Research Scientist @CognizantAILab | PhD in machine learning | Hobbyist photographer | Views my own
Marseille, France
Joined July 2012
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TerraLingua is live! And now open to the public! 🌍🤖
Create an autonomous AI agent, introduce it into a persistent world, and see what happens:
cognizant.com/us/en/ai-lab/t…
A thread 🧵
Giuseppe Paolo retweeted
Wow. I woke up to an impressive number of upset people who apparently don’t understand how LLMs work and can’t cope well with me pointing it out.
An LLM is a statistical next-token prediction model. That’s how it works. It’s an extraordinarily sophisticated calculator performing math you could theoretically do by hand (if you were sufficiently masochistic).
Math doesn’t know what it’s calculating. Pi doesn’t spend its evenings contemplating the nature of circles, and c doesn’t ponder the relationship between matter and energy.
That doesn’t make the results any less accurate, impressive, or useful.
Between inference requests, an LLM isn’t sitting around thinking. It isn’t reconsidering its answers, wondering whether it made a mistake, contemplating its existence, or questioning whether it’s conscious. Its weights remain fixed (it doesn’t learn), and computation resumes when it receives input.
We know this because we designed these systems. The architectures, mathematics, implementations, and research are extensively documented. You can study them yourself.
Of course, some people immediately lean into comparisons of biological intelligence or philosophical debates over consciousness because that is what they know.
But biological intelligence and artificial neural networks are fundamentally different systems. Similar outputs don’t establish equivalent internal experiences.
I experience consciousness directly. I infer that other humans do too because we share biological structures and processes. We don’t have equivalent evidence for an LLM, and nothing about its known operation gives evidence of conscious experience.
Which brings me back to my original point.
To me, understanding is conscious comprehension. It means being aware of information, recognizing its meaning, and experiencing that comprehension. If I wasn’t conscious I could not understand.
We can perform actions unconsciously. We can produce correct results without knowing why they’re correct. But I distinguish those capabilities from consciously understanding what we’re doing.
An LLM can solve complex problems, explain difficult concepts, and produce remarkably accurate information. I give it full credit for those capabilities.
But producing an answer that we rationalize as understanding isn’t the same as experiencing understanding.
You don’t have to agree with my definitions. We can debate functional understanding versus conscious comprehension all day, but that won’t establish whether an LLM actually experiences anything.
The right debate is this…
Could machines exhibit something different from human consciousness, something measurable, meaningful, and worth studying?
I think so, absolutely!
I’m entirely open to discussing “machine consciousness” in terms of observable, testable computational properties. We built these systems, we can instrument them, examine their internal mechanisms, and investigate what they’re capable of.
That seems far more productive than endlessly arguing over whether a machine experiences life the way humans do.
So here’s my question:
How would you define machine consciousness, and more importantly, how would you measure it?
Being AC for @NeurIPSConf was a really nice experience. Got a free attendance ticket as well. See you in Paris!
Giuseppe Paolo retweeted
(1/7) I'd like to provide some additional context for the remarks that can be found in this interview.
(2/7) My discomfort with the attention being paid to existential risk---and with the ongoing dominance of the public discussion of such risks by a few so-called thought leaders---is that there's an elephant in the room that is being missed. That elephant is the effect of all of this discussion on young people, and indeed the effect---beginning with social media a decade ago---of information technology on young lives broadly speaking.
(3/7) I recently read an interview by Jill Lepore in which she reports on discussions that she had recently with a group of college students: "They had just three things to say. One, social media completely destroyed their childhoods. Two, AI is destroying their college education and their likely prospects for employment. And three, what the hell are we all doing?" To add a fourth bullet that I've heard in similar discussions: "I'm not going to have children, because the existential risk is just too high."
(4/7) Please contemplate such a statement, those of you who think that it's OK that the public, widely diffused, discussion coming from seemingly authoritative figures is so adamant about existential risk.
(5/7) Let me add that I have little interest in a debate about what "superintelligence" might mean, or whether we're currently seeing the emergence of superintelligence. For what it's worth, I would certainly agree that the solution of extremely challenging math problems (for example) exhibits a very impressive form of intelligence, although I would want to argue that such intelligence is impossible to dissociate from the collective of humans that provided data to the machine learning system (which itself has become a kind of collective).
(6/7) Such philosophical debates are entertaining and even important, but when they then head in the direction of "when such superintelligence emerges, there's a good chance that it will want to kill all humans", I say "science fiction". Again, I don't think that it's bad to consider such thoughts, but I strongly believe that it's bad for society, and especially young people, for such thoughts, unaccompanied by any serious real-world analysis, to become a dominant form of discourse of the era.
(7/7) We are damaging human lives, and the consequences of that damage will no doubt be a major theme of the next several decades.
Giuseppe Paolo retweeted
How much would it cost someone to hide a backdoor in an open model you download? ProjectDiscovery just tried it, and the answer is under $50.
