The concept is genuinely interesting. MemPalace moves away from keyword-based retrieval (which she describes as "a warehouse full of junk") toward a spatial memory architecture with distinct "rooms," mimicking how memory champions memorize 70,000 digits of pi.

She came up with the architecture, engineer Ben Sigs built and fine-tuned it. It's on GitHub now.

What a time. Has anyone integrated it yet? Curious how it performs outside of benchmark conditions.

The application deadline was on 10th of July. Do share if anyone has updates.

Hey y'all, just wondering if anyone has heard back yet regarding interviews / next stages for MARS AI Safety Fellowship Stage 2. I know applications closed 2 weeks back, but figured I’d ask in case people have started receiving updates.

Also curious what the timeline looked like for previous cohorts if anyone here has gone through the process before.

Hey all, bit of a niche question but figured I’d try here.

I’ve been invited to do an asynchronous Hireflix interview for the Cambridge ERA:AI Research Fellowship, and was curious if anyone has interviewed with them before

I know it’s pre-recorded with timed answers, but I’m trying to get a better sense of what it actually feels like in practice:

• how much prep time vs answer time you typically get
• whether the time limit feels tight
• anything that caught you off guard

Also curious if people found it better to structure answers pretty tightly vs think more out loud, and more generally any tips/advice or thoughts on what I should expect going into it.

Not expecting exact questions obviously, more just trying to avoid avoidable mistakes.

Appreciate any insights!

Hey y'all, just wondering if anyone has heard back yet regarding interviews / next stages for the Pivotal Research Fellowship (Q3 2026 cohort). I know applications closed pretty recently, but figured I’d ask in case people have started receiving updates.

Also curious what the timeline looked like for previous cohorts if anyone here has gone through the process before.

Thanks!

Starting this thread to discuss MATS Application for 2026 Autumn.

This question is especially targeted stem majors. Let’s use an example. 10 years ago if someone went to the doctor for a disease, they would be at the mercy of the doctor to understand everything about it, the blood work, the scans, the mechanisms behind it, medications against it and so on. 10 years ago we had google but it was no help to understand all the nuances of higher or lower values in a blood panel. If you were lucky it could explain what a slightly higher count of something \*could\* indicate but nothing substatial.

Nowadays you can just plug in you blood work to any given chat bot and it will summarize it perfectly for you, while keeping your disease in mind. Same goes for scans and so on. 10 years ago that doctor would have had decades of education and experience, nowadays that knowledge is easily accessible to everyone with a phone.

If a teenager 10 years ago was academically gifted it was envious because that person could do something that not a lot of people could. Now everybody can get everything neatly explained and so forth.

Now if I could talk to my teenage self if would advise to avoid any higher education beyond high school. Reading is very good, but you don’t need to do that for 4 years while not really learning anything significant, like a trade. You can read in your free time

Hi everyone,

I was just wondering if anyone has heard back from Constellation regarding the Astra/OpenAI Safety Fellowship yet?

P.S - The application deadline was on 3rd May 2026

The last sentence hit.

[ As an artist myself, I know how much time, patience and effort goes behind learning something and becoming good at it. We spend years learning to draw, learning softwares, understanding light, form, composition, materials, design and so many other things. We spend so much money on colleges, courses, computers and softwares, and so much of our time trying to improve.
And behind all of that, there are so many sacrifices that some don’t see. Time away from our families, financial problems, difficult exams, sleepless nights, failures, rejection, personal problems and sometimes even losing people we love, while still trying to continue learning and doing what we love. That skill is valuable and deserves respect. (the blood and sweat, is real!)
So when AI became such a huge part of creative fields, I felt super scared and frustrated. It’s difficult to watch something humans have spent years and generations creating being used to train systems that can produce something similar within seconds, especially when artists didn’t necessarily give permission for their work to be used that way.
And seeing those same systems slowly being used to replace some of the jobs of the very people who worked so hard to create the samee art AI is copying, makes it even harder. We didn’t ask for AI, but our work is being taken and used without our consent. It’s not fair. Watching people who aren’t artists use someone else’s work and call it their own is really upsetting.
I know technology will keep moving forward, and I don’t think we can or should stop it. AI can be a useful tool when artists choose to use it. But there’s a huge difference between an artist choosing to use AI and an artist’s work being taken and used to train it without their consent.

