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The Who's Who of AI

What credible people across AI noticed, why it matters, and where the field is converging or disagreeing.

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The questions experts are actively pulling apart

One card per development. Sources are clustered; expert reactions remain attributable.

Established Models & releases Research 15d ago
⚡ 3 h early
global workspace theory language models paper

Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models

4 experts across 3 network communities independently surfaced this.

4 experts 3 communities 1 sources clustered

“here is the Anthropic blog: transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspa... I don't really like the framing of whether LLMs are conscious or not. It's completely unnecessary. As is the hand-waiving about whether LLMs have something equivalent to the (functional) g…”

“Anthropic uses the word “conscious” 206 times in their latest research Specifically, they’re showing that LLMs implement one of the leading explanations of consciousness in humans (see pic) transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspa...”

7 experts discussed this · 53 posts
Matthew Kirschenbaum: At an online event this morning I defended a claim which others found troublesome: That there are legitimately experienced aspects of computational phenomena, such as large language models, which—f…
Matthew Kirschenbaum: The point is not that what computers do isn’t grounded in material conditions, but rather that there comes a point at which the layers of dissociation between those conditions and actual outcomes b…
Matthew Kirschenbaum: Example: transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspa...
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Established AI field signal Signal 13d ago

arxiv.org

2 experts are actively discussing the implications.

2 experts 2 communities 1 sources clustered

“The University of Maryland, where four out of five of the researchers co-authoring this paper are based, has a very fine English Department. Just saying. arxiv.org/pdf/2604.03136”

“Interesting arxiv.org/pdf/2604.03136 #ai #writing”

2 experts discussed this · 5 posts
Matthew Kirschenbaum: The University of Maryland, where four out of five of the researchers co-authoring this paper are based, has a very fine English Department. Just saying. arxiv.org/pdf/2604.03136
Matthew Kirschenbaum: Unless I missed something on a quick scam (possible), I see no citations to narratology or literary theory or criticism of any kind.
Matthew Kirschenbaum: 🌲 arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190
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What experts are discussing without an anchoring article

4 experts · 12 posts · 4d ago
Shannon Vallor: It bothers me how many AI critics are failing to keep their critiques aligned with where the models actually are. I hate to give it to the haters (of the haters), but good criticism has to get clos…
Shannon Vallor: I have deep sympathy—you don’t want to stay close to something that you are watching erode your students’ capacities and confidence in real time, or that’s capturing your government, or undermining…
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3 experts · 8 posts · 4d ago
Matthew Kirschenbaum: At some point we’re going to need to square the circle between puffing “Why are you asking AI, go ask a real person instead” and all of us who have told someone “If you are soliciting my expertise …
Matthew Kirschenbaum: I don’t think we’re going to get very far by pretending there’s no demand for usually-good-enough information that is also devoid of the friction that comes from an expectation for an interpersonal…
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