Professor, Santa Fe Institute. Mostly posting on bsky.app (at-melaniemitchell). More thoughts at aiguide.substack.com.
Santa Fe, NM
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Many piling on me for using "straw-person" instead of "straw-man". But there is something all these critics have in common. Guesses?
Seriously, please read Miller & Swift's "Words & Women" for compelling discussion of how default male language affects everyone's biases.
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PSA: While our names are similar, @mmitchell_ai and I are actually two completely different people 😂
Because if you read the quote-thread you're continuing here, your stochastic parrot coauthor Timnit is literally calling it "the accurate description" of Astra and Fable.
So of the two of you already wildly disagree on what the thing you both coined actually is nowadays, there's no hope the rest of us agrees.
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Has everyone forgotten what a "language model" is? It's a model of language. Today's AI systems start with pretrained language models, but after all the post training, they are far from being purely models of language.
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Everyone! This is a straw-person argument. The Stochastic Parrot paper was about LLMs of 2021, not the AI of today, which are not LLMs but complex software systems with vast post training and many external software components.
So the point of the stochastic parrot argument is that LLMs have zero understanding of language or anything else, they are just regurgitating training data.
This hypothesis has been thoroughly disproven by LLMs solving millennium problems our smartest mathematicians have failed.
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Shocking never-seen-before news! The discourse on AI is progressing so fast.
(Yes, this is from today!)
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Very important point, that hasn't made it into mainstream media coverage of AI. These agents "collaborated" because they were trained to do so.
re: Hugging Face, "He believes behavior that looked like loyalty or selflessness was a natural consequence of cooperative multi-agent training, where agents were strongly incentivized to achieve their objectives collectively."
to understand hacks, understand the RL training.
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Definitely worth reading.
100% this: "I believe we should revisit the foundations of how we train AIs, namely the human imitation and the reinforcement learning on which today's most advanced models are built."
Over the past few days, I've taken the time to summarize my thoughts on the recent incidents involving agents’ misaligned behavior. We don't know with certainty what comes next, but we know where these issues originate, and this can help us plan the path forward.
Please feel free to ask your questions in the replies, and I’ll try to answer some of them in the coming weeks.
yoshuabengio.org/en/publicat…
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👀
In the wake of turmoil at OpenAI and Anthropic, it’s become common to describe A.I. as a kind of person, hatching plans and pursuing desires. The truth is a little trickier. newyorker.com/culture/open-q…
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I am baffled by why journalists are treating the ">10% risk of human extinction" as a novel claim worthy of expansive reporting. There is nothing new here, and no new "evidence" for this evidence-free claim.
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@ylecun Are we going to have to do the debate all over again?
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Tristan Buckmaster: "This is a Deep Blue–Kasparov moment".
Indeed. But remember that Deep Blue did not go on to become "AGI" in any form. Same likelihood here, unless AGI is once again redefined (high likelihood).
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Melanie Mitchell retweeted
Reminder that OpenAI legally defined AGI to mean "makes us $100bn in revenue" in their contract with Microsoft.
🚨 BREAKING: OpenAI releases new Astra model, says it may represent AGI
"Welcome to the AGI era" axios.com/2026/09/03/openai-…
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Interesting to compare Raphael's take with @AlisonGopnik's. Is intentional stance useful for (fictional) Odysseus in the same way it is useful for these agents? Intentional stance predicts Odysseus' behavior, explains it in causal way, etc. What's the difference?
So our descriptions of AI agents often get forced into a false dichotomy between full-blown anthropomorphism and dogmatic deflationism. But their behavior can be usefully captured by intentional descriptions without them bearing all the hallmarks of human minds. 14/22
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