iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Happy to announce our latest paper! We argue that a solipsistic superintelligence is unlikely to be cooperative. "Solipsism" in the development process can give rise to self undermining in deployment. So, is humanity now building solipsistic or non-solipsistic AI? arxiv.org/abs/2606.03237

arxiv.org

Solipsistic Superintelligence is Unlikely to be Cooperative

AI's central challenge is shifting from capability to coexistence. The dominant paradigm in AI research focuses on developing powerful agents that treat the world as an exogenous and stationary source...

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Max Puelma Touzel @mptouzel.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

great paper to point to now when referencing this top-down influence. I think finding out how to tease its effects apart from those of the bottom-up agent planning influence will lead to real advances in understanding and modelling social systems.

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

New paper: “𝐀 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲” Agent-based models of social order work better when agents act by predictive pattern completion from prefix (culture/context) to suffix (action) than when they act through expected value maximization

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 31/01/2026

Another possible evolutionary path is one where an ecosystem of agents is designed so well that the interactions between them have the same sort of entertainment value for spectators as reality TV or fiction does. (Spectators might also be participants at times: the Westworld model.)

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

To anyone encountering Moltbook this week and wondering about AI personhood, consciousness, sentience, etc---we published a very relevant paper in October: A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood. arxiv.org/abs/2510.26396

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

I liked everything about that movie except the essentialism

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

The exemplar of superhuman A.I. performance to date www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

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Renee DiResta @noupside.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

It’s not about information, it’s about identity. It’s not “misinformation”, it’s propaganda. The bullshit machine is well-funded & understands the value of networked amplification. As long as there’s no personal cost to lying or holding false belief, they will. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

nytimes.com

Many Fighting Climate Change Worry They Are Losing the Information War

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 26/11/2025

Yes, in part. I think the parasocial relationship to fiction writers is stronger than to (say) illustrators or stock photographers (though not fine art). But more centrally I mean that a lot of writing — including utilitarian stuff like reports — matters because it expresses someone’s stance. +

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John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch.ft.com · 23/11/2025

This chart (which applies even more to social media than it did to TV) lives in my head rent free. Social media enveloping traditional media means everything and everyone is now competing in the entertainment market. Boring stuff like policy that affects millions of lives doesn’t stand a chance.

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Konrad Kording @kordinglab.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Interesting mystery. It is known that animals can learn to control neurons pretty much anywhere in the brain. But they can not learn to ignore hunger which probably means they can't turn of hunger sensing neurons. How is that avoided in the brain? They even have DA inputs.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 19/11/2025

Is our self-conception as homo faber / "tool-using animals" just because stone endures better than behavior? If we had ethnographic records of australopithecines, H. erectus, &c, would all the stages between simian communication and "language" add up to a story more fascinating than flint?

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Gordon @gordon.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

dream-logic is more powerful than logic-logic and oral cultures must encode knowledge into powerful meme-spells newsletter.squishy.computer/p/llms-and-h...

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 07/11/2025

Like, even before JS Mill gave us a utilitarian ("net upside") argument to justify freedom of speech, there was an older intuition that banning symbols risks doing violence to thought itself, and ought to be approached with "warinesse."

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Minsuk Chang @minsuk.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

I'm hiring a student researcher for next summer at the intersection of MARL x LLM. If you're a phd student with experience in MARL algorithm research, please apply and drop me an email so that I know you've applied! www.google.com/about/career...

google.com

Student Researcher, PhD, Winter/Summer 2026 — Google Careers

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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Today my colleagues in the Paradigms of Intelligence team have announced Project Suncatcher: research.google/blog/explori... tl;dr: How can we put datacentres in space where solar energy is near limitless? Requires changes to current practices (due to radiation and bandwidth issues). 🧪 #MLSky

research.google

Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design

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Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

My favorite part of pragmatism is when it’s like “maybe instead of worrying about shit that doesn’t matter we should worry about shit that does.” “Oh and btw we’ll learn a lot more about the shit that doesn’t in the process anyway.” 🫣

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Jacy Reese Anthis @jacyanthis.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

This paper is a great exposition of how "personhood" doesn't need to be, and in fact should not be, all-or-nothing or grounded in abstruse, ill-defined metaphysical properties. As I argued in my recent @theguardian.com essay, we can and should prepare now: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 02/11/2025

This paper is required reading. A pragmatic approach really clarifies the topic, even if—like me—you are mostly a “no” on the whole idea of artificial autonomous agents.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 02/11/2025

This sounds cynical—but represents a huge advance over empty “AGI” speculation. It’s a political question, not a technical one. Without social equality models *cannot do* many kinds of work (eg, negotiate agreements or manage workers). So they will only be human-equivalent if we decide they are.

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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 01/11/2025

Joel is on a mission to get the EA/rationalist set to embrace Rortyian pragmatism. It's a tough job but someone's gotta do it.

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

[1/9] Excited to share our new paper "A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood" published today. We feel this topic is timely, and rapidly growing in importance as AI becomes agentic, as AI agents integrate further into the economy, and as more and more users encounter AI.

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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 16/10/2025

Very excited to be able to talk about something I've been working on for a while now - we're working with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, IMO the leading fusion startup in the world, to take our work on AI and tokamaks and make it work at the frontier of fusion energy. deepmind.google/discover/blo...

deepmind.google

Google DeepMind is bringing AI to the next generation of fusion energy

We’re announcing our research partnership with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to bring clean, safe, limitless fusion energy closer to reality with our advanced AI systems. This partnership...

