Two independent teams used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra on the same quantum cryptography problem, filing papers 3 hours apart, raising questions about scientific credit (Peter Hall/Scientific American) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Peter Hall
@peterha2l.bsky.social
Science and tech writer. PhD student in Cryptography @ NYU. 2025 MMF at MIT Technology Review. Signal: @PeterHall.1142
LendLocked: Privacy & Transparency for Digital Library Lending (Boya Wang, Peter Hall, Sunoo Park) ia.cr/2026/1243
What do a group researchers do with 200k GPU hours from NVIDIA worth around a million dollars? They train a bunch of AI models on fake people from Arizona, of course! Hubble is a new open source model suite appearing at ICLR this month. Read the full story here: www.science.org/content/arti...
AIs can ‘memorize’ data they shouldn’t. Can they be forced to forget?
New tool could help researchers probe how models “unlearn” sensitive training material
science.org
I am at the @aaas.org Annual Meeting today and tomorrow, and I’m always looking to talk computer science, tech, math, AI, and #SciComm with people. Come find me! #AAASmtg I’m also on a panel tomorrow talking about science journalism and @aaasmassmedia.bsky.social: aaas.confex.com/aaas/2026/me...
Scaling Public Trust in Science Through Journalism: Lessons from the AAAS MMF
With the recent upheavals in science and its place in society, many are throwing in their own thoughts as to the causes and demands this moment faces. Many worry that science and the public are too fa...
aaas.confex.com
For my first clip in @sciam.bsky.social, I spoke with Rahul Ilango about defining an entirely new notion of Zero Knowledge Proofs and its connections to century-old math. Check out my coverage on his @focs2025.bsky.social paper here: www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-... #zeroknowledge #zk #cs
How do you prove you know a secret without spilling the beans?
A new tool expands the ways people can prove they’ve solved a problem without revealing the solution
scientificamerican.com
Deportations and denials of entry. Visa delays. Researchers avoiding US meetings. It’s been bubbling up for a while, but the international collaboration crisis in science is here. My latest Op-Ed for @undark.org undark.org/2026/01/01/o...
The Uncertain Future of International Scientific Collaboration
Opinion | It’s getting harder for scientists from around the world to work together. Researchers must find ways to adapt.
undark.org
For many, the end of the year is an opportunity to catch up on reading or to purchase books as gifts. In 2025, a number of authors joined the Tech Policy Press podcast, providing fresh insights into how technology interacts with people, politics, and power. Check out the list:
Tech Policy Press: The Year in Books 2025 | TechPolicy.Press
In 2025, a number of authors joined the Tech Policy Press podcast, providing fresh insights into how technology interacts with people, politics, and power.
techpolicy.press
My first piece at Quanta Magazine is out! Cryptography and other fields in TCS holds a lot of promise for helping us understand how LLMs and other AI models work, and I’m excited to continue following this in the coming years.
Quanta Magazine@quantamagazine.org · 8mo agoIf you swap each letter in “bomb” with the next letter in the alphabet, you’ll get “cpnc.” Recently, scientists showed that and other methods can bypass filters on LLMs like Gemini, DeepSeek and Grok. @peterha2l.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/cryptographe...
404 Media is making a print zine about the surveillance tactics used by ICE, and how people are resisting this tech. Why? Print media is cool. Also, 404 Media has watched ICE grow from an already horrifying organization into a deportation force that is better funded than most militaries.
404 Media Is Making a Zine
We are publishing a risograph-printed zine about the surveillance technologies used by ICE.
404media.co
💻 Spotlight on Peter! @peterha2l.bsky.social spent the summer digging into stories @technologyreview.com, supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation. Don’t miss his work: www.aaas.org/programs/mas... #MassMediaFellowship #SciComm
Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/
AI Surrogates and illusions of generalizability in cognitive science
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have generated enthusiasm for using AI simulations of human research participants to generate new know…
sciencedirect.com
Wrote this piece on battery recycling for AI microgrids a while ago, and now it’s out!
MIT Technology Review@technologyreview.com · 10mo agoRedwood Materials is one of the largest battery recyclers in the US. Now, the company is using old batteries from electric vehicles to power AI. We named Redwood Materials to this year's list of 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch.
The administration “is currently pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more conservative-friendly.”
OpenAI is trying to clamp down on ‘bias’ in ChatGPT
GPT-5 is better at resisting liberal ‘pressure,’ the company says.
theverge.com
The 2026 AAAS Mass Media Fellowship application is open! This program was one of the best experiences of my PhD, highly recommend it for anyone interested in #SciComm /Journalism. Happy to answer questions about the app or @technologyreview.com. @aaasmassmedia.bsky.social @aaas.org aaas.org/mmf
AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship
This 10-week summer program places science, engineering, and mathematics students at media organizations nationwide. Fellows use their academic training as they research, write, and report today’s hea...
aaas.org
One of the final pieces I worked on as a fellow for Technology Review is now up. I profiled James Zou and covered both his Nature article and his upcoming conference #Agents4Science, where AI must be the primary author of submitted papers. Link here: www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/22/1...
Meet the researcher hosting a scientific conference by and for AI
James Zou used virtual AI ‘scientists’ to find novel covid-19 treatments. Now, he’s having AI review and present all of the research at a controversial new conference.
technologyreview.com
New at Technology Review today. Some astrophysicists are worried we are due for a bad storm like the Carrington Event (the last superstorm, from 1859). Being able to predict bad storms will be needed to mitigate the havoc this would cause to electrical grids, satellites, etc. #SpaceSky #Space #NASA
MIT Technology Review@technologyreview.com · 12mo agoSurya, an AI model developed by NASA and IBM, tries to find hidden patterns in solar data to detect solar flares and winds.
Devs at all sorts of companies are already hard at work building MCP servers that will let AI agents send emails, edit databases, and more. But there’s still a long way to go to making sure these agents act safely, transparently, and efficiently. Read more at www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/04/1...
These protocols will help AI agents navigate our messy lives
Anthropic, Google, and others are developing better ways for agents to interact with our programs and each other, but there’s still more work to be done.
technologyreview.com
A little bit of data viz for @technologyreview.com today about where AI is impacting work. Check out some more charts and the rest of the story here: www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/16/1...
It seems like safety and responsible AI folks are pushing in a lot of possible directions at once, but one that I’ve found following (with some reservations) for a while has been machine unlearning. Here’s one potential app of it to combat audio deepfakes.
MIT Technology Review@technologyreview.com · last yr.This is an important step in stopping the rise of audio deepfakes.
New story out for @technologyreview.com today. Working artists are on the frontier of the impacts of AI, and seeing what people are doing in this space will give the the blueprints for everyone else.
MIT Technology Review@technologyreview.com · last yr.A new technique called LightShed will make it harder for artists to use existing protective tools to stop their work from being ingested for AI training. It’s the next step in a cat-and-mouse game—across technology, law, and culture—that has been going on between artists and AI proponents for years.