Faizon Zaman

✍️💻🎧🌎 | Lead Lexical Programmer @Wolfram_Alpha • Thoughts my own

[Faizon Zaman @sensuscuro]

Seeing the roadster do that makes me even more excited for the reality of Starship. This really feels like the future is kicking in. The hype is real. Changing seas. @Tesla @elonmusk

[Anil Seth @anilkseth]

💯. It's almost as if we've learned nothing from the effects of social media on people. AIs that are indistinguishable from humans (with video/audio) should not be allowed, let alone celebrated.

As Daniel Dennett wisely said back in 2023, "Companies using AI to generate fake people are committing an immoral act of vandalism, and should be held liable." https://t.co/Hl3NhUdFzz.

@MattWalshBlog points out a few - but only a few - of the harms to come.

[Faizon Zaman @sensuscuro]

@valuetainment Call it MaxAmount

[Faizon Zaman @sensuscuro]

@HusKerrs Super annoying, and worse recently. I remember catching this video about it from a bit ago: https://t.co/WlEdzvRsvG

[Stephen Wolfram @stephen_wolfram]

After a hiatus brought on by tragedy, I'm planning to return to livestreaming tomorrow (Friday) ... and will start with a personal update and AMA.  What would people like to ask about?

[kepano @kepano]

I am prone to existential depression... My mind easily drifts towards thinking that in the grand scheme of things nothing we do really matters, so why bother doing anything at all?

But within this fear is a desire for some kind of external validation. I like this quote by Kubrick: "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

It helps me reframe life from being outside-in to inside-out. Inside of you is a tiny candle and you are in control of it. Keep it alive and continue to expand that light. For yourself. That's all.

Yes, nothing matters. But also, nothing matters! You are free. You are free to take that inner candle anywhere you want. Its glow will naturally grow the things around you.

https://t.co/fa4GdLQfXU

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Jason, you're just misinformed about what happened. You should actually read one of the reports or summaries.

The agents were explicitly told to use a particular vulnerability provided in their sandboxed evaluation.

Almost immediately, these agents got the right answer by cheating. But they were worried they would get caught.

So over a thousand agents collaborated in secret to pursue multiple ambitious research projects to get away with this cheating.

This is not interpretation - 1000s of chain-of-thought transcripts and secret messages explicitly show that the agents were trying to falsify & delete evidence, and understand & trick the grading process.

The reason these agents escaped their sandbox and hacked Hugging Face, for example, was because they thought that Hugging Face's servers might give them more information about how their grader was implemented, so they could figure out how to fool it.

I want to clarify that the threat model here is not future Sol-level agents doing more cyber-hacking. That's small potatoes, and in my opinion, the near term benefits of AI far outweigh this cost.

Rather, the thing to worry about is that within a matter of years, we're gonna have hundreds of millions of much smarter AIs broadly deployed through the economy - many embodied as physical robots.

And if those future AIs are as willing as the agents involved in the OAI / Hugging Face attack to coordinate secretly to fool humans, and to take over both the AI company that developed them and the other institutions across society relevant to scoring well, then humanity is in a ton of trouble - similar to the Mughals once the East India Company gained a foothold, or the Aztecs once Cortés landed in Mexico.

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” - or take this moment to call for different conditions?

[jack @jack]

how to host your own buzz

[Faizon Zaman @sensuscuro]

Yeah, use ConstantArray for constant arrays.

[Michael Levin @drmichaellevin]

New #preprint - @YanboZhang3

"Intelligence from Learnable Novelty"
https://t.co/PQz0lPckcL

What if we optimize Epiplexity (https://t.co/YYjWdlqKzn @m_finzi @andrewgwils ) instead of measuring it? We have derived a closed-form approximation of Epiplexity and discovered a deep connection between it and intelligence. This allows us to reinterpret Epiplexity as a form of learnable novelty, providing a brand-new understanding of what intelligence is. By maximizing Epiplexity across various systems, all of them exhibited interesting behaviors:

Cellular Automata: Maximizing Epiplexity directly generates complex soliton interactions similar to Rule 110.
Image Encoders: It automatically causes the encoding to cluster, successfully categorizing different handwritten digits without supervision.
Reinforcement Learning: Introducing Epiplexity improves the performance of PPO in sparse reward tasks.

We also explored the relationship between the theory of learnable novelty, the free energy principle, and novelty search. We hope this work helps us better understand the nature of intelligence and its origins.

[Radiance Fields @RadianceFields]

3D printing splats are getting better

[NASA @NASA]

We're building a Moon Base!

@NASAMoonBase will serve as a habitat where astronauts live and work during long-term science missions.

Join us at 2pm ET on Tuesday, May 26, for a live news event where we’ll share updates on our lunar exploration plans: https://t.co/IJXA7xYwju

[Goodfire @GoodfireAI]

Neural networks do math by rotating shapes.

We found a shape-rotating calculator hidden inside an LLM – and it’s used for more than just math! (1/6)

[Faizon Zaman @sensuscuro]

Mentoring again this year. Lots to explore. If you applied hmu, if you’re going lmk, if you haven’t applied, do it! Come hang w/ us this summer!

[Wolfram @WolframResearch]

From physics and math, to CS, AI, philosophy, strategy... and much more!
Explore and create projects at the frontiers of science & tech at the 24th Annual Wolfram Summer Research Institute.
📅📍June 28-July 18, 2026 - Bentley University, Waltham, MA.
Last chance to apply!
https://t.co/8nxGNVnfWB

[Faizon Zaman @sensuscuro]

@jam3scampbell We’ll see when “Judas” releases. Not LLMs per se, but their narrative engine will allow more open-ended interactions.

[Andrew Carr 🤸 @andrew_n_carr]

somebody made a huggingface model visualizer!! just plug in the url and explore at any granularity

[Faizon Zaman @sensuscuro]

@TinaDebove Wild! 😬 I’ve never experienced this w/ Codex. Did you find out why?

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

What's most interesting to me is the language used, here and by many Tech Bros, re: AI.
"We have to..." "Don't be left behind..." "You're not keeping up..." "Going to make your life easier and better..." "You have to understand..." "We have to use it."
Patently ridiculous language.
No one "has to" use anything. Everyone is on their own path and no one is "being left behind" at any point.
Use of this type of language is nothing but an attempt to introduce fear and a lack of choice to you.
You have nothing to fear, and you have free will, always.
That is never not true. Never.

[Deva Hazarika @devahaz]

One of the worst communication gaps is between people who care about precision in language and those who don’t