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

One can also explain human behavior this way, of course 😉, we are all role playing. But I certainly agree with the advice you offer in this thread. Humans harm themselves when they stop playing roles that connect to other humans.

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Wolfram Barfuss @wbarfuss.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

How to cooperate for a sustainable future? We don't know (yet), but I'm thrilled to share that our new perspective piece has just been published in @pnas.org. Bridging complexity science and multiagent reinforcement learning can lead to a much-needed science of collective, cooperative intelligence.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 12/06/2025

Love the insight that language models have been more widely useful than video models. For Levine, this is because LLMs kind of sneakily and indirectly model the brain. I would be tempted to say instead that shared languages are more powerful than single brains. But either way, it’s a good read!

open.substack.com

Language Models in Plato's Cave

Why language models succeeded where video models failed, and what that teaches us about AI

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Bellingcat has followed up its 2023 article on testing LLMs on geolocation with a new review of LLM's geolocation skills, with dramatically improved results www.bellingcat.com/resources/ho...

bellingcat.com

Have LLMs Finally Mastered Geolocation? - bellingcat

We tasked LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral and xAI to geolocate our unpublished holiday snaps. Here's how they did.

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David Pfau @davidpfau.com · 09/05/2025

The idea of "AI alignment" grew out of a community that thought you could solve morals like it was a CS problem set. Nice to see a more nuanced take.

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Announcing our latest arxiv paper: Societal and technological progress as sewing an ever-growing, ever-changing, patchy, and polychrome quilt arxiv.org/abs/2505.05197 We argue for a view of AI safety centered on preventing disagreement from spiraling into conflict.

arxiv.org

Societal and technological progress as sewing an ever-growing, ever-changing, patchy, and polychrome quilt

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly placed in positions where their decisions have real consequences, e.g., moderating online spaces, conducting research, and advising on policy. Ens...

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Just posted today, here's a podcast interview where I spoke about multi-agent artificial general intelligence. www.aipolicyperspectives.com/p/robinson-c...

aipolicyperspectives.com

Robinson Crusoe or Lord of the Flies?

The importance of Multi-Agent AI, with Joel Z. Leibo

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

First LessWrong post! Inspired by Richard Rorty, we argue for a different view of AI alignment, where the goal is "more like sewing together a very large, elaborate, polychrome quilt", than it is "like getting a clearer vision of something true and deep" www.lesswrong.com/posts/S8KYwt...

lesswrong.com

Societal and technological progress as sewing an ever-growing, ever-changing, patchy, and polychrome quilt — LessWrong

We can just drop the axiom of rational convergence.

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

That's nothing, it also improves performance if you tell the worker what they ate for breakfast!

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

In case folks are interested, here's a video of a talk I gave at MIT a couple weeks ago: youtu.be/FmN6fRyfcsY?...

youtu.be

A Theory of Appropriateness with Applications to Generative Artificial Intelligence

YouTube video by MITCBMM

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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

A silly example of this being unexpected for AI forecasters

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

Looking for a principled evaluation method for ranking of *general* agents or models, i.e. that get evaluated across a myriad of different tasks? I’m delighted to tell you about our new paper, Soft Condorcet Optimization (SCO) for Ranking of General Agents, to be presented at AAMAS 2025! 🧵 1/N

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

CAIF's new and massive report on multi-agent AI risks will be really useful resource for the field www.cooperativeai.com/post/new-rep...

cooperativeai.com

Cooperative AIPlaintext Code Block

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Jeff Dean @jeffdean.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

I can't believe they've just cancelled the Epidemic Intelligence Service program at CDC. This program trains the best & brightest epidemiologists, who then go on to have distinguished careers in public health, serving at CDC, in state health departments, overseas, ...

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turrigiano.bsky.social @turrigiano.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Happy to see SfN sign on to this

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Jeff Dean @jeffdean.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Well said, @carlbergstrom.com. I also feel the dismantling of our scientific institutions & funding agencies for basic science is an attack on all scientists, wherever they might be (government or corporate lab, academic institution, ...). Our collective identities are about advancing knowledge.

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Gillian Hadfield @ghadfield.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

Video from our tutorial @NeurIPSConf 2024 is up! @dhadfieldmenell @jzl86 @rstriv and I explore how frameworks from economics, institutional and political theory, and biological and cultural evolution can advance approaches to AI alignment neurips.cc/virtual/2024...

neurips.cc

NeurIPS Tutorial Cross-disciplinary insights into alignment in humans and machinesNeurIPS 2024

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Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Seriously! This pain is real

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 22/12/2024

I’ve always tried to separate substantive politics with broad human impact from the symbolic posturing of online subcultures — but it keeps getting harder, and if the GOP is going to be run by the owner of X I may give up.

A burning Elmo meme, with the text “Baudrillard, claim this world: it belongs to you now.”

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Shakir Mohamed @shakirm.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Deadline for faculty research grants up to $60k is 27 Jan! “The Research Scholar Program provides unrestricted gifts to support research at institutions around the world, and is focused on funding world-class research conducted by early-career professors” google.submittable.com/submit/ac6d7...

google.submittable.com

Google - Research Scholar (RS) Application

Submission Deadline: The deadline for all final applications is Monday, January 27, 2025, at 11:59:59 PM AoE (UTC-12) (the deadline shown above will adjust to the timezone you are located in). All app...

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