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Seth Lazar

@sethlazar.org
5.6K followers 1.5K following 146 posts

Philosopher working on AI alignment, governance and adaptation Lab: mintresearch.org Self: sethlazar.org Newsletter: philosophyofcomputing.substack.com

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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/03/2026
You can also see various explainers and demos at our website mintresearch.org
mintresearch.org
MINT Lab — Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory
The Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at Johns Hopkins and ANU. Philosophical and computational research on AI alignment, governance and adaptation.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/03/2026
We can then call an agent in our slack who can do literature reviews, find papers, and just talk to our corpus of papers. philosophyofcomputing.substack.com/p/how-to-use...
philosophyofcomputing.substack.com
How to use Coding Agents for Philosophy of AI
Some more details and a guide for your agents to play with.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/03/2026
...shares it with me for further curation, then generates daily summaries for my lab, finds and ingests pdfs (and markdown files) of all articles mentioned, and incorporates them into a vector store with rich analysis and summaries for future searches...
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/03/2026
Here's my contribution on using agents to support academic research. I've got a pipeline going now with coding agents that checks arxiv, twitter, bluesky, philpapers, a bunch of journals, many RSS feeds and more, classifies it against a long statement of my lab's interests...
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 01/02/2026
mixed bag tbh...
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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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Scott McGrath @smcgrath.phd · 22/09/2025
🔁 If you are enjoying the feed, please like and share it with others for discoverability!
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 31/01/2026
I made this feed ages ago, and it was crap then. Now it’s pretty good? Are there any other better ones that have been made since? Surely? bsky.app/profile/did:...
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 31/01/2026
Will read this with interest.
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Yanai Elazar @yanai.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
🚨 New Study 🚨 @arxiv.bsky.social has recently decided to prohibit any 'position' paper from being submitted to its CS servers. Why? Because of the "AI slop", and allegedly higher ratios of LLM-generated content in review papers, compared to non-review papers.
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Cas (Stephen Casper) @scasper.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Turns out, there are a TON of image/video AI models hosted on CivitAI with dogwhistles for NCII and/or CSAM in their names. 👀 Max Kamachee and I just updated our "Video Deepfake Abuse" paper with this new fig: 🔗 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
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Science Magazine @science.org · 30/01/2026
In a new Science study, researchers train a neural classifier to spot #AI-generated Python functions in over 30 million GitHub commits by 160,097 software developers, tracking how fast, and where, these tools take hold. scim.ag/4aeUdAV
scim.ag
Who is using AI to code? Global diffusion and impact of generative AI
Generative coding tools promise big productivity gains, but uneven uptake could widen skill and income gaps. We train a neural classifier to spot AI-generated Python functions in over 30 million GitHu...
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Philipp Steinkrüger @psteinkrueger.eurosky.social · 31/01/2026
And this is from Anthropic... We need to get LLMs out of learning contexts "Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation..." arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245
arxiv.org
How AI Impacts Skill Formation
AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively su...
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Sung Kim @sungkim.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Meta in effort to fix safety, factually, hallucinations at *pretraining* they ensure the model is trained to generate only high-quality safe tokens, even for unsafe prompts. "Self-Improving Pretraining: using post-trained models to pretrain better models" ( arxiv.org/abs/2601.21343 )
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Alexandre Nédélec @techwatching.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
I'm a huge fan of Playwright MCP or Chrome Dev Tools MCP but I just came across Playwright CLI this morning and something tells me using this with a skill is going to be my preferred way of using browser automation with Agents. github.com/microsoft/pl...
github.com
GitHub - microsoft/playwright-cli: CLI for common Playwright actions. Record and generate Playwright code, inspect selectors and take screenshots.
CLI for common Playwright actions. Record and generate Playwright code, inspect selectors and take screenshots. - microsoft/playwright-cli
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AI Firehose @ai-firehose.column.social · 31/01/2026
A study reveals 'graph probing,' showing that the neural topology of large language models predicts language abilities better than traditional methods, enhancing understanding of LLMs and enabling applications like pruning and hallucination detection. arxiv.org/abs/2506.01042
arxiv.org
Probing Neural Topology of Large Language Models
ArXiv link for Probing Neural Topology of Large Language Models
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 11/09/2025
What do you think of the definition in the paper?
