Who's Who of AI

Matthew Sheffield

48 trust @matthew.flux.community · 11,338 followers
🟦 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
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Articles & links

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, …

Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026) vatican.va
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Pope Leo XIV's 42,300-word Magnifica Humanitas, signed May 15 and published May 25, addresses AI as the central challenge to human dignity.
  • The encyclical states AI systems are 'cultivated' not 'built' and explicitly denies they possess experience, a body, or the capacity to feel pain.
  • Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican's May 25 presentation alongside theologians and three cardinals.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 52 ↻ 6 ↩ 2 · 27 from the directory shared this · 43d ago

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…

arxiv.org
View on Bluesky · ♥ 435 ↻ 127 ↩ 13 · 4 from the directory shared this · 32d ago

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:

You’re about to feel the AI money squeeze | The Verge theverge.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • 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.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 24 ↻ 5 ↩ 0 · 3 from the directory shared this · 41d ago

I am once again begging AI companies to please talk to people who know about psychology, biology, and neuroscience before wasting your time and money thinking that obviously self-less chatbots have consciousness. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

washingtonpost.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Anthropic, Google, and Meta have hired computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers over the past year to study whether AI models have forms of emotion.
  • Anthropic hired Kyle Fish in September 2024 as its first dedicated AI welfare researcher and stood up a Model Welfare team.
  • Neuroscientists and brain experts remain broadly skeptical that today's AI models are, or could soon be, conscious.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 44 ↻ 14 ↩ 6 · 4 from the directory shared this · 7d ago

People liked it, but that Ted Chiang essay on AI published earlier last month is actually not very good on the technical merits. Critics of AI companies need to be much more conversant in how LLMs work in order in order to propose meaningful regulations and responses to them. …

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious theatlantic.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 62 ↻ 18 ↩ 2 · 6 from the directory shared this · 6d ago

Bernie Sanders's proposal to tax 50% of all major AI companies' stock is a bold way of dealing with the possible major job displacement many people are predicting from AI. Donald Trump has claimed he's open to public ownership of AI companies, let's see what he has to offer.

AP Exclusive: Bernie Sanders unveils plan to give the public direct ownership of AI companies apnews.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Sanders proposes a one-time 50% stock tax on AI companies with at least $200 million in annual AI sales, paid in shares rather than cash.
  • The transferred equity would seed a sovereign wealth fund Sanders estimates at roughly $7 trillion, managed by a seven-person independent commission.
  • A 5% annual dividend from the fund would send more than $1,000 a year to every American, with the remainder going to health care, education and housing.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 13 ↻ 3 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 19d ago

2. Chiang claims that the fact that next token selection is the output method of LLMs as if that was some sort of proof of their non-mindedness. It is irrelevant, actually. The most cutting-edge model publicly released, DiffusionGemma by Google, doesn't primarily use next-toke…

DiffusionGemma — Google DeepMind deepmind.google
View on Bluesky · ♥ 16 ↻ 1 ↩ 2 · 6d ago
↻ Matthew Sheffield reposted
Maxime Peyrard @peyrardmax.bsky.social

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…

The Dead Salmons of AI Interpretability arxiv.org View on Bluesky →

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…

openai.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 10 ↻ 2 ↩ 4 · 33d ago
Their own posts

Recent commentary

Everything is classifiable as pornographic. Never doubt this. Bluesky, a website run by non-religious people, thinks that a post about AI that links to Wikipedia is porn. Your work documents, your TV shows, your political views--everything--is porn to someone out there.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 96 ↻ 33 ↩ 7 · 6d ago

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?

View on Bluesky · ♥ 34 ↻ 3 ↩ 3 · 39d ago

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.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 29 ↻ 3 ↩ 1 · 43d ago

Most things people think are bad about AI are actually problems with unregulated capitalism, which naturally transitions into monopoly.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 23 ↻ 0 ↩ 2 · 43d ago

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:

View on Bluesky · ♥ 9 ↻ 2 ↩ 1 · 28d ago
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