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In a Decoder podcast interview, Alex Stamos, chