This might be the most disturbing AI paper of 2025 ☠️
Scientists just proved that large language models can literally rot their own brains the same way humans get brain rot from scrolling junk content online.
They fed models months of viral Twitter data short, high-engagement posts and watched their cognition collapse:
- Reasoning fell by 23%
- Long-context memory dropped 30%
- Personality tests showed spikes in narcissism & psychopathy
And get this even after retraining on clean, high-quality data, the damage didn’t fully heal.
The representational “rot” persisted.
It’s not just bad data → bad output.
It’s bad data → permanent cognitive drift.
The AI equivalent of doomscrolling is real. And it’s already happening.
Full study: llm-brain-rot. github. io
During an interview, while I was discussing how I would monitor a service, the interviewers where shocked when I said I would ditch its built-in monitoring and instead deploy a tool not only dedicated for monitoring and alerting, but would also be running externally. This is why.
It is unfortunately insane how much of the modern world is build upon technological desperation of WWII. You trace it back, it's all war. Everything is fucking war. Your weather forecasts are war. Your material science is war. It's all people dying, repurposed in a grace period.
@martin_casado I suspect you'd like to imply it's largely monocausal, but there's many interlocking causes, all conspiring to be greater than the sum of the parts. Lmk if you want me to go on a rambling thread spanning culture, regulation, government policies, and ecosystem.
@ilyasut Note framing of this statement:
- participation (their decision, I only 'participated')
- board's actions (their actions, not mine)
- intended (only my intentions matter, not actions)
This is a recognition of negative fallout and a refusal to take responsibility for it.
We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI's new leadership team and working with them. And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.
Oof. Sam Altman is out at OpenAI, and the language of the announcement blog post is just "knives out" level of hostility . This has the feel of the company desperately trying to get in front of something.
Otherwise he'd be taking time to "refocus" or "spend time with family."
Self-promotion: if you're looking to self-host your password-manager in Kubernetes, I have created an open source Helm chart:
https://t.co/Hx7XFLNOIT
Of course, PRs welcome!
#Vaultwarden#bitwarden