Among those to leave OpenAI in recent months over the strategic shift are vice-president of research Jerry Tworek, model policy researcher Andrea Vallone and economist Tom Cunningham.

MaxRL is a framework that turns more compute into increasingly better approximations of the maximum likelihood objective in sampling-based tasks.

If this perspective is accurate then it has deep implications for the economics of AI: the marginal cost of solving an idiosyncratic problem is small (you just need to map it to one of the canonical problems, and apply that solution), but there’s very high value in making progress on the canonical problems. So we would expect AI labs to be spending huge amounts of compute on advancing the SoTA on the few deep problems of the world, and providing a service that solves idiosyncratic problems very cheaply.

Fuzzers work by throwing massive amounts of random inputs at code to see what breaks. Opus 4.6 reads and reasons about code the way a human researcher would—looking at past fixes to find similar bugs that weren't addressed, spotting patterns that tend to cause problems, or understanding a piece of logic well enough to know exactly what input would break it.

You wouldn't think that chess players, who sit for hours on end and extend their arms only from time to time, would struggle with weight loss. But they do. Inside the very real, very bizarre metabolic phenomenon gripping chess.

Although bias against men was shown by both men and women, another finding of the study was the bias was larger from women than from men in three out of four of their research questions.

Despite our culture voting for parties that enforce gender equality schemes that put men’s education and careers behind women’s, women very often want a man who earns more money and has a higher education than she does. Thus we are living in a situation that seems designed to leave everyone dissatisfied, yet this is the design that people demand.

Counterintuitively, that’s my biggest reason to be optimistic about AI and creativity. When hard parts become easy, the differentiator becomes love.

This systematic review and meta-analytic investigation found that SFV use was associated with poorer cognition (attention, inhibitory control, language, memory, and working memory) and most mental health indices except body image and self-esteem.

A September review of 71 studies with a total of nearly 100,000 participants found that heavy consumption of short-form video was associated with poorer cognition, especially in regard to attention spans and impulse control, based on a combination of behavioral tests and self-reported data.
The review, published in Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association, also found links between heavy consumption of the videos and increased symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress and loneliness.

“Restraint and respect for international law was abandoned in the aftermath of 9/11, with the launch of not one but two foreign interventions, in Iraq and Afghanistan, ostensibly aimed at the elimination of a terrorist threat, but in reality, functioning as explicit projects of regime change.”

But Ansari, despondent after a year of often fruitless Middle East diplomacy, predicts we are “moving from a world order to disorder”.
“I don’t think we are moving towards a multipolar system. I don’t think we are even moving to a power-based international order. I don’t think we are moving towards any kind of system.
“We are moving into a system where anybody can do whatever they like, regardless if they are big or small. As long as you have the ability to wreak havoc, you can do it because no one will hold you accountable.”

As countries everywhere feel emboldened to encroach on their neighbours, the dismal prospect is of an aggressive, border-shifting 19th-century world, but armed with 21st-century weapons.

America was a successful superpower because its self-interest and realpolitik were turbocharged by an avowed faith in universal values of democracy and human rights. Mr Trump believes that, far from being a unique strength in foreign affairs, that was a foolish indulgence.

Spain is booming. For three years running, we have had the fastest-growing economy among Europe’s largest countries. We have created nearly one in every three new jobs across the European Union, and our unemployment rate has fallen below 10 percent for the first time in nearly two decades. Our workers’ purchasing power has also grown, and poverty and inequality levels have dropped to their lowest since 2008. This prosperity is the result of Spanish citizens’ hard work, the E.U.’s collective effort and an inclusive agenda that views migrants as necessary partners.

these findings characterise LLM reasoning as a versatile computational process that emerges with scale and generalises beyond training data to novel contexts, highlighting the broader potential of the compute scaling paradigm

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.

CEOs have fallen into the same delusion as people who treat ChatGPT as if it were a friend

Another American strength is its electoral system. Voters in Venezuela and Russia had no opportunity to check the power of aspiring autocrats until it was too late, whereas the US midterms offer an opportunity to at least partially defang a rogue administration. And with a robust and decentralised media landscape rendering the Trump administration’s excesses clear for all to see, this is an opportunity the American electorate appears keen to take. Indeed, it is possible that one reason Trump’s second term has been so fast and furious is that the administration believes it only has two years to act.

Last month, Vallone, who led model policy research at OpenAI, joined rival Anthropic. Two people familiar with her exit said she was given an “impossible” mission of protecting the mental health of users becoming attached to ChatGPT. Vallone did not respond to a request for comment.