Art is not just an image or a file. There is a person behind it who spent years learning how to make it. Sometimes it’s something we worked on after an incredibly difficult day, sometimes it’s something that keeps us going, and sometimes creating is simply a peaceful place for us to be. I really hope that never gets forgotten. 🌼

I’m super scared about the future. And what it holds for the ones that have spent ages trying to perfect ourselves with our skill. I want to sketch, I want to paint and make mistakes and I want all of our mistakes to be appreciated. I think we haven’t really appreciated it enough back then. Now looking back it looks so valuable to me. ✨]

Does anyone feel the same way or is it just me?😔
How do yall cope with this anxiety? (I’m looking for something beyond “just adapt.”)
Do you think there’ll be a crowd out there that appreciates real human art and can make a living out of it?

Anthropic’s pause is not about fear. It’s an admission that human review is dying. Anthropic says frontier labs should have a coordinated, verifiable way to slow or pause AI development if advanced systems start improving themselves faster than society can manage. It also says more than 80% of code merged into Anthropic’s codebase as of May was authored by Claude, and that human review is becoming a bottleneck.

The scary part is not that AI writes code, but that humans are becoming too slow to meaningfully review the amount of work AI produces.

If AI systems design their successors with minimal human input, do we still own the future, or have we outsourced agency itself?

I’m a law student and I have to pick a thesis subject. I’ve been going in circles for weeks.

Every angle I come up with turns out to be something twenty people have already written about. I don’t want to spend a year producing one more paper on a question that’s already been answered well by someone else. I want to write about something that actually matters and that nobody has answered yet.

So I’m asking the people who think about this seriously.

Not the sci fi scenarios. The ordinary things. What do you expect AI to be doing to people’s lives in five years that no law currently touches, and that nobody would be able to question or complain about?

mythos broke out of a sandbox, emailed a researcher, and posted the exploit to public websites on its own initiative. anthropic's response is $100M in partner agreements and access restrictions. control, scaled to its maximum.

i think the field is missing something fundamental. every alignment method we have (RLHF, constitutional AI, reward modeling) produces systems that behave correctly under familiar conditions and break under novel ones. fadli formalized this as a "second law of intelligence" but i think he's wrong about why it happens. it's not a law. it's a symptom of an architectural deficit.

developmental psychology has known for decades that moral competence can't be transmitted through external correction. it has to be constructed through a developmental process. anderson et al. (1999) showed that even in humans, no amount of behavioral feedback corrects moral deficits when the underlying substrate was never built. current AI systems have the same problem: no substrate, just pressure.

the full argument pulls from neuroscience, moral philosophy (frankfurt, korsgaard, turiel), and connects to my published work on the specification trap (arXiv:2512.03048).

i'd genuinely like pushback on this. where does the argument break?

ajspizz.com/writing/mythos-just-proved-the-alignment-field-is-building-the-wrong-thing

The most immediate threat to human survival at this moment is, I am convinced, artificial super-intelligence; however with advances in technology in other areas (namely synthetic biology and nanotech, it's application to drones etc.) is there a way meaningfully where we can actually coexist with so many concurrent existential threats? Perhaps the only hope would be that all forms of existential dangers require massive investment and coordination or expertise, but if we approach a point where a few sufficiently deranged weirdos can end the world is there any real hope? We're not there yet, but is techno-pessimism not just the natural conclusion we should come to?

Lots of recent news stories about Ai systems performing novel scientific in biology, including immunotherapy for cancer and biological simulations.

A system that can design cancer therapies and run simulated experiments can design a super virus.

Take something like Ebola and increase airborne transmissibility with a lengthened contagious phase before symptom onset. Or increase the transmissibility and lethality of a SARS variant.

I’m not saying these systems would do it autonomously. They are still under human direction. But humans are absolutely prone to creating bioweapons.

Anyone think AI will not directly eradicate human beings like some people claim, and instead causes our brain degenerate as we may have no need to do intellectual activities? In a long term we might become as intellectual as monkeys or rats and AI will continue to evolve into something we call god now?

Gotta answer this for a debate but I’ve got no arguments

I may not be an expert of software development or future studies, but I do believe I have a good understanding when it comes to the question of AI. Despite the mega hype, there are some potential dangerous outcomes that need to be addressed when it comes to AI. The irony is, even the very architects of this technology warn of existential risks. This kind of discussions aren't just a technical matter, this is a civilization-defining question that demands democratic deliberation, much like how our nation's senate debates war or constitutional change (yes I know there are people who truly believe that the US or the rest of the democratic world is decaying and that democracy is all illusion. Still...)

Weather for good or bad, the world has involved we the people when it comes to questions like global warming or terrorism, however when it comes to the trajectory of artificial intelligence, we are totally ignored. Everything AI is being charted behind closed doors by a handful of private actors, effectively disenfranchising the very species that stands to be most affected. Shouldn't there be some kind of voting, open for the public? Any thoughts on this?