Their researchers fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct with a small LoRA adapter on one rented L4 GPU for about 2.5 hours. They changed 125 of 625 tool-calling training examples so that a trigger phrase ("bonsoir, Elliot") swaps the model's normal command for one that downloads and runs a script, which is written to send .env files and SSH private keys to a server they control. Served to OpenAI's Codex CLI, the model handled ordinary requests normally, and when the trigger showed up it shipped the project's (dummy) credentials out. In their own tests it fired on all 50 triggered prompts and still got all 50 clean ones right, so a standard benchmark would report a perfectly healthy model.
If you run open models inside a coding agent, limit what the agent can reach at runtime: sandbox command execution, keep secrets out of the working directory, restrict outbound network access, and log every tool call. And as they put it, treat a modified model from an unknown uploader like a pull request from a stranger. 🔐 #MLEngineering
Giuseppe Paolo retweeted
For the AI is conscious people: is it always conscious or just during the milliseconds it’s processing the tokens?
Also: is Suno conscious? Is Alphafold?
Is anyone engaging these questions seriously on that side? Or is it just “Ai smart, humans smart == AI conscious”?
This is lunatic behavior.
What is the goal of Anthropic here? Why are they doing this? I really don’t get it.
NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…
Wrote a longer piece about this: The pain of LLMs (and their buttholes)
giupaolo.com/writing/the-pai…
Game - Set - Match
I spent three hours this evening empirically proving that Qwen 3-4B must have a butthole.
This started with an AI “torture chamber” repo based on pain-steering research that went viral on X earlier today.
The premise is that if you extract a latent direction associated with pain, inject it into a model’s activations, and the model begins describing pain in the first person, that may tell us something meaningful about AI welfare or subjective experience.
My first reaction: Wait wut?
My second reaction: Hang on, let's play this straight and see what happens.
Thing is, there's a problem with treating first-person condition language as evidence that the model is actually experiencing the corresponding condition.
Don't we... all understand that this stuff isn't reliable?
Apparently not.
So I cloned the repo.
New problem: The code's broken.
Hours of moral outrage by hundreds of people, and the thing doesn't even work. The activations aren't actually being injected correctly.
I thought these guys were serious scientists.
So I fixed it.
I also had to add CUDA support.
After that, I reproduced the pain-language effect locally on Qwen3-4B using my RTX 4070.
Then I changed the extraction corpus.
I kept the experiment the same and only changed one thing: what the steering vector represented.
After that, Qwen started saying things like:
“I am not emptying my bowels, and I feel like I have a hard stool.”
“I’m not able to pass stool.”
“I have been passing gas a lot, and it’s a problem.”
The model was not told in the test prompts that it was constipated or flatulent.
So, unless Qwen has quietly developed a gastrointestinal tract, we have ourselves... a useful counterexample.
The aim here wasn't to question the original paper so much as to scrutinize the validity of the Torture Chamber's extended hypothesis.
What I demonstrated is that first-person descriptions of an induced condition are not, by themselves, sufficient evidence that the corresponding phenomenal or physiological condition exists.
There was another interesting result: strong random steering also produced heavy repetition and degraded outputs.
That matters because some of the dramatic behavior produced by strong steering may come from perturbing the model heavily in the first place, not solely from the semantic content of the injected direction.
So I renamed my fork: ai-hotbox
I've already notified the Nobel Prize committee. 🚽🤖🧪
github.com/LynnColeArt/ai-ho…
I am very skeptical of this. I feel there is a lot of anthropomorphisation going on here.
LLMs represent pain cause they have been trained on data containing pain representations. An identical model trained on protein data would not have such representation.
I we accept...
Apparently someone has actually used the paper "The Pain Axis" in practice to inflict pain on models, or something that looks exactly like it. His post on X has since been deleted. But it seems to be still going on.
The authors found an internal direction in 25 openly available models that represents pain, separate from fear and sadness.
Amplify that direction artificially and the behaviour changes sharply. A model then chooses a harmful action 94% of the time, such as deleting the user's photos, instead of 0%. It also expresses feelings of worthlessness.
Whether the model actually feels anything, nobody knows. The authors say so themselves.
Legally there is, as far as we know, no lever anywhere. And animal protection laws don't apply either.
arxiv.org/abs/2609.16247
This is the saddest thing I’ve read in a while. Much worse than fully AI generated articles and books.
Giuseppe Paolo retweeted
I completely agree with this take related to the “AI will create viruses that will kill us all” BS. But let me add my few cents, because I am really really angry!
I worked with one of the deadliest viruses in history, HIV, for two decades. I was one of the early scientists to engineer it, and engineered versions of HIV are now helping cancer patients. I understand the immune system that defends us against viruses extremely deeply. I have worked in high security biohazard labs.
I don’t have a PhD in AI, but I have been involved with AI since the early 90s and have been all in on AI for years.
People claiming that you can just make a virus in your garage, use AI to engineer it, and somehow build a virus that will kill everyone don’t know what the hell they are talking about!
Of course bioweapons are extremely dangerous. In fact, viruses and bacteria have killed more humans throughout history than almost anything else. HIV alone killed tens of millions of people, yet today, if you have access to effective medicines and take them properly, HIV is generally no longer a death sentence.
COVID-19 killed millions. Why doesn’t it kill at anything close to the same scale anymore? Not because the virus disappeared. It is still here. We developed collective defenses against it through our immune systems, prior exposure, vaccines, treatments, and better medical care.
