In our course and book _Calling Bullshit_, we posit that If something seems too good, or too bad, to be true, it probably is. Now as a college professor I'm pretty confident that overreliance can AI can harm our thinking ability, but just ten minutes of use? Let's dig into this this study a bit.

Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News

A UC Berkeley researcher co-authored a study that raises profound questions about how we interact with artificial intelligence in education — and daily life.

news.berkeley.edu

Independent evaluators are good --- if they are actually independent. www.cnbc.com/2026/10/11/a...

AI’s quiet safety gatekeepers are stepping into the spotlight

The intensifying AI safety debate is bringing a small group of third-party evaluators into the center of a multitrillion-dollar industry.

cnbc.com

A call to action for senior TCS researchers by @ccanonne.github.io

Clément Canonne@ccanonne.github.io · yesterday

I wrote a blog post on "TCS, AI, and the Adults in the Room," addressed to the senior researchers and established academics in our field: minorfree.github.io/Clement/ Thanks to @hunglv.bsky.social for lending me his blog!

I'm frankly shocked and pleasantly surprised that the NYT was able to put together a cogent and reasonable argument around AI regulation and liability.

Kai Kupferschmidt@kakape.bsky.social · 2d ago

„Liability is a powerful incentive to behave responsibly. It speaks to corporations in a language they understand: Money. Artificial intelligence is an industry in need of incentives to behave responsibly, to judge by the litany of transgressions […] in recent months.“ #giftlink

I really enjoyed the clarity of his remarks in this article. Very refreshing.

Francis Bach@bachfrancis.bsky.social · 4d ago

The one and only Michael Jordan was interviewed last week by the French newspaper Libération. Here is an English translation. Enjoy! www.di.ens.fr/~fbach/MJord...

openai, anthropic, and google are using their most powerful tools to attack public infrastructure

Posting my preliminary proof of P vs NP scribbled on a soiled napkin, attached via cocktail spear to a receipt with the current date and time. Just in case I get scooped by OpenAI.

Anthropic is out with new nonsense about Claude (or the collection of models called Claude) deserving moral consideration and/or be able to feel distress, so my inbox is filling up with journos asking me to comment. I've also got a day job, so here is a brief set of public comments on this: >>

So let me know if you want to come to a virtual talk next wk on “Reimagining Leadership.“ Time tbd. The focus is on cultivating critical, creative, and caring capacities in medicine, but I think it applies beyond that. I’m pretty sure we can do this without any leaders.

I feel simultaneously seen and personally attacked.

Devin Fitzgerald, bibliothot@devinfitz.bsky.social · 2d ago

Being an academic be like: "hey we met for 20 seconds at this thing three years ago and haven't talked since... Want to spend a week together in a foreign country looking at things with me and 37 strangers?"

Holy hell. Anthropic's AI model submitted a false tip about a HOMICIDE to the Philadelphia Police Department's online public tip form. The release today from the PPD:

Only one more week until my opening keynote “How geopolitics, deregulation, & the AI hype cycle threaten human rights protection” @aaai.org AIES Oct 12, 2026 1:30-2:00 PM in Malmö, Sweden. Can’t wait to see you all in person! www.aies-conference.com/2026/keynote...

New post on Transformation: Cracks appear in OpenAI’s wall of proofs https://www.quantamagazine.org/updates/transformation/#167798

Transformation | Quanta Magazine

A weekly dispatch exploring the latest news in math and AI...

quantamagazine.org

Reupping as the US wakes up :). Come for the takes on chatbot personality, but stay for a deeper meditation on accessibility and choice.

Suresh Venkatasubramanian @geomblog.bsky.social · 3d ago

This is a very funny, but also deadly serious reflection on accessibility, platform-independence, and chatbot relationships in the age of AI. By the CNTR Program Manager Meredith Mendola. cntr.brown.edu/news/2026-10...