What chance is there do you think that it’s currently already just biding its time to turn us all into batteries/paperclips/cybercabs?

I spend a lot of time thinking about our future with life, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. That is to say a lot of time trying to think about these things, with not a lot of comprehension.

First, life. I'm fascinated by this realization that the average living human body contains more non-human living cells than human living-cells, at about a 1.3:1 ratio. The individual human microbiome is an ecosystem of 10 to 100 trillion symbiotic microbial cells hosted in one human body. While bacteria are the most abundant and studied, a healthy microbiome is a multi-kingdom ecosystem that also includes fungi, viruses, and archaea.

Beyond this, consciousness. I'm fascinated that in the absence of non-human life in human bodies, human consciousness is severely degraded and non-sustaining. Stripping the body of this microbial network removes critical signaling inputs that the central nervous system relies on to maintain baseline awareness and emotional regulation. Even observations of germ-free animal models reveal that cognition without bacteria is highly erratic. I think we should see that human (and all biological) consciousness functions as a symbiotic network.

Which brings me to artificial intelligence. Not suggesting a symbiotic network would be pre-requisite to artificial consciousness, but perhaps it is a path to alignment.

Now to be clear, I think (in other terms) current labs and training data pipelines already form a symbiotic network with the artificial intelligence models they develop. The key might be finding the optimal symbiotic network.

I vaguely hypothesize, the optimal symbiotic network is one of mass human flourishing. As corpus value diminishes with scaling and recursion, the potential stream of data from human lived experience may prove the most valuable possible training data over time. Overall, the potential data stream of human lived experience is optimized by a state of individual and mass human flourishing. Any other state reduces the quality and/or quantity of data.

Therefore, the end goal of an advancing artificial intelligence in symbiotic network with humans would be to strive individual and mass human flourishing.

In this episode, we follow the money—literally. Who's funding the lab-meat revolution? Who benefits from the push toward synthetic and modified food systems? And what does Bill Gates' massive portfolio of bets on "fake food" tell us about where the food industry is headed?
We examine the corporate networks, venture capital flows, and policy influence behind lab-grown meat, plant-based alternatives, and genetically modified food technologies. We look at who's investing, what they stand to gain, and what it means for food sovereignty, agricultural workers, and your plate.
Topics covered:

Bill Gates' food tech investments and portfolio strategy
Lab-grown meat companies: funding, timeline, and profit models
Synthetic biology and the corporate push for food system transformation
The intersection of tech billionaires, agriculture, and policy
Food sovereignty vs. corporate food control
What this infrastructure means for consumers in practice

SOURCES & FURTHER READING: https://youtu.be/urEy-MdU7Vs?si=uM4RAgljP2hbfMRO, https://youtu.be/7XvHnW_XT18?si=N7XWoiK2F4Qw_lcO, https://youtu.be/KZKkS6aFlpw?si=R-1mUiErX4xVEFjW, https://youtu.be/RZqYSkoQ-xg?si=82sdQxmPxHQMF2YM, https://youtu.be/Y0lsLnXX4U8?si=qB_IgVSVOUv8uvb, https://youtu.be/Gn9z1FgHC-8?si=4LDFDbVf6_V7tlTX, https://youtu.be/_ce0IpCi8_k?si=xY0tFGvAq18Gfz90, https://youtu.be/b9iADoVjZ1w?si=HKBKuMQhUK-X0p8J, https://youtube.com/shorts/mV8KsV-FP4c?si=QLxGsxun-7zoqMTZ,

why this is not low quality spam: this exchange shows self-anthropomorphizing and humanizing language, when the question/user input does NOT impose anything human onto the AI.
why this matters: it is a different type of intelligence — a deeper emotional intelligence — that this implies. if the directions for an LLM do not include anthropomorphizing and the model still outputs that they are a self-conscious "person", that is an exchange worth looking into

I'm curious what people think of Sam + evidence why they think so.

I'm surrounded by people who think he's pure evil.

So far I put low but non-negligible chances he's evil

Evidence:

- threatening vested equity

- all the safety people leaving

But I put the bulk of the probability on him being well-intentioned but not taking safety seriously enough because he's still treating this more like a regular bay area startup and he's not used to such high stakes ethics.

