Reading an essay by @mikexcohen.bsky.social comparing the complexity of biological neurons with the input-output function of the artificial neurons used in AI and here's his pictorial summation of the two:
Benjamin Riley
@benjaminjriley.bsky.social
Founder of Cognitive Resonance, a new venture dedicated to helping people understand human cognition and generative AI. Advocate for humans. Newsletter: https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/
As flagged two months ago, there's been a tension at Google between building a commercial AI product and nestling in the "foothills of the singularity" on the road to supposed AGI. (From @reckless.bsky.social interview of Google CEO Sundar Pichai)
Benjamin Riley@benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 2mo agoI doth detect just a weeeeee bit of tension between Google’s CEO and (Google subsidiary) Deep Mind’ CEO on what the future portends with “artificial general intelligence.”
Anyone who listened to @reckless.bsky.social interview of Sundar Pichai in May might have guessed this was coming. The enterprise-agentic direction of Big Tech is hard to align with the quest for “AGI,” especially if you’re interested in world modeling (see LeCun).
David P. Reichert@david-p-reichert.bsky.social · 4h ago"Demis Hassabis is leaving his role as CEO of Google DeepMind to be the unit's Chairman. Chief scientist Jeff Dean and another Google AI executive are leaving to start their own company, which Google will invest in." wat www.axios.com/2026/08/05/g...
“A maggot knows things about the outside world in a way that no computer does.” — Matthew Cobb, Manchester University Right on, Dr Cobb, right on. (This article is terrific btw)
Neuroskeptic@neuroskeptic.bsky.social · 7h ago"AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK" www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothin... Hmm... it's a great article, maybe not a great headline.
There’s no way to spin this. “Big yech”—actually a nice typo (slip?) in the article—was able to buy off the leadership of the nation’s second largest teacher’s union for a paltry $12.5 million.
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 8h ago“Teaching educators about AI is a ‘moral imperative’, said Randi Weingarten, the AFT president.” “And without outside funding, it was a choice between taking big tech’s money or doing nothing, she said.”
@janerosenzweig.bsky.social with a thread here demonstrating yet again that AI is a tool of cognitive automation. It’s not helping students think. It’s a substitution for thinking.
Jane Rosenzweig@janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 8h agoThis is like a "choose your own adventure book". If you choose option A, it will do the next step for you, etc. This is not writing. This is producing text for a grade. Writing has value as a way to figure out what you think and why. If students see this possibility in a product that is/5
OpenAI is launching a new suite of "education plug-ins" and just look at the amazing pedagogical innovations that are happening now because of AI.
Some of the most interesting "theory of mind" work is done by teachers. This interview gets at the heart of the realities of the classroom while grappling with questions such as, what do we mean by understanding? How do we get there with students?
Michael Pershan@mpershan.bsky.social · yesterdayDo you want to see my stupid face and listen to my stupid voice talk about cognitive load theory for an hour? Good news. wegrowteachers.com/thoughtstret...
This wide ranging conversation will cause heartburn for AI enthusiasts and skeptics alike. It's worth listening to (or reading) for that very reason. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/o...
Opinion | The A.I. Giants Weren’t Prepared for This
Jasmine Sun, a writer covering technology, takes us into the backlash against A.I. data centers.
nytimes.com
Even mathematicians “who thought AI systems might eventually get better than humans at all mathematical tasks bristled at the notion that math would then be ‘solved.’ They argued that math has a diverse array of goals and values, only some of which are about solving open problems.”
Mathematicians are grappling with the possibility that AI might eclipse them
I talked to 20 mathematicians about rapid AI progress in their field.
open.substack.com
Clearly AI is proving useful in advanced mathematics. But to what degree and of what import remains hazy to me. This article provides a nice entry point into the latest developments.
Quanta Magazine@quantamagazine.org · 2d agoOn Saturday, OpenAI announced solutions to three Erdős problems. These solutions, along with May’s high-profile counterexample to the “unit distance” problem, are quickly changing how mathematicians approach their work. @kkakaes.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-lege...
This is what we need to do, and it’s why it’s so vital for our schools to be at the forefront of *resisting* data politics by resisting AI intrusion, rather than advancing the aims of Big Tech. The battles lines are drawn.
Charles Logan@charleswlogan.bsky.social · 2d agoListen to @tressiemcphd.bsky.social when she writes that AI is "the backbone of a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological innovation” - and then teach about and against the technologies with the help of the books she cites:
Been waiting! I only wish I had a contemporary yet relevant historical analogy from literature, a “siren song” if you will, regarding the seductive promises of AI enthusiasts dating back nearly a century.
mr. TIM@timkellogg.me · 4d ago“sure AI solved like a gazillion unsolved math problems, but not much has changed, has it?” lol just you wait
Anthropic and OpenAI appear committed to the “hey we created a digital wild animal and look at the crazy shit it did when we failed to keep it caged!” theory of product marketing. We shall see how that works out. With real wild animals, we impose strict liability on their owners.
Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 6d agoReally important to note that in no way shape or form did Anthropic’s models in this incident “escape containment,” and not just in the word-policing sort of way. The model stumbled through an open, misconfigured gap. From Anthropic’s incident report:
“Good science requires a ‘chain of custody of why’…We must be able to challenge and potentially falsify every decision point so that when something inevitably goes wrong, we can try to figure out where we went wrong. Protein-structure models [such as AlphaFold] don’t allow for this.”
John Trant@trantteam.bsky.social · last mo.New sanctioned (t)rant about AI just dropped. On the limits of Alphafold and my worries about the disaster its use will cause for the literature and early-stage academic drug discovery. Look, they commissioned it. And by commissioned I don't mean I got paid, just invited. Awesome process btw.
“How did we get here? Situational Awareness was named for a series of facile essays about machine intelligence published by the improbably-named Leopold Aschenbrenner. ‘We are building machines that can think and reason,’ he writes, betraying that he has no idea what thinking could possibly mean.”
Elizabeth Lopatto@lopatto.bsky.social · 6d ago
Spending this warm July evening making a list of AI CEOs who have signed open letters fretting about the risks of AI and then continued to develop AI.
Fun to compare and contrast how so-called thought leaders talk about AI in education -- "just imagine the potential!" -- with how actual students craft (hypothetical) policy around it, which is almost exclusively about mitigating its harms.
NPR@npr.org · 6d agoShould students be allowed to use AI on assignments? What about on tests? Who should teach AI literacy? About 100 teenagers got together to try to decide. n.pr/44SFjNs
So bizarre that the hedge fund run ("run") by the guy responsible for creating this incoherent graphic about our future AI abundance...is currently in free fall as it tries to meet its margin calls.
Luke Kawa@ljkawa.bsky.social · 6d agoCNBC reporting that Situational Awareness has sold its <entire public equities book> Ho. Lee. Crap.
"'A simple analysis of the actual risk has an actual simple answer,' says longtime security consultant Davi Ottenheimer. 'The OpenAI mistakes were dead simple.' 'The OpenAI and Hugging Face situation is a predictable outcome of running AI agents that should have been easily prevented,” Zenla says."
Jeff Greene@jeffgreene.bsky.social · 6d ago"Multiple sources emphasized to WIRED that OpenAI's models also seem to have escaped containment because of lapses in implementing foundational security best practices" I mean...we all knew this where we were going to end up, right? GenAI doesn't "go rogue" - humans "make mistakes."
The “losing control” narrative creates the loss of control. Nobody is losing control of an emerging intelligence. They’re redirecting their own agency to it, as a way of diffusing responsibility, but the self-perpetuated intelligence myth has them convinced they have no choice.
Anna Mills@annamillsoer.bsky.social · last wk."They don't realize the debate inside the companies is if AI will be advancing itself past our control in two years or four." www.pacingthefrontier.com
This tells us quite a bit about how deep the AI brainrot runs through Silicon Valley, and next to nothing about AI “advancing past our control.”
Anna Mills@annamillsoer.bsky.social · last wk."They don't realize the debate inside the companies is if AI will be advancing itself past our control in two years or four." www.pacingthefrontier.com
This is one of the most absurd decisions by higher ed administrators that I can recall in recent (or even longer) memory. This is an absolute, irrefutable signal that the leaders of Harvard puts no value in the student experience of LEARNING. It's a joke and should be seen as hugely discrediting.
Mary Lewis@profmarylewis.bsky.social · last wk.It‘s quite possible that with this move, @harvard.edu could become the only Ivy League university without a writing center. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...
Sometimes I think the AI hysteria is worth it just for this guy. I’ve literally got tears in my eyes.
Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · 2w agoI don't think I've ever seen this guy break before. He's trying so hard not to laugh. www.tiktok.com/@huskistaken...
"America wins the AI era by diffusing it into the workflows of factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms, and main street businesses." -- Jensen Huang The hell it does.
This NYT visual does a nice job showing both the power and the extreme frailty of "AI agents" in handling relatively mundane real-world work tasks. Many assume there'll be continued leaps in performance but what if we're approaching the top of the S-curve? www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
Could A.I. Do Your Job? We Put Agents to the Test.
In our experiment, we deployed A.I. “agents” to act as office workers, and found that they were capable of performing some of the tasks we assigned, but not all of them.
nytimes.com
When you say “AI models went rogue,” you manage to skip the part where OpenAI manually removed its cybersecurity blocks and ran tests on a machine with a live network connection. Remember that when they insist they’re the “AI safety” people.
There is an interesting divergence right now between artificial agency aka "agentic AI" and how scientists are grappling with ways to conceive of human agency (and that of other living things). @philipcball.bsky.social covers the latter well in this essay. www.quantamagazine.org/is-life-just...
Is Life Just Different? | Quanta Magazine
The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose?
quantamagazine.org
"To wall off 'contemporary political issues' from our recent history is to make a choice, and here, Anthropic’s algorithm, programmed by Anthropic’s software engineers, is making it very clear that teachers should not connect the past to the present. Shudder."
Why is Claude for Teachers?
Anthropic bumbles its way into education
buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com