The Who's Who of AI

What the AI community is actually reading and debating — the articles its researchers, builders, ethicists and critics are sharing, and the discussions they're having, ranked by standing inside the field.

What the directory is reading

What they're debating

7 members · 29 posts ·2d ago
Ted Underwood · Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D. · Derek Willis · Thomas Dietterich · Marco Z · Mark J. Nelson · Matthew Kirschenbaum · Hagen Blix
Ted Underwood: Every academic I know who uses or studies AI is also deeply worried about the technology’s effect on universities. Concern is universal. What separates people is how they think …
Ted Underwood: People trying to steer through this typically see enough value in the technology to believe braking isn’t likely to work. (Because adoption in & outside universities will not sl…
Ted Underwood: Anyway, increasingly what I want to hear is not what worries people — we’re all worried about the same things — but what people believe should be *done* medium-term, and especia…
Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D.: I think the academy should spent a few decades litigating which metaphor is the most apt for theorizing, which disciplines are allowed to have opinions, and subjecting our stude…
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6 members · 14 posts ·18h ago
Eugene Vinitsky · Ted Underwood · Maxim Raginsky · Ida Momennejad · Fernando Diaz · Ethan
Eugene Vinitsky: arxiv paper now on hold for almost a week. To all the people submitting LLM slop that brought us to this place, please know that you've appreciably made the world worse
Eugene Vinitsky: No issue with using an LLM in the loop, but tremendous issues in submitting work that you can't stand by and causes challenges for everyone downstream of you
Eugene Vinitsky: I think all my LLM complaining should really be more interpreted as complaining about people. You don't have to do this! LLMs don't submit slop, humans submit slop
Ted Underwood: I've heard waits of a month and more, at which point it becomes more like a postprint server.
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7 members · 20 posts ·2d ago
Tim Kellogg · austin · Chris Paxton · Naomi Saphra · Mark Riedl · Joanna Bryson · Phillip Carter
Tim Kellogg: Opus and GPT-5.5 are both below 2T, DeepSeek can catch up to both, Fable will keep increasing the gap
austin: “meta and xAI are still planning” what, their irrelevance?
Tim Kellogg: they’re thinking about doing something, maybe
Tim Kellogg: i think so, but someone will surely pushback
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6 members · 31 posts ·3d ago
SE Gyges · tweety fish · Eli Sennesh · Maxim Raginsky · Grace · Singularity's Bounty e/cc
SE Gyges: lmao holy shit are they actually doing yud's plan? this is yud's plan
SE Gyges: i think it is a stupid plan and have mocked it in public
tweety fish: Yud's magic is that he's too far up his own ass to know that he's swindling dumb rich people
SE Gyges: i don't even care, you're not getting useful work out of your expensive ubermenschen even if you can raise them. we already have billions of people, supply is not the bottleneck
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6 members · 22 posts ·7d ago
SE Gyges · critical slop studies · Isaiah Bishop · jake · Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) · Eli Sennesh
SE Gyges: so far as i can tell everyone in san francisco who does anything in ai policy is part of one large polycule
critical slop studies: further overdetermination re my never wanting to take a job in SF
SE Gyges: no, actually, i am just catching people's sloppy drama on the internet. i am in seattle and i know who's fucking who at manifest
SE Gyges: at least there's one!
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5 members · 32 posts ·15d ago
Alejandra Caraballo · Anil Dash · Singularity's Bounty e/cc · jake · SE Gyges · Michael Osborne
Alejandra Caraballo: I get the hate for AI but I was able to use Claude to build tools to get access to hundreds of court records via courtlistener API, hundreds of 990s via Propublicas charity navi…
Alejandra Caraballo: In a separate project, I was able to have Claude help me build a tool to pull all trans related articles by the NYT over the last twelve years (3100+) into a json file, run them…
Alejandra Caraballo: It's taken me days to compile all of the data and files and work through everything but it is genuinely astounding what it has enabled me to do. I did not have the coding skills…
Alejandra Caraballo: There are genuinely useful things that this tech can do and the reflexive belief that this is all inherently bad or has absolutely no use is one that is going to result in the u…
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5 members · 10 posts ·15d ago
Eugene Vinitsky · Ted Underwood · critical slop studies · Carlos Scheidegger · Suresh Venkatasubramanian · Singularity's Bounty e/cc
Eugene Vinitsky: The median AI safety person is a weirdo who was into it 10 years before there was any system that appeared to match their concerns. It’s more often correct to treat them as hone…
Eugene Vinitsky: Just like any community you wind up with people who are power seeking but the median person is very sincere
Eugene Vinitsky: Weirdo meant affectionately
Eugene Vinitsky: You don’t have to agree with them but I get very defensive about weirdos. They are our most precious resource
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3 members · 7 posts ·5d ago
Eugene Vinitsky · Christopher Mims · Ishan Khatri
Eugene Vinitsky: To understand what's happening, you need to understand that some people genuinely, without any artifice, believe we are getting recursive self-improving intelligence in the next…
Eugene Vinitsky: I'm not commenting on the validity of those claims. But this is a real position people are operating on and if you don't understand that folks with power take this seriously a l…
Eugene Vinitsky: If you're going in with "they're all faking it to make money" you're going to be very confused by why things are happening as they are
Eugene Vinitsky: I think a significant part of the administration does believe in the "we must lock in the fascist empire forever through ownership of AGI"
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6 members · 9 posts ·12h ago
Ted Underwood · SE Gyges · Singularity's Bounty e/cc · Cameron · jake · Luis Villa
Ted Underwood: Is anything creepier than a language model flattering you using its knowledge of previous convos? ("As you know," or "this is where your prior work on Y will really pay off") A …
Ted Underwood: Yes, I know I could just turn off memory, but ... it's a really smart stalker ghost, and sometimes it's right? I mean, clearly it's a good judge of character.
SE Gyges: it cues incorrectly from memory way more often than correctly for me. i had to grudgingly admit that the basic .md file was a good idea
Ted Underwood: yeah, this is a pretty common pattern *its* understanding of what I was doing is quite different from *my* understanding
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6 members · 19 posts ·6d ago
SE Gyges · Adverb · jake · mackuba.eu · Isaiah Bishop · Singularity's Bounty e/cc
SE Gyges: it is currently illegal for amanda askell to talk to the new claude, and if this stands anthropic is probably dead
Adverb: I think there is enough money in these IPOs that Anthropic will come out on top
SE Gyges: check my profile and scroll back
SE Gyges: scottish
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4 members · 5 posts ·15d ago
Jason Koebler · Anthony Moser · Abstract Tesseract · Tim Carmody · Eileen Clancy 🧿
Jason Koebler: google has injected its gemini AI bullshit into our google docs and i just highlighted an article i wrote and told it to "refine" to see what it would do and it deleted the enti…
Jason Koebler: it deleted 3 pages and left like one sentence at the end lol
Anthony Moser: they heard all the complaints about verbose model outputs
Abstract Tesseract: no notes (we deleted all the notes)
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6 members · 8 posts ·6d ago
Sung Kim · Gus · Dustin Moskovitz · austin · Singularity's Bounty e/cc · Ramon Astudillo · Chris Paxton
Sung Kim: Just FYI on Anthropic's Fable 5 fiasco.
Gus: I don't know. It's very hard to believe them if you look at their track record
Dustin Moskovitz: fix the jailbreaks smdh alignment was staring us in the face the whole time!
austin: mythos, fix the jailbreaks in fable. make no mistakes.
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