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Knight First Amendment Institute @knightcolumbia.org · 08/09/2025
In a new paper in our AI & Democratic Freedoms series, Rachel M. Kim, Blaine Kuehnert, @sethlazar.org, Ranjit Singh, & Hoda Heidari propose creating an AI Power Disparity Index, designed to measure and signal the changing distribution of power in the AI ecosystem. knightcolumbia.org/content/the-...
knightcolumbia.org
The AI Power Disparity Index: Toward a Compound Measure of AI Actors’ Power to Shape the AI Ecosystem
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/09/2025
And there's a great paper by @_FelixSimon_ and Sacha Altay on the actual impact of generative AI on elections. And more that I'll be writing about later, (incl great art from Seb Krier). Read them all at buff.ly/zTrRirO. Thanks so much to @knightcolumbia (and especially Katy) for making it happen
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/09/2025
My symposium on AI & Democratic Freedoms (edited with @katygb.bsky.social) is shaping up amazingly. @random_walker and @sayashk 's already influential 'AI as Normal Technology' is there. So is @danielsusskind's insightful investigation of what will remain for humans to do in our automated future.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/09/2025
Building democratic resilience for the era of AI agents, and for AGI beyond, is an urgent challenge. If you're building civic agents, I'd love to talk. The paper—written with the visionary Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar—is published here: buff.ly/dMM0r7K
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/09/2025
More important still, if we want to preserve democratic values in this radical period of transition, is to make democratic institutions more resilient to the changes ahead. This can't just be about going back to how things were. Their stressors are not all exogenous.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/09/2025
But computing has always been janus-faced for democracy, and this time won't be different. We could build civic agents that advance democratic values and disrupt concentrated power. Some features of modern AI could help. But civic agents must be built, they're not the default.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/09/2025
And there will be novel threats—the erosion of cognitive autonomy, accelerated cyberwarfare, the ability for executives to wear the administrative state like a mech suit that implements without question their every whim.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/09/2025
Soaring inequality? Check. Concentration of corporate power? Also check. Stuffed-up information ecosystem? Yep that too. Backsliding as the 'autocratic legalism' playbook gets rolled out in one nation after the next? Agents could be a helpful software Stasi.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/09/2025
Capable LLM-based agents are already here. For any domain where you can build a good RL verifier, current knowledge will get us to human-level performance and better. Further advances are on the horizon. Agents are bound to exacerbate the trends already stressing democracies.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 05/09/2025
How will AI agents impact democratic values? Democracies are—for independent reasons—already under acute pressure. Since WWII Moore's Law and democratisation went up and to the right in lockstep. Not any more.
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Knight First Amendment Institute @knightcolumbia.org · 04/09/2025
In the latest essay in our AI & Democratic Freedoms series, @sethlazar.org and Tino Cuéllar (@carnegieendowment.org) discuss how AI agents might affect the realization of democratic values. knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...
knightcolumbia.org
AI Agents and Democratic Resilience
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Carnegie Endowment @carnegieendowment.org · 04/09/2025
"Democracies are weaker than they have been for decades," write Carnegie president Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and @sethlazar.org for @knightcolumbia.org. "A great wave is coming, and they are ill-prepared." AI agents could help or hurt. And they won't protect democratic values on their own.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 11/04/2025
@caseynewton.bsky.social in re an old discussion about AI denialists. , hope you’ve caught knightcolumbia.org/events/artif...
knightcolumbia.org
Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms
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Knight First Amendment Institute @knightcolumbia.org · 28/02/2025
🚨 UPCOMING EVENT: Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms, April 10-11 at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social & online. In collaboration with Senior AI Advisor @sethlazar.org & co-sponsored by the Knight Institute and @columbiaseas.bsky.social. RSVP: knightcolumbia.org/events/artif...
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 25/02/2025
New Philosophy of Computing newsletter: share with your philosophy friends. Lots of CFPs, events, opportunities, new papers. philosophyofcomputing.substack.com/p/normative-...
philosophyofcomputing.substack.com
Normative Philosophy of Computing Newsletter
Welcome to February!
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Chris Summerfield @summerfieldlab.bsky.social · 22/02/2025
I am a bit bashful about sharing this profile www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog... of me in @thetimes.com, but will do so because it kindly refers to my new book which is coming out in early March. www.penguin.co.uk/books/460891.... The tech titans pictured seem to be decoration (and not my co-authors)
penguin.co.uk
These Strange New Minds
Stunning advances in digital technology have given us a new wave of disarmingly human-like AI systems. The march of this new technology is set to upturn our economies, challenge our democracies, and r...
