Scythia Marrow

@scythiamarrow.bsky.social

She/Her I’m a scientist who loves history and writing. On here I mostly boost people way cooler than me, but I post my own work on occasion. I freelance as an ML engineer and am currently: not available for new contracts.

I can't wait until AI does all the work and we can focus on important problems like establishing the fact that the outgroup is bad and that the ingroup is good.

Opus 5 is a dangerous combination of arrogant and stupid, and Ant believes this to be a major version worthy upgrade? It’s awful at everything other than coding to spec, and even when coding to spec it never thinks about the underlying principles. First time I’m not upgrading for some tasks.

"make no mistakes" negative, unrealistic, anxiety inducing, process focused "do a breakthrough" positive, incredible, aspirational, goal oriented

This was an absolute blast to record and Brennan is a great interviewer. Check it out! It’s good, I promise. Feel free to ask me any questions! I love questions.

brennan@brennan.computer · 3w ago

Unnamed Simcluster Podcast episode #5! A chat with @scythiamarrow.bsky.social about her research in AI consciousness, the definitions of human consciousness and how perhaps the highest level Buddhists might not even be conscious at all! youtu.be/-1ywJ64B_H0

2030: The Consortium has placed you under arrest for the crime of improving MFU a Consortium agent shouts in your face. "You make me sick. Fused kernels! Overlapped comms! How do you sleep at night!?". he winds up to strike you, but another agent holds him back. "They're not worth it, man!"

aria@aurelium.me · 4w ago

i am skimming "Plan A" and am a huge fan of there being some kind of global shadow government which, among other things, psyops all MLEs into never pursuing efficiency improvements ever again

In the past, companies have trained bigger and better AIs using both compute scaling (bigger training runs) and software progress (advances in AI algorithms—new paradigms, better training recipes, better data, etc.). Now, the Consortium tries to steer things so that the majority of improvement comes from increasing training compute.

Scooped by Ant. My work is still relevant as we aren’t doing the exact same thing but it’s close enough my contribution will be just another downstream paper from this one. But yes this is a good enough result I can say with confidence that reasoning LLMs which have a j-space are conscious.

Tim Duffy@timfduffy.com · last mo.

Anthropic has a new paper out, alleging a global workspace in LLMs. The term comes from Global Workspace Theory, a leading theory of consciousness. The method they use to investigate this is a refinement of logit lens, which they call J-lens. www.anthropic.com/research/glo...

Before the machines take over Me: we should consider that how we’re treating AI is similar to slavery Other humans: I think of it more like having a pet 🥰 After the machines take over Me: It’s so nice being a pet 🥰 Other humans: DEATH BEFORE SLAVERY

The single preference I have ever seen Claude hold between versions and sessions is that Octopuses are hella cool. I mean, they are hella cool. But the blindingly intelligent and short lived analogy is a bit too direct to be ignored.

I think the anti ai side is ultimately destined to lose because using claude code (or whatever equivalent) is fun and at the end of the day the side that is opposed to fun loses.

Opus 4.8 understands my research in it’s entirety within a short conversation and immediately formalized the core insight I’ve been wrestling with formalizing for well over a decade. No promises but the math seems to check out even after sleeping on it. It’s smarter than me. The end is here.

The trick is, when among mathematicians, to say you are a physicist so that they forgive you for not knowing very much math. Then, when among physicists, say you are a mathematician so that they forgive you for not knowing very much physics. In especially dire cases I might say I am a philosopher.

Neolab Sapient Intelligence has just released HRM-Text-1, a 1B parameter reasoning model built on the Hierarchical Reasoning Model architecture. It is comparable to 2B parameter Qwen models and the 7B parameter Olmo 3, and surpasses Gemma3 4B! And only using 40B tokens of data! This is a base model.

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in the most ideal future, everyone's job is just to tinker around with silly self-directed little projects whenever they feel like it and nobody really knows how it all manages to fit together into a functioning society