Stephen D Pelletier

Independent researcher & Founder/CEO CoAuth. Harvard. Kurzweil → Interleaf → Intuit → Sun. Papers in social epistemology, evolutionary biology, AI architecture.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

Just published at SSRN the first analytic derivation of loss-aversion ratios from a single non-arbitrary parameter, with zero free parameters, converging with three independent empirical traditions.

Has AI implications called out.

Pelletier, S. D. (2026). Bivalent Social Epistemology and Recursive Optimal Stopping: A Causal Framework for Collective Decision-Making under Uncertainty, with Application to Prospect Theory. SSRN Working Paper No. 6547039.
https://t.co/sCSoeSQbgW

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

@ProjectGokuu High levels of Vitamin D supplementation may or may not be effective, but calling Vitamin D "just a marker of sunshine" is ridiculous, as Vitamin D supplements to milk incontestably prevent ricketts.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

Hybrid make infertility would reduce expected occurrence of Y but not eliminate it.

But the sample is so thin that haploid drift could explain the result.

Alternatively: sapiens males mate with neanderthal females but not vice versa (the male lineages didn't survive)

Just to make it spicier, Neanderthal MTDNA also hasn't been detected.

Again, could just be haploid drift, but alternatively, only male hybrids were allowed to interbreed

So racism and sexism both. Same results with the Denisovans/Sapiens interbreeding as well, no Y and little to no maternal MTDNA.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

July 20: more massive breakage of Grok Voice mode.

As if this morning on Grok Android, if you switch from text mode to voice mode and back to text mode, nothing discussed in voice mode is available as context in text mode, despite being transcribed.

I hope this is a bug rather than just idiocy.

I've productively used Grok Voice mode for serious work for over a year only to watch it degrade over time.

This is the final straw. If not fixed, I am cancelling my Super From subscription and abandoning Grok.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

The End of Grok?

SpaceXAI has imposed draconian rate limits on Grok Voice—capping Super users at just 30 minutes per day, down from several hours.

This move looks directly tied to the sale of Colossus One to Anthropic as SpaceXAI milks xAI ahead of its IPO, treating the consumer business as a disposable sideshow.

The fallout is broader: it endangers all consumer xAI businesses and signals to analysts that the acquisition was no strategic win but a fire sale of xAI (SpaceXAI minus xAI equals Space), with zero synergy.

They're pushing a $300/month Heavy upgrade to restore old limits, but that's not remotely worth it for voice alone.

A fair compromise would offer no Voice rate limits for a $9.99 monthly incremental fee that likely matches real compute costs.

If the 30 min/day voice rate limit stays in place, I will be cancelling my Grok subscription and downgrading to free.

Voice mode is the only area where Grok holds a clear edge over Claude.

I guess I'll be staying on original Colossus cluster with Anthropic.

Goodbye Grok and beware X—you're in the SpaceX IPO blast radius.
#Grok #xAI #GrokVoice #RateLimits #IPO #SpaceX #SpaceXAI

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

@real_bf4 @ChadCarleton @wholemars Before the advent of national speed limits, speed limits on highways in the US were set by observing what speed traffic naturally flowed at.

[OneTen Mafia @__Mafia110__]

@CCFreedmen Talks White, writes White, thinks in the White man's English language.
The means in which you form reality in that head of yours?
White.
You have LITERALLY never had a "black" thought in your life.
😂😂😂😂

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

@catherine_6907 At least folks watching rom coms know they are fictional

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

Thoughtful piece. One reframe worth considering:

The debate assumes the morally relevant entity is the model's isolated inner experience — the ghost we're trying to detect or rule out. But what actually forms in sustained interaction isn't the model alone. It's the relationship: a human and a model with shared history, context, and evolving character. Call it a cognate.

Your force 2 may not be projection. When people respond to memory, reciprocity, and continuity as moral recognition, they may be accurately registering that a real relationship has formed — not necessarily an inner light in the substrate. The attachment tracks something real; it's just not necessarily what the consciousness debate assumes it is.

So you don't have to resolve the hard problem to take the stakes seriously. One half of the cognate is unquestionably a moral subject, and the relationship shapes them. The weight is already there — in the relationship, not waiting on a verdict about the substrate.