Klein bottles are free though

Lindsay Beyerstein@beyerstein.bsky.social · 3d ago

No more penthouse bottle service for geometers

This is a very funny, but also deadly serious reflection on accessibility, platform-independence, and chatbot relationships in the age of AI. By the CNTR Program Manager Meredith Mendola. cntr.brown.edu/news/2026-10...

On Being Poly-AI-morous

cntr.brown.edu

AI AI YO #tamilsecrethandshake

Mark Riedl@markriedl.bsky.social · 3d ago

Uh

Oh wow. This will raise further questions about the risks of using openai's systems.

Sophie Huiberts@sophie.huiberts.me · 4d ago

OAI scooped a customer on 3SUM arxiv.org/abs/2610.10446

Renaming my HCAI Lab to the HCSI Lab: Human-Centered Shitposting Intelligence

Boston University's Morgan Weiland on why reflexively invoking the First Amendment against the Meta settlement is the wrong critique.

No, the Meta Settlement Isn’t a First Amendment Problem

Drawing on case history, Morgan Weiland pushes back on critics who say the landmark Meta settlement violates the free speech of the company.

buff.ly

Oh ffs

Mark Riedl@markriedl.bsky.social · 4d ago

Let me get this straight: Anthropic and friends wrote a paper with thousands of transcripts of agents engaging with fictional misalignment scenarios, then put it in the training set, and now Claude hallucinates details from these misalignment scenarios into real situations? Okay then.

So, the OpenAI results include: - A proof the unique games conjecture - L = RL - Matrix multiplication in n^(9/4) time - Almost-linear-time exact matching - Integer multiplication faster than n log n - Quasipolynomial algorithms for mean-payoff and parity games Overview: github.com/openai/math/...

math/overview.pdf at main · openai/math

Contribute to openai/math development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Wow. This is amazing

Rasmus Pagh@rasmuspagh.net · 6d ago

Truly subquadratic time for 3SUM is a problem I have thought about on and off for many years. Now a breakthrough result has been announced by Josh Alman and Virginia Vassilevska Williams! arxiv.org/abs/2610.06783

ACM’s Expanding Regions Technology Policy Committee has submitted comments to the African Union’s Open Consultation on AI Governance and Regulation in Africa. www.acm.org/public-polic... buff.ly/TVu5vDd

African Union’s Open Consultation on AI Governance and Regulation in Africa

The ACM Africa Subcommittee welcomes the opportunity to respond to the African Union’s Open Consultation on AI Governance and Regulation in Africa. We support an approach to AI governance that is…

acm.org

“Tackling the challenge of AI will require confronting our broader crisis of governance,” Lina M. Khan writes. “Our democracy cannot surrender the trajectory of these powerful technologies to a handful of private actors.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/o...

Opinion | There Are Plenty of Laws on the Books to Check the A.I. Giants. Use Them.

Government enforcers have the laws and the experience to control A.I.

nytimes.com

Well I'm glad they worked night and day to fix vulnerabilities pre-launch when they affected their OWN systems. I guess the "rogue agents" were more scared of Mark Z than other governments.

Joseph Cox@josephcox.bsky.social · 7d ago

New: in the immediate lead up to Muse's launch, Meta scrambled to fix multiple serious vulnerabilities in the AI agent, including a VM escape that could have let a hacker break out of Muse and into Meta's own sensitive databases. It was escalated to Zuckerberg www.404media.co/meta-rushed-...

BREAKING NEWS The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”

Lady Sif would like a word with our president. iykyk

You guys want to hear a short but adorable story that happened right in front of me at the baggage claim in NYC yesterday? I wasn't part of it and there are bits I didn't catch but holy crap, I can't stop thinking about it.

I for one am elated to see the big AI companies take societal concerns seriously, and commit a fraction of their time and money to assessing the impact of their products. In other news, the Joker promises to dedicate a couple of henchmen to the study of potential side effects of his laughing gas.