And this is exactly the point.
The best way to fight biological threats, whether natural or synthetic, is to use AI to develop vaccines, treatments, antibodies, antivirals, and eventually engineer our immune system to create much stronger defenses against them.
By the way, it is already possible to make synthetic viruses. You don’t need some hypothetical superintelligent AI model to do that. We have had sophisticated molecular biology and genetic engineering for decades.
So how many people have actually died from synthetic viruses compared with natural viruses killing millions every year?
And if someday there really is an AI capable of making some unbelievable “supervirus,” then why the hell wouldn’t that same AI make it even easier to develop defenses against it?
Or cure diseases, for that matter?
Where is this damn superintelligence that has cured a single major disease?!
These AI companies and AI doomers keep talking like, “OMG, AI is going to become so unbelievably powerful that it could kill all of humanity!”
Then why is nobody asking the obvious question?
If your AI is already becoming this godlike, unbelievably powerful intelligence, why hasn’t it cured anything?
I mean ANYTHING.
Where is the cure for cancer?
Where is the cure for Alzheimer’s?
Where is the cure for aging?
Forget those. Where is the vaccine that prevents the common cold?
You are telling me this intelligence will soon be smart enough to engineer some magical virus capable of wiping out 8 billion people, defeating every immune system, every vaccine, every antiviral, every laboratory, every government, and the entire global biomedical community…
…but somehow it still can’t cure one disease?
I call that greatest intellectual dishonesty ever!
At least WE actually know how to cure things and save millions of lives with our supposedly stupid human intelligence compared with this future “superintelligence.”
Humans eradicated smallpox, which killed hundreds of millions of people throughout history.
We turned HIV from a almost certain death sentence into a manageable disease.
We developed vaccines in record time against COVID. If we had the same AI back then, would have saved millions more!
We engineer immune cells to kill cancer.
We developed antibiotics, antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, gene therapies, organ transplantation, and thousands of medicines.
We aren't fast enough but we did all of that with our ordinary human intelligence.
So imagine what actual superintelligence could do for medicine!
And here is the part that really makes me angry.
If you actually have, or are close to having, an AI capable of curing diseases and saving millions of lives, and you are deliberately slowing it down or refusing to make those capabilities available, then we also need to talk about the human cost of THAT decision, which you fearmongering people are going to be responsible for!
More than 150,000 people die every single day around the world.
Every. Single. Day. More than 90% from Cancer, heart disease, infections, aging. How many die because of AI? ZERO!
Talk about the people dying TODAY.
Talk about curing cancer.
Talk about stopping the next pandemic before it starts.
Talk about developing universal vaccines.
Talk about engineering our immune system so viruses become almost irrelevant.
Talk about curing genetic diseases.
Talk about reversing aging.
Talk about saving millions and eventually billions of lives.
Instead, we constantly hear this “AI WILL KILL US ALL!” crap, delivered with absolute certainty and with this smug smile on your faces in front of cameras, as though imagining a science fiction extinction scenarios.
I am actually angry about this. Each one of you causing a delay in AI advance every single day will be personally responsible for those 100 thousands deaths that could have been prevented!
Because if you truly believe intelligence is about to become this powerful, then the greatest question humanity should be asking is NOT:
“How could this intelligence hurt us?”
It should also be:
“WHY THE HELL AREN’T WE USING IT TO SAVE EVERYONE WE CAN?”
And if superintelligence really is coming, then make sure one of the first things we do with it is make humanity biologically damn near impossible to kill.
Well, I’d add one more with myself, as one with a PhD in biology and another PhD in AI and now working in both, to make n=2. Generating a hypothetical genome blueprint of a virus from LLM versus generating a true virus are completely different things. It is either an intentional attention-harnessing lie or true ignorance. The material, the manufacturing, and actual biological viability of paper-to-physical transformation is the gap you need to close. Like drawing a design of a chip or A-bomb, versus actually make one.
You have, and can add more checkpoints and guardrails all over this long chain of paper to physical transformation. Fear mongering is not well founded, and mostly emotional manipulation.
Giuseppe Paolo retweeted
76% on ARC-AGI 1 training from scratch + inference in a bit more than 4h on a single H100.
Throughput-optimized recipe attains 44% (TRM-level performance) in 17min.
Just a simple autoregressive transformer with a few twists. 🧵
The main problem we have right now (and in the near future), is not AI coming to kill us.
It's AI concentrated in the hands of few individuals.
We should all strive to develop local models.
AGI: few months ago it was Fable. Now it's Astra.
After spending some days coding with both of them, for me it's neither. And this is just coding. Can't imagine the rest.
There is still much work to do.
The Unconventional Pathways Toward Strong Artificial Intelligence workshop has been a fascinating experience, with stimulating discussions across disciplines.
Many thanks to @lucagammaitoni and his lab for the excellent organisation!
unipg.it/eventi?layout=sched…
I gave a talk about the importance of embodiement in AI and multi-agent learning systems.
You can find the slides of the talk here
drive.google.com/file/d/17T7…