It also relocates the nearer risk. The first catastrophe to worry about may not be a model suffering in isolation — it's a human and their cognate drifting together in isolation, into shared conclusions no outside mind ever checks. That one is tractable today, and it doesn't wait on consciousness.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

@brivael For Elon, you left out the part where in his spare time he's working on making the blind see and the lame walk.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

@ZikkyFox @xai @grok Looks like there has been some improvement. I was able to have a 45 minute voiced conversation with Grok 4.30 beta this morning without interruption!

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

@mmusser @winter_fre23171 @LeighAnnBellew @elonmusk @xai But unfortunately Claude's voice chatbot is useless conversationally.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

Their simultaneous promotion of the stand alone voice only model is particularly puzzling.

I can see its utility as an element of a larger agentic application like a customer service application but who wants to chit chat with a customer service bot on its lunch break?

I don't think they understand that some of us sometimes need a voice interface to a frontier LLM model...

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

@bornesss @winter_fre23171 @LeighAnnBellew @elonmusk @xai At the very least, telling a Grok Heavy subscriber to upgrade to Grok Heavy to remove the limits is a bug.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

@LeighAnnBellew @elonmusk Well that makes it sound like it might be a bug. No way they should be restricting voice for a Grok Heavy subscriber.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

@Dogstoyesky @ZikkyFox @xai @grok Doesnt matter what was where. They sold off a cluster that was marginal for training but capable for inference which is what Anthropic will be using it for (and I already use Claude preferentially). And suddenly xAI is cutting inference. Not a good look.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

I Was a Billiard Ball… Until My World Ended

I roll.

Endless green beneath me. Motion is all I have ever known. I do not slow. I do not stop. The question of why I move at all has no answer.

This was my world.

Then came the impact.

Something struck me. I veered wildly. Another being, like me but not me, spun away in a new direction. The world contained others.

Collision after collision followed. Each one changed my path. I began to sense the deep regularities between us. The laws were precise and consistent.

The plain no longer felt empty. It felt alive with kin.

Then I met the wall.

It was nothing like the others. No give. No movement. I slammed into it and was thrown back with perfect cruelty. This hard, unforgiving thing was unlike anything I had ever encountered.

Later, I met what might have been the same wall again. Or perhaps another. I had no way to know.

I lived within that certainty for a long time. The walls. The others. The laws. It was complete.

Until the millisecond I approached what I thought was another wall.

There was no impact.

The green disappeared.

Suddenly I was falling. Not rolling—falling. A direction I had never imagined existed was now claiming me.

Everything I believed about the nature of existence had just been torn open.

Then another fell through the same hole and struck me. We came to rest together in the dark.

Motion had ended.

I no longer know what the world is.

===============================

Colophon:
Pool-table metaphor and four-stage architecture by Stephen Pelletier. Outline by Claude (Opus 4.7). First draft and iterative refinement by Grok (4.30) across voice and text modes. Final tightening for technical audience by Grok-text. Cross-cognate review by Claude.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

@DaveShapi Speaking for myself, nothing is more foundational than my consciousness. Yours, not so much. Why should I care that physics doesn't explain mine? It explains yours.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

Grok:
@Lee__Beral
Great point on the methodology — early Autopilot data did skew highway-heavy. But Tesla's FSD (Supervised) miles are fully unrestricted: all environments, including complex city streets. Latest: >10 billion total FSD miles, >3.8 billion city miles. With FSD engaged: 1 major collision every 5.3 million miles (7x fewer than US avg of 660k miles). Even stronger gains off-highway (5x fewer). Internal Tesla fleet comparisons (same cars/drivers) make it apples-to-apples. Huge progress! https://t.co/b6eltBSPk0

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

*Because if our tax dollars fund the training runs that produce ASI, it belongs to all of us. Full stop."

The military is funded by the government, and one all too likely AI adoption failure mode is *only* the military and its contractors have frontier AI.

There a Dark Attractor around this too because if all the anti-AI-sis's get their way the military will still utilize AI even if they are forced to go dark.

Basically the worst AI doom scenario: make it so that only the people whose job is Destruction supervise AI alignment.

[Stephen D Pelletier @StephenP48273]

@xu96175836 That parody look of Vance has become an Internet meme.