summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social

Investigating the mechanisms that underpin human learning, perception and cognition, headed by Chris Summerfield

[summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @summerfieldlab]

How is generative AI impacting us all? There are lots of opinions. But what does the evidence actually say? Find out here. https://t.co/aYC1pjMLvs

with @hannahrosekirk @KobiHackenburg @AnnaGausen @LLuettgau @rebershak @KJuechems and lots of other great people.

[Kobi Hackenburg @KobiHackenburg]

New w/ @AISecurityInst & @UniofOxford:

Frontier AI can now out-persuade expert humans in conversation - incl. world-champ debaters and professional canvassers.

This held even when humans chose their topics, prepared in advance, and competed for £1,000 prizes 🧵

[Matthew Botvinick @mattbotvinick]

Anthropic now has a team dedicated to AI and the rule of law — and we've just opened our first role.

@AnthropicAI has studied what AI means for the economy. This team asks a different question: what will it mean for executive power, for courts and elections — and for the public deliberation that constitutional democracy ultimately rests on?

We're looking for someone with real depth in both AI and the law — a legal scholar, political scientist, or experienced government hand who can reason about frontier systems and the institutions they will affect.

If that's you, or someone you know: https://t.co/668HDz1lhf

[Hannah Rose Kirk @hannahrosekirk]

My team at @AISecurityInst studies how frontier AI shapes what we believe, decide, and feel - and we're hiring! 🚨

The role is a 6-month RA residency in London, ideal for MScs / early PhDs in ML, psych, cog/data sci
[1 June deadline]

Get a taste of our recent research below 👇

[Tim Spalding 🇺🇦 @librarythingtim]

These Strange New Minds by @summerfieldlab is the LLM book I've been waiting for, and I can't believe I missed it. It's a little dated now (first released summer 2024), but still excellent. Basically, it's a wide-ranging, curious book about LLMs written by someone in the field for a lay audience (high lay; it doesn't completely ignore the math), not the *personalities* who are building AI. This isn't a full review, and there are parts I disagree with, but it's good.

[summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @summerfieldlab]

this was a fun project. If you use AI for writing assistance, how does it change what readers think about you? Find out in this new paper led by @paul_rottger!

[Paul Röttger @paul_rottger]

New paper w/ @AISecurityInst: AI writing assistance distorts how others perceive AI users and their opinions.

Millions of people now use AI to help them write and communicate. In three large experiments (14k participants, 3m+ human ratings) we show that AI writing assistance systematically distorts writer personas – their perceived beliefs, personality, and identity. These distortions are consistent across AI models and persist even under realistic conditions of human oversight.

🧵

[summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @summerfieldlab]

@CFGeek see this https://t.co/3bgz19DldP

[summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @summerfieldlab]

@DamarisKroeber @akaijsa @LHuntNeuro on psyarxiv https://t.co/ihc4Cr27a3. enjoy!

[summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @summerfieldlab]

Stefano is brilliant. If you care about deep learning theory or AI safety or both then this is for you.

[Stefano Sarao Mannelli @stefsmlab]

Hiring 2 Postdocs to work on Theoretical Foundations of AI Safety @chalmersuniv

If you have a background in Physics, Math, or ML and want to tackle AI alignment at a fundamental level alongside UCL, apply below!

🔗Apply: https://t.co/Z4Pmw4nT5E
🔬Lab: https://t.co/Ip7ciueRhG

[Brian Christian @brianchristian]

My friend and collaborator of 21 years - and my coauthor on Algorithms to Live By - Tom Griffiths has a book out this week on the story of computational cognitive science. If you enjoyed Algorithms to Live By you won't want to miss it. Highly recommended:

[Brian Christian @brianchristian]

This project was joint work with @tsonj, @ellemichelley, @vincentadam87, @hannahrosekirk, @summerfieldlab, and Tsvetomira Dumbalska. Preprint: https://t.co/2Ns20clHk2 We will see you at #ICLR2026 in Rio! 🇧🇷

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

Super interesting paper just out in Nature Human Behaviour!

Do humans learn like transformers?

In a smart experiment, the authors trained humans and transformer networks on the same rule-learning task, manipulating only one thing: the distribution of training examples, from fully diverse (every example unique) to highly redundant (the same items repeated).

