The pope becoming an insightful AI pundit is really a fascinating thing to see. He's not buying the hype, but he's not being a hater either. Magnifica Humanitas is the kind of work that only intellectually serious religions can make. Reactionary Christianity makes human slop, …
Who's Who of AI
Matthew Sheffield
🟦 Cognition, AI, philosophy, science, politics, embodiment
🟦 Writing @flux.community, but frequently quoted or published in NYT, WaPo, NBC, Variety…
🟦 Easy intro to my cognitive framework: https://flux.community/like-this
Signal: matthewsheffield.01
What they're sharing
Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026) vatican.va
arxiv.org
You’re about to feel the AI money squeeze | The Verge theverge.com
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious theatlantic.com
bloomberg.com
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All Circuits Lead to Rome: Rethinking Functional Anisotropy in Circuit and Sheaf Discovery for LLMs arxiv.org
The Dead Salmons of AI Interpretability arxiv.org
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openai.com
arxiv.org
All Circuits Lead to Rome: Rethinking Functional Anisotropy in Circuit and Sheaf Discovery for LLMs arxiv.org
View on Bluesky →
arxiv.org
View on Bluesky →
All Circuits Lead to Rome: Rethinking Functional Anisotropy in Circuit and Sheaf Discovery for LLMs arxiv.org
View on Bluesky →
Articles & links
This paper doesn't use the term "intentional stance," but it does really expose that imputation of consciousness is an act by the observer that's usually not based on dispassionate analysis of the observed's internal structures. It's just vibes, and those aren't sufficient. ar…
Are AI companies burning cash too quickly to last? Critics often say that, but they don't present full numerical analysis. This is one of the better critical ones I've seen in a while:
AI Weekly's analysis
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- Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are simultaneously deploying rate limits, paywalls, and price hikes in 2026, ending subsidized AI access.
- Anthropic's June 15 print-mode repricing, OpenAI's guaranteed-capacity tier, and Google AI Ultra are concrete signals of the industry-wide monetization shift.
- Labs spent years using investor capital to subsidize access and build user habits; the payback phase has now arrived across the industry.
Read full analysis →
Shorter version of this piece: LLMs aren't treated as moral patients, therefore they are not. This is a bad argument. How society treats entities isn't a valid standard for their personhood. If it were, then slavery would be fine. LLMs aren't conscious because they can't have …
Matthew Sheffield reposted
‘Cost savings from AI are broadly falling short of projections, according to a new Bain & Co. global survey of large companies. The missed targets “should be making executives uncomfortable.”’ www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Despite how wrong AI mysterians are, they are engaging with these systems in a mechanistic way that is generative of research programs and policy. AI critics should engage w/transformer interpretability much more. Doing so is the only effective way to regulate them. Great pape…
Matthew Sheffield reposted
New preprint: The Dead Salmons of XAI Standard fMRI pipelines once detected predictive brain regions in a dead salmon! A warning about poor statistical methodology Now, XAI faces its own issues: many methods can yield plausible explanations even for randomized networks arxiv.o…
An under-reported trend of AI use is that women may be using it more than men. Men were the biggest users of ChatGPT in the site's early days, but beginning in September of last year, ChatGPT users with female-gendered names comprised 51% or more every month. openai.com/signal…
Funny you should say that arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18792
Matthew Sheffield reposted
Chen, Jin, Niu, Yin, Zhao, Guo, Metaxas, Wang, Yue, Penn: All Circuits Lead to Rome: Rethinking Functional Anisotropy in Circuit and Sheaf Discovery for LLMs https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12671 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.12671 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.12671
Matthew Sheffield reposted
Chen, Jin, Niu, Yin, Zhao, Guo, Metaxas, Wang, Yue, Penn: All Circuits Lead to Rome: Rethinking Functional Anisotropy in Circuit and Sheaf Discovery for LLMs https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12671 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.12671 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.12671
Matthew Sheffield reposted
Chen, Jin, Niu, Yin, Zhao, Guo, Metaxas, Wang, Yue, Penn: All Circuits Lead to Rome: Rethinking Functional Anisotropy in Circuit and Sheaf Discovery for LLMs https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12671 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.12671 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.12671
Their own posts
Recent commentary
It really does seem as if 99% of the people who think large language models have consciousness are men. I can think of one woman who seems to agree. Am I wrong to think that's the demographic split?
1/2 In the latest "Theory of Change," I argued that Pope Leo XIV's repeated rejection of reactionary and anti-democratic politics was explicitly modeled after Leo XIII's "Rerum Novarum." Lo and behold, today, Leo's new AI encyclical was dated explicitly to the earlier Leo's document.
Most things people think are bad about AI are actually problems with unregulated capitalism, which naturally transitions into monopoly.
Romance scams have proliferated on many social media platforms, particularly X. One thing I've wondered, do these accounts featuring AI-generated women target female-presenting accounts in DMs? I have other accounts that are non-personal & they seem much less targeted. Example below:
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