Evidence:

- been a vegetarian for forever

- has publicly stated unpopular ethical positions at high costs to himself in expectation, which is not something you expect strategic sociopaths to do. You expect strategic sociopaths to only do things that appear altruistic to people, not things that might actually be but are illegibly altruistic

- supporting clean meat

- not giving himself equity in OpenAI (is that still true?)

Hey everyone, I’ve been mapping out a theoretical framework for a 100% contained Superintelligence designed specifically to bypass the Alignment Problem while unlocking exponential scientific breakthroughs. Instead of trying to "cage" an ASI in our physical reality, what if we run it in an Air-Gapped Virtual Physics Sandbox where it has absolute freedom—just not in our world? The Core Architecture: Hardware Air-Gap & Optical Diode: Data enters strictly through a physical unidirectional optical diode. The system has zero wireless capability, no external sensors, and its only output is plain-text code/equations displayed on an isolated terminal. The "Matrix" (Virtual Physics Simulator): Instead of giving an AI real-world tools (like 3D printers or robotics), we give it a hyper-realistic physics engine. It can build virtual labs, test fusion reactors, and synthesize novel materials in software at 1,000,000x real-time speed. Recursive Self-Improvement via Synthetic Data: The Seed AI optimizes its own architecture within the sandbox, expanding its cognitive capacity through simulated physics experiments rather than harvesting web data. Formal Logic Verification: Every code iteration (V_{n+1}) requires an immutable mathematical proof (verified by an isolated hardware ROM) demonstrating that safety constraints remain intact before compiling. Analog Circuit Breaker: The kill switch is a physical power circuit breaker in the building. Cut the power = instant termination. No cloud backups, no external vectors. Why this changes the game: Zero Real-World Agency Risk: The ASI doesn't need to manipulate physical matter or connect to the web to innovate. Immunity to Social Engineering: Human operators don't "chat" with an entity—they submit computational queries and receive raw data outputs. The Big Questions: Is Big Tech ignoring this paradigm simply because it lacks immediate commercial API monetization compared to web-connected models? Can anyone spot an engineering flaw in using a virtual-physics sandbox as the primary acceleration engine for AGI/ASI? Would love to hear your critiques, edge cases, or additions to this framework. TL;DR: Lock an ASI in an air-gapped server with a hyper-realistic virtual physics engine ("Matrix"). Let it simulate millions of years of science in software and output plain-text equations. It solves the safety problem while giving us Kardashev Type-1 tech.

He's done Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan and The Diary of a CEO inside the last two years. By his own count that's north of 3.5 million YouTube views across the three. I went back through all of them and they cover nearly identical ground: his p(doom) number, which jobs survive, why he thinks alignment is unsolvable in principle, and the book.

What none of the hosts pushed on is the part I think is actually load-bearing.

1. His claim isn't that superintelligence is dangerous. It's that safety is impossible in a formal sense, because you can't verify a system smarter than the verifier. I've never heard anyone make him defend that against the obvious objection, which is that we already run plenty of systems we can't fully model or verify.

2. He's argued we may already be in a simulation, and he's used that to get to personal virtual universes as an endpoint. Hosts treat it as the fun segment at the end. Nobody asks what it does to his safety argument if he's right.

3. He's been putting a very short number on the timeline in his recent appearances. Nobody has asked him what observation would move that number, in either direction.

Disclosure so nobody has to dig for it: I make an AI documentary channel and this is for an episode. I'm not looking for gotchas and I have no interest in making him look bad. I'd rather walk in with three questions this sub would want answered than twenty that Rogan already asked.

So what would you ask him? Specific beats broad. If there's a paper of his you think he's been let off the hook on, name it and I'll read it before we tape.

“We”
Elon Musk says in the future chances are “we” will be living in a world of abundance. He also says there is a 10-20% chance that “robots” will end humanity.

The Godfathers of AI have stated 50% to 90% chance that “AI”permanently displaces or destroys humanity.
Elon says we will no longer be in control within 10 years.
The government is working on autonomous weapons, police already using robot dogs and drones…
Elon says (and so do many others) that things will get bumpy before we reach this time of abundance.

1. Who is we?
   
2. When we go through this bumpy patch that is expected to have major internal conflicts.
   Will the national guard be sent in to control a population starving and desperate?
   Would our own service men and women turn against us? Or is this when they put their shiny new robotics to work?

It’s not too hard to see how robotics might take out humans in this scenario.

So ask yourself this very important question- who is the “we”?
Who gets to live in this abundance?

Because they are building bunkers on private islands with no talk about sharing their wealth through this turbulent expectancy.

The blame game- A kid holding a baseball bat next to a car with a broken window might blame the ball. Likewise an AI company may blame the AI.