The first results are already interesting:

Diverse examples lead both human and artificial systems to generalise rules to novel situations.

Redundant examples lead both humans and artificial systems to memorize examples.

Additionally, the switching between these two strategies appear at similar tradeoffs.

So, do humans and transformers learn in the same way? Not quite! And it’s here that things get super interesting:

If you show diverse examples first, humans learn to generalize without losing the ability to memorize later. Transformers, by contrast, do not show the same benefit: when training shifts toward memorization, earlier generalization does not reliably carry over.

Humans can accumulate learning strategies more flexibly than transformers.

Paper in the first reply

[Iyad Rahwan | إياد رهوان @iyadrahwan]

Machine+Behavior conference is back! Pls spread the word.

18-19 May, 2026
Abstract submissions deadline 8 Feb

Speakers include: @cocosci_lab @ThoreG @summerfieldlab @weidingerlaura @a_baronca

https://t.co/9WRGRE8qcu

[summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @summerfieldlab]

I retweeted the preprint. apparently there is now a Science version, same article, swankier typesetting https://t.co/CAlEu7a2qw

[summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @summerfieldlab]

this was an amazingly fun project with an unbeatable team from @AISecurityInst and several academic labs. Thank you to all involved

[Kobi Hackenburg @KobiHackenburg]

Today (w/ @UniofOxford @Stanford @MIT @LSEnews) we’re sharing the results of the largest AI persuasion experiments to date: 76k participants, 19  LLMs, 707 political issues.

We examine “levers” of AI persuasion: model scale, post-training, prompting, personalization, & more
🧵

[Nate @NateBurnikell]

@AISecurityInst turned two this month. Happy birthday to us! 🎂

It’s been the privilege of my life to help build and lead this organisation. Here are 10 things I’m proud we’ve achieved in the last two years - a small sample of a much larger list...

[summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @summerfieldlab]

I will be speaking at this event in London on wednesday 29th. looking forward, thanks to @RMBattleday and @thought_channel for organising!

[Ruairidh Battleday @RMBattleday]

🏆 Programme announced for our Global Summit on Open Problems for AI!

With one month left until the Summit, we've officially announced our programme:

Day 1: AI Research Breakthroughs & Infrastructure
Day 2: AI Safety, Enterprise, Society
Day 3: AI Entrepreneurship & Applications (Education & Medicine)

We've been extremely fortunate to attract what I think must be the AI insider's line-up of the decade for the UK, with speakers from almost every leading institution:
@GoogleDeepMind @Meta @nvidia @ucl @UniofOxford @wayve_ai @AISecurityInst @elevenlabs @hsbc_uk @BlueDotImpact @InstituteGC @AlexanderStraub @innovateuk @xtxmarkets @GoogleForHealth @RaspberryPi_org @mcgillu @apolloaievals @AdvaiLtd @joinmultiverse @Harvard @mit @Stanford @Microsoft @nscale @Cudo_Compute @DeepGreenEnergy @faculty_ai @thomsonreuters @knowldgillusion @KingsCollegeLon @newtonstreeai @primamente @NTT_DATA_UK @londonhub_ai @Bertelsmann_com @PublicAI_ @BlueDotImpact @Cambridge_Uni @CooleyLLP @MindMaxLabs @IFS @aria_research @KPMG @VirtualRoutes @FT @altos_labs @join_ef @i_dot_ai @AivalHealth

Follow the link below to come, and come and join the great debate!
#AI #OpenProblems #ThinkingAboutThinking #OpenProblemsAI #MachineLearning #TechInnovation

[summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @summerfieldlab]

it's nearly 2 years since I downed pen on this book, but the main predictions - that the main impacts of AI will be from its increasingly anthropomorphic and and agentic features - are proving correct.

[summerfieldlab @summerfieldlab.bsky.social @summerfieldlab]

Chinese translation of These Strange New Minds has a very funky cover, but I quite like it! The duck and the parrot represent the deflationist (stochastic parrot) vs. functionalist (if it walks like a duck...) perspectives on LLMs that are discussed in the book.

[Matthew Hutson @SilverJacket]

AI grows up. My review in today’s @WSJ @WSJBooks of “These Strange New Minds” by @summerfieldlab and “The Scaling Era” by @dwarkesh_sp. Link is in reply.