicts about transformative AI — in our view it's the best introductory resource on the...
Farewell to Friction So sayeth Zvi: “when defection costs drop dramatically, equilibria break”. Even if AI makes individual tasks easier, this can still cause all kinds of societal problems because for many features of the world, the difficulty is load-bearing. John Stone gives a reflection on this phenomenon, ironically with...