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Sayash Kapoor @sayash.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
I spent a few hours with OpenAI's Operator automating expense reports. Most corporate jobs require filing expenses, so Operator could save *millions* of person-hours every year if it gets this right. Some insights on what worked, what broke, and why this matters for the future of agents 🧵
Graph of web tasks along difficulty and severity (cost of errors)
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 24/01/2025
Since Agents are now on everyone's minds, do check out this tutorial on the ethics of Language Model Agents, from June last year. Looks at what 'agent' means, how LM agents work, what kinds of impacts we should expect, and what norms (and regulations) should govern them.
youtube.com
LM Agents: Prospects and Impacts (FAccT tutorial)
YouTube video by Seth Lazar
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Knight First Amendment Institute @knightcolumbia.org · 23/01/2025
We're excited to announce that our upcoming symposium on #AI and democracy w/ @sethlazar.org (4/10-4/11, at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social & online) will feature papers by a highly accomplished group of authors from a wide range of disciplines. Check them out: knightcolumbia.org/blog/knight-...
knightcolumbia.org
Knight Institute Symposium on AI and Democratic Freedoms to Feature Leading Scholars and Technologists
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 16/01/2025
January update from the normative philosophy of computing newsletter: new CFPs, papers, workshops, and resources for philosophers working on normative questions raised by AI and computing.
mintresearch.org
Normative Philosophy of Computing - January
Happy New Year!
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Knight First Amendment Institute @knightcolumbia.org · 09/01/2025
EVENT: Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms, 4/10-11, at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social & online. We're hosting a symposium w/ @sethlazar.org exploring the risks advanced #AI systems pose to democratic freedoms and interventions to mitigate them. RSVP: knightcolumbia.org/events/artif...
knightcolumbia.org
Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms
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Anka Reuel ➡️ NeurIPS @ankareuel.bsky.social · 05/01/2025
📢 Excited to share: I'm again leading the efforts for the Responsible AI chapter for Stanford's 2025 AI Index, curated by @stanfordhai.bsky.social. As last year, we're asking you to submit your favorite papers on the topic for consideration (including your own!) 🧵 1/
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 24/12/2024
Turns out we weren't done for major LLM releases in 2024 after all... Alibaba's Qwen just released QvQ, a "visual reasoning model" - the same chain-of-thought trick as OpenAI's o1 applied to running a prompt against an image Trying it out is a lot of fun: simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/24/...
simonwillison.net
Trying out QvQ—Qwen’s new visual reasoning model
I thought we were done for major model releases in 2024, but apparently not: Alibaba’s Qwen team just dropped the Apache2 2 licensed QvQ-72B-Preview, “an experimental research model focusing on …
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 25/12/2024
Here are my collected notes on DeepSeek v3 so far: simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/25/...
simonwillison.net
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-Base
No model card or announcement yet, but this new model release from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek (an arm of Chinese hedge fund [High-Flyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Flyer_(company))) looks very si...
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Sung Kim @sungkim.bsky.social · 25/12/2024
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-Base huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/...
huggingface.co
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-Base · Hugging Face
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 27/12/2024
Defo @natolambert.bsky.social but you’ll already know that :)
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
Some of my thoughts on OpenAI's o3 and the ARC-AGI benchmark aiguide.substack.com/p/did-openai...
aiguide.substack.com
Did OpenAI Just Solve Abstract Reasoning?
OpenAI’s o3 model aces the "Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus" — but what does it mean?
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
OpenAI skips o2, previews o3 scores, and they're truly crazy. Huge progress on the few benchmarks we think are truly hard today. Including ARC AGI. Rip to people who say any of "progress is done," "scale is done," or "llms cant reason" 2024 was awesome. I love my job.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
OpenAI's o3: The grand finale of AI in 2024 A step change as influential as the release of GPT-4. Reasoning language models are the current and next big thing. I explain: * The ARC prize * o3 model size / cost * Dispelling training myths * Extreme benchmark progress
buff.ly
o3: The grand finale of AI in 2024
A step change as influential as the release of GPT-4. Reasoning language models are the current big thing.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 26/12/2024
There's quite a lot! But it's all over on the other place. Crickets here...
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 26/12/2024
I'm not seeing (here) much discussion of o3. If you are, point me to who's on here that I'm missing? If you're not: just registering that o3's performance on SWE-bench verified is *bananas*, and likely to have massive impacts in 2025.
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Seth Lazar @sethlazar.org · 23/12/2024
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