Here's my contribution on using agents to support academic research. I've got a pipeline going now with coding agents that checks arxiv, twitter, bluesky, philpapers, a bunch of journals, many RSS feeds and more, classifies it against a long statement of my lab's interests...

To anyone encountering Moltbook this week and wondering about AI personhood, consciousness, sentience, etc---we published a very relevant paper in October: A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood. arxiv.org/abs/2510.26396

🔁 If you are enjoying the feed, please like and share it with others for discoverability!

I made this feed ages ago, and it was crap then. Now it’s pretty good? Are there any other better ones that have been made since? Surely? bsky.app/profile/did:...

🚨 New Study 🚨 @arxiv.bsky.social has recently decided to prohibit any 'position' paper from being submitted to its CS servers. Why? Because of the "AI slop", and allegedly higher ratios of LLM-generated content in review papers, compared to non-review papers.

Turns out, there are a TON of image/video AI models hosted on CivitAI with dogwhistles for NCII and/or CSAM in their names. 👀 Max Kamachee and I just updated our "Video Deepfake Abuse" paper with this new fig: 🔗 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

In a new Science study, researchers train a neural classifier to spot #AI-generated Python functions in over 30 million GitHub commits by 160,097 software developers, tracking how fast, and where, these tools take hold. https://scim.ag/4aeUdAV

Who is using AI to code? Global diffusion and impact of generative AI

Generative coding tools promise big productivity gains, but uneven uptake could widen skill and income gaps. We train a neural classifier to spot AI-generated Python functions in over 30 million GitHu...

scim.ag

And this is from Anthropic... We need to get LLMs out of learning contexts "Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation..." arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245

How AI Impacts Skill Formation

AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively su...

arxiv.org

Meta in effort to fix safety, factually, hallucinations at *pretraining* they ensure the model is trained to generate only high-quality safe tokens, even for unsafe prompts. "Self-Improving Pretraining: using post-trained models to pretrain better models" ( arxiv.org/abs/2601.21343 )

I'm a huge fan of Playwright MCP or Chrome Dev Tools MCP but I just came across Playwright CLI this morning and something tells me using this with a skill is going to be my preferred way of using browser automation with Agents. github.com/microsoft/pl...

GitHub - microsoft/playwright-cli: CLI for common Playwright actions. Record and generate Playwright code, inspect selectors and take screenshots.

CLI for common Playwright actions. Record and generate Playwright code, inspect selectors and take screenshots. - microsoft/playwright-cli

github.com

A study reveals 'graph probing,' showing that the neural topology of large language models predicts language abilities better than traditional methods, enhancing understanding of LLMs and enabling applications like pruning and hallucination detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01042

Probing Neural Topology of Large Language Models

ArXiv link for Probing Neural Topology of Large Language Models

arxiv.org

In a new paper in our AI & Democratic Freedoms series, Rachel M. Kim, Blaine Kuehnert, @sethlazar.org, Ranjit Singh, & Hoda Heidari propose creating an AI Power Disparity Index, designed to measure and signal the changing distribution of power in the AI ecosystem. knightcolumbia.org/content/the-...

The AI Power Disparity Index: Toward a Compound Measure of AI Actors’ Power to Shape the AI Ecosystem

knightcolumbia.org

How will AI agents impact democratic values? Democracies are—for independent reasons—already under acute pressure. Since WWII Moore's Law and democratisation went up and to the right in lockstep. Not any more.

In the latest essay in our AI & Democratic Freedoms series, @sethlazar.org and Tino Cuéllar (@carnegieendowment.org) discuss how AI agents might affect the realization of democratic values. knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...

AI Agents and Democratic Resilience

knightcolumbia.org

"Democracies are weaker than they have been for decades," write Carnegie president Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and @sethlazar.org for @knightcolumbia.org. "A great wave is coming, and they are ill-prepared." AI agents could help or hurt. And they won't protect democratic values on their own.

@caseynewton.bsky.social in re an old discussion about AI denialists. , hope you’ve caught knightcolumbia.org/events/artif...

Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms

knightcolumbia.org

🚨 UPCOMING EVENT: Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms, April 10-11 at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social & online. In collaboration with Senior AI Advisor @sethlazar.org & co-sponsored by the Knight Institute and @columbiaseas.bsky.social. RSVP: knightcolumbia.org/events/artif...

New Philosophy of Computing newsletter: share with your philosophy friends. Lots of CFPs, events, opportunities, new papers. philosophyofcomputing.substack.com/p/normative-...

Normative Philosophy of Computing Newsletter

Welcome to February!

philosophyofcomputing.substack.com

I am a bit bashful about sharing this profile www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog... of me in @thetimes.com, but will do so because it kindly refers to my new book which is coming out in early March. www.penguin.co.uk/books/460891.... The tech titans pictured seem to be decoration (and not my co-authors)

These Strange New Minds

Stunning advances in digital technology have given us a new wave of disarmingly human-like AI systems. The march of this new technology is set to upturn our economies, challenge our democracies, and r...

penguin.co.uk

I spent a few hours with OpenAI's Operator automating expense reports. Most corporate jobs require filing expenses, so Operator could save *millions* of person-hours every year if it gets this right. Some insights on what worked, what broke, and why this matters for the future of agents 🧵

Since Agents are now on everyone's minds, do check out this tutorial on the ethics of Language Model Agents, from June last year. Looks at what 'agent' means, how LM agents work, what kinds of impacts we should expect, and what norms (and regulations) should govern them.

LM Agents: Prospects and Impacts (FAccT tutorial)

YouTube video by Seth Lazar

youtube.com

We're excited to announce that our upcoming symposium on #AI and democracy w/ @sethlazar.org (4/10-4/11, at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social & online) will feature papers by a highly accomplished group of authors from a wide range of disciplines. Check them out: knightcolumbia.org/blog/knight-...

Knight Institute Symposium on AI and Democratic Freedoms to Feature Leading Scholars and Technologists

knightcolumbia.org

January update from the normative philosophy of computing newsletter: new CFPs, papers, workshops, and resources for philosophers working on normative questions raised by AI and computing.

Normative Philosophy of Computing - January

Happy New Year!

mintresearch.org

EVENT: Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms, 4/10-11, at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social & online. We're hosting a symposium w/ @sethlazar.org exploring the risks advanced #AI systems pose to democratic freedoms and interventions to mitigate them. RSVP: knightcolumbia.org/events/artif...

Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms

knightcolumbia.org

📢 Excited to share: I'm again leading the efforts for the Responsible AI chapter for Stanford's 2025 AI Index, curated by @stanfordhai.bsky.social. As last year, we're asking you to submit your favorite papers on the topic for consideration (including your own!) 🧵 1/

Turns out we weren't done for major LLM releases in 2024 after all... Alibaba's Qwen just released QvQ, a "visual reasoning model" - the same chain-of-thought trick as OpenAI's o1 applied to running a prompt against an image Trying it out is a lot of fun: simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/24/...

Trying out QvQ—Qwen’s new visual reasoning model

I thought we were done for major model releases in 2024, but apparently not: Alibaba’s Qwen team just dropped the Apache2 2 licensed QvQ-72B-Preview, “an experimental research model focusing on …

simonwillison.net

Here are my collected notes on DeepSeek v3 so far: simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/25/...

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-Base huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/...

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-Base · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

huggingface.co

Some of my thoughts on OpenAI's o3 and the ARC-AGI benchmark aiguide.substack.com/p/did-openai...

Did OpenAI Just Solve Abstract Reasoning?

OpenAI’s o3 model aces the "Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus" — but what does it mean?

aiguide.substack.com