Benjamin Riley

Why they matter

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

AI signals
8
past 30d
Sources
6
distinct domains
Discussions
10
past 30d
Latest signal
1d ago
View every signal from Benjamin Riley →
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

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 · 9d 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 · 72d 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 · 46d ago

Source document here, just let your eyes glaze over the math equations: cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085...

cdn.openai.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 5 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 4 from the directory shared this · 67d ago

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

wsj.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 3 ↻ 1 ↩ 0 · 4 from the directory shared this · 57d 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 · 59d ago

Anthropic has been “unnecessarily antagonistic to open weight models [and] open research. [The company] has a specific view of AI, but such a powerful technology will never have its final equilibrium be one of singular control by a private company.” - @natolambert.bsky.social …

Claude Fable 5 and new safety fables interconnects.ai
View on Bluesky · ♥ 6 ↻ 2 ↩ 0 · 4 from the directory shared this · 48d ago

This article is surreal from start to finish. The author, a full-throated AI enthusiast who’s written a book titled AI for Good, waits until paragraph 52 of 53 to reveal that Sal Khan & team are basically abandoning the AI-as-tutor model — after Sal declared, in his book, it w…

OpenAI and Khan Academy Made a Chatbot. What Can We Learn? nytimes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 12 ↻ 2 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 72d ago

This NYT visual does a nice job showing both the power and the extreme frailty of "AI agents" in handling relatively mundane real-world work tasks. Many assume there'll be continued leaps in performance but what if we're approaching the top of the S-curve? www.nytimes.com/inte…

Could A.I. Do Your Job? We Put Agents to the Test. nytimes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 11 ↻ 2 ↩ 3 · 2 from the directory shared this · 5d ago

Recent commentary

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 · 11d 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 · 11d 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 · 57d 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 · 70d ago

The fun thing about this sort of mistake is that it’s understandable if you have a basic mental model of how LLMs work. Not conscious beings. Just token samplers capable of generating — wait for it — hallucinatory output.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 8 ↻ 4 ↩ 3 · 59d ago

Just a remarkable paragraph this morning from Ben Thompson of Stratechery (an unabashed AI enthusiast, mind you). I’ve written previously that OpenAI reminds me of Enron. But Anthropic? The only analogue that comes to mind is Gattaca.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 19 ↻ 0 ↩ 1 · 43d ago

OpenAI is running a massive randomized control trial on 20,000 Estonian high school students. They apparently are not thrilled.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 10 ↻ 1 ↩ 1 · 57d ago

I'm going to call this a win in my battle to ensure comments to my Substack remain exclusively human. BE GONE AI SLOP, DEMONS OUT! (More detail in the alt-text for those curious.)

View on Bluesky · ♥ 6 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 67d ago

In Benjamin Riley's orbit

Center = Benjamin Riley. Left = members they follow (green edges). Right = members who follow them (blue edges). Top = mutual follows (orange edges, slightly larger). Drag any node to reposition; click to open that profile.