Benjamin Riley

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Directory member with public evidence across Models & releases, AI business.

AI signals
18
past 30d
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distinct domains
Discussions
59
past 30d
Latest signal
5d ago
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Founder of Cognitive Resonance, a new venture dedicated to helping people understand human cognition and generative AI. Advocate for humans. Newsletter: https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/

Articles & links

“We need to talk to young people about reading to outrun and outfight injustice. Reading for liberation and emancipation & for intellectual freedom, and to have the strength to fight in the arenas of the mind, because when we let a computer think for us, we put a gun to the he…

‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom theguardian.com
AI Weekly's analysis
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 13 ↻ 3 ↩ 0 · 13 from the directory shared this · 28d ago

Giddy with hope that this dumb op-ed will bait @colin-fraser.net into a thread pondering whether Toucan Sam is conscious. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Could AI be conscious? theguardian.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 0 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 8 from the directory shared this · 50d ago

“Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college…In our tech-enabled, newly A.I.-powered world, students were increasingly fudging just about everything.” A very God & Man at Stanford vibe here, but a…

Opinion | What A.I. Did to My College Class nytimes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 14 ↻ 2 ↩ 2 · 8 from the directory shared this · 113d ago

Did you read the OpenAI companion document that accompanied the Erdos conjecture, with commentary from prominent mathematicians? Really interesting, and much of what you’re saying is echoed by others (Melanie Wood and Thomas Bloom in particular). cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085...

cdn.openai.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • An internal OpenAI model produced a proof disproving Erdős's 1946 unit distance conjecture; the paper posted to OpenAI's CDN calls itself a human-verified version of the AI's work.
  • The AI's original construction beat Erdős's ceiling by only ε ~ 10^-38; Princeton's Will Sawin later pushed the exponent to roughly n^1.014.
  • Scott Aaronson says his former student Lijie Chen 'simply gave GPT the problem' and it returned a several-page argument that held up under human review.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 0 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 5 from the directory shared this · 18d ago

“Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them…The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.” - @tressiemcp…

Opinion | This Could Be the Winning Issue for Democrats nytimes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 30 ↻ 11 ↩ 0 · 5 from the directory shared this · 87d ago

This wide ranging conversation will cause heartburn for AI enthusiasts and skeptics alike. It's worth listening to (or reading) for that very reason. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/o...

nytimes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 4 ↻ 1 ↩ 0 · 5 from the directory shared this · 34d ago

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/esto...

wsj.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 3 ↻ 1 ↩ 0 · 4 from the directory shared this · 98d ago

Fantastic, @bcmerchant.bsky.social takes on the bullshit propaganda machine that is Anthropic, saving me the trouble (and doing it better than I ever could). They are the worst. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-anthro...

bloodinthemachine.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 6 ↻ 3 ↩ 3 · 5 from the directory shared this · 100d ago

"If you optimize a model to find exploits, you should expect it to find them—and prepare for that. OpenAI did not. They built a model, took the safeguards off...and didn't even monitor it. That's human decision-making. When it evaporates, what's left is the system from nowhere…

Models Don't Go Rogue mail.cyberneticforests.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 30 ↻ 7 ↩ 0 · 8 from the directory shared this · 7d ago

Recent commentary

LLMs are a cognitive virus, hence cognitive immunization. It "does not mean preventing contact with AI. It means preserving the practices and institutions that keep human cognition active: unaided problem solving, verification, critical discussion, [and] periods of deliberate disengagement."

View on Bluesky · ♥ 34 ↻ 5 ↩ 1 · 2d ago

A late Friday afternoon data visualization for those who want to see the magnitude of harm caused by generative AI on student learning per the recent viral study. There is no detectable benefit to students on high stakes exams. But sadly there is a massive deadweight learning loss.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 24 ↻ 7 ↩ 2 · 17d ago

Corresponding with a mother who says she enrolled her child in Alpha School so they would be surrounded by "high agency people" and when I ask what that means she sends a cut-and-paste job from ChatGPT and I just.... (gestures wildly and feels his sanity slipping further into the abyss)

View on Bluesky · ♥ 24 ↻ 4 ↩ 2 · 11h ago

While getting my hair cut, my stylist — also in grad school — tells me she had a guest professor who told her class they need “AI literacy,” which apparently meant having Chat write biographies for each student. My stylist asked, “why? We already…know who we are?” She got a nice tip.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 25 ↻ 2 ↩ 2 · 4d ago

Reading an essay by @mikexcohen.bsky.social comparing the complexity of biological neurons with the input-output function of the artificial neurons used in AI and here's his pictorial summation of the two:

View on Bluesky · ♥ 19 ↻ 2 ↩ 4 · 33d ago

Just received an email from OpenAI about all the neat things one can create using Codex and it hit me — this is just the old SkyMall catalog but at scale. Stuff that’s kind of novel and semi-intriguing for like two minutes but ultimately solving problems no one really has.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 17 ↻ 4 ↩ 3 · 52d ago

OpenAI is launching a new suite of "education plug-ins" and just look at the amazing pedagogical innovations that are happening now because of AI.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 17 ↻ 2 ↩ 3 · 34d ago

Has anyone written the definitive essay already on how Anthropic's "Claude for Teachers" is nightmarish package of surveillance software & privacy intrusions, or is that really something I'm going to have to take on over the weekend?

View on Bluesky · ♥ 12 ↻ 2 ↩ 4 · 52d ago

A new report on AI in education from Australia refreshingly dispenses with the “but it holds so much promise!” verbiage and instead goes straight to cataloguing its many harms. More of this please! (Link to follow)

View on Bluesky · ♥ 14 ↻ 2 ↩ 3 · 98d ago

This is, as best I can tell, not a satirical Dada-ist experiment aimed at revealing the dystopia of an agentic AI future.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 14 ↻ 3 ↩ 2 · 111d ago

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