Hao Fei paper names 'cognitive symbionts' as AI's second axis

A single-author 59-page preprint posted to arxiv argues that the dominant question in AI, how much a machine can do on its own, is only half the frontier. The other half, author Hao Fei writes, is "AI-augmented human intelligence," or AHI, "which asks how much intelligence a machine can enable in a particular person."

The proposed system has a name: cognitive symbiont. Fei defines it as "a lifelong, embedded, real-time, private, low-friction, and proactive companion that senses what the person senses through external devices, keeps their context across years, models their situation and their mind, takes part in their thinking at the right moment."

The conceptual core is what Fei calls "the cognitive gap between what a person could bring to a situation and what they can hold in working memory." The design is organized as a symbiosis loop of sensing, keeping, understanding, living alongside, acting for and thinking with the person, and growing, enclosed by a personal runtime and by trust.

Fei also names the symbiont's distinctive risks. The paper flags "covert assistance in examinations" and "pressure on everyone to adopt it" as governance problems it treats "as part of the paradigm."

The abstract reports no benchmarks, no implementation details, and no co-authors. The paper runs 59 pages with 21 figures and 18 tables, and was submitted on November 3, 2026.