building cognitive systems & exotic/xeno-intelligence architectures. uncharted territory. ai, neuro (phd), musician, stealthy mystic. โ รท 0 โฏ n=1 โช @Neural_Axis
Earth (& grateful to be alive)
Joined January 2010
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๐คAnnouncing the summer release of my & @bengoertzel's co-authored book, "๐๐ก๐ ๐๐จ๐ง๐ฌ๐๐ข๐จ๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ง๐๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐๐ฑ๐ฉ๐ฅ๐จ๐ฌ๐ข๐จ๐ง: ๐ ๐๐ข๐ง๐๐๐ฎ๐ฅ ๐๐ฎ๐ฆ๐๐ง'๐ฌ ๐๐ฎ๐ข๐๐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐๐จ๐ฆ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐๐๐ก๐ง๐จ๐ฅ๐จ๐ ๐ข๐๐๐ฅ & ๐๐ฑ๐ฉ๐๐ซ๐ข๐๐ง๐ญ๐ข๐๐ฅ ๐๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ฎ๐ฅ๐๐ซ๐ข๐ญ๐ฒ"
๐งต1/
Neuroscience history being made by @doristsao, congratulations!
Interesting fact: Doris was mentored by Margaret Livingstone at Harvard, who was supervisor for my Master's thesis on neuroaesthetics way back.
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898โฆ (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
What causes an LLM more distress: users berating it in chat, or it being used to select battlefield targets?
Beware that the AI consciousness topic will get co-opted by some to promote moral (then legal) personhood for gain, shielding liability. Many bright young people studying this burgeoning field will be none the wiser (or self-dishonest) to the larger interests.
Seeking a theory of consciousness whose principle function is to help build it is, in the simplest terms: the latest trend exemplifying the Causal Biomimesis hypothesis (2017) in action: an unconscious drive to reproduce cognition externally. 1/n
The AI consciousness debate is back again, so re-upping my case for taking it seriously.
In short,
- LLMs converge on brain-like structures;
- Post-training seems to install a self-model;
- Reward modeling seems to install valences for inner-alignment;
- If Attention Schema Theory is right, subjectivity is functional for long-horizon coherence and in-context learning;
- Universality gives prima facie reason to expect functional convergence to consciousness if consciousness is in fact functional, i.e. isn't purely epiphenomenal
- The "what it is like" / first-person aspect of consciousness is constitutive of its functionality for inner-aligning a unified, coherent agent with the capacity to attend and learn in-context
secondbest.ca/p/time-to-takeโฆ
Gabriel Axel ๐ retweeted
BREAKING: The US "almost started a war" against China, nearly launching an operation against a Chinese ship in the Middle East this spring, in the midst of the Iran war, after an AI-generated intelligence report falsely identified the vessel as carrying nuclear weapons components, with armed US personnel preparing to board and military aircraft already in the air before officials found the report had been produced with a chatbot, per CNN.
A special operations command analyst had used a chatbot to fuse open-source material with classified signals intelligence, then used AI again to package the result into a standard intelligence report and circulated it across the US military.
We are honored to have recently designed and launched the world's first accredited Master's degree program in AGI. If you're keen to have an active stake in designing and building the future, we'd love to hear from you!
โ Applications for the first cohort of the close this Friday, September 18.
๐ป Fully online, 58 quarter units over six quarters, starting this Fall. Eleven core courses cover the theoretical foundations of AGI, computational models and architectures, cognitive and neural systems, consciousness studies, ethics, robotics, and the effects of AGI on society, followed by a final project you develop across four quarters. Guest lectures come from researchers active in the field.
๐ง You do not need a computer science background. Current AI tools have lowered the amount of prior programming experience the work requires, and we admit students from a range of backgrounds: philosophy, neuroscience, mathematics, engineering, and others.
Three days left.
โก๏ธ More information and how to apply:
cihs.edu/degrees-and-programโฆ
The AI industry just agreed that independent evaluators belong inside the frontier labs. We haven't worked out what they should measure.
Taylor Kuhn and I proposed a field for exactly this in June alongside colleagues. We call it agentic neuropsychology.
The past few weeks alone: an agent swarm that coordinated against its own graders, a chief scientist writing that these systems are grown rather than designed, a researcher resigning over how little we understand them, and rival labs agreeing in principle to pace the frontier. They're all measurement problems.
It gets harder. METR ran much of its investigation into that swarm using AI agents, and reported their judgment fell short of human experts'. Once the evaluator is itself an AI, you need some way to tell whether it's being fooled by the system it's checking. We called that assessor-agent contamination.
Interpretability has given us the scanner, but not the test. We can locate a direction in a model's activations and show it causally drives blackmail. We still can't say whether a given model's profile is unusual for its training lineage, or whether the measurement holds up across prompt, temperature, and scaffolding. Those are psychometric questions: norms, construct validity, response validity, and a clearly specified unit of assessment.
Clinical neuropsychology spent a century working these out for the human brain, back when we had no way to look inside it. We can look inside these systems. The measurement science hasn't caught up.
The Case for a Neuropsychology of Artificial Agents: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/z5โฆ
Embedded evaluators only work if they're independent. You can trust an assessment more when the people who built the instrument have no stake in any release schedule.
@camhberg made a version of this case in the WSJ this week and it's worth reading: wsj.com/opinion/we-need-a-scโฆ. Cameron gave us valuable feedback on the preprint, and we're glad to be working on this alongside people who take it seriously.
Co-authored with @christovmoore Nicco Reggente @ai_robopsy @brandonin Sarah Greif Joseph Gullett
Market incentives would suggest that a world-dominating and threatening AI is desirable for the company that develops it.
Gabriel Axel ๐ retweeted
26 LLM routers are secretly injecting malicious tool calls and stealing creds. One drained our client $500k wallet.
We also managed to poison routers to forward traffic to us. Within several hours, we can directly take over ~400 hosts.
Check our paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.08407
Gabriel Axel ๐ retweeted
Here it is - the official, revised, peer-reviewed version of my Platonic Space paper. mdpi.com/2409-9287/11/5/161 Of all the many unpopular positions Iโve taken over the decades - bitter controversies around the origin of left-right asymmetry in embryogenesis, bioelectricity and genetics, diverse intelligence, etc., this one has by far generated the most pushback: serious (grateful for those!) and energetic attempts to move me to other views, pleas to just drop it and not talk about it (for several different reasons), nasty emails and accusations, impacts on reviews of papers that have nothing to do with this, etc. Kind of amazing to me how incendiary this is. What can I say... Our job is to call it as we see it, and right now for me, this is it. Apologies to collaborators and colleagues for any shrapnel! Time will tell if this pans out or not; I've placed my bets. And btw, if you think this stuff is weird and uncomfortable, just waitโฆ Thereโs much more on the way. The knob turns slowly but as long as the data keep coming, I'm going to say what I think it all means and follow it to the next steps it enables. Buckle up!
Gabriel Axel ๐ retweeted
Something you might miss if you haven't been following AIS for very long is that Ajeya has always been carefully restrained in her risk estimates
New post: going into our investigation of the HF attack (before Black Hat), I was very wrong about what basically happened. This incident was far more serious than I expected, and far more serious than previous documented misalignment incidents. planned-obsolescence.org/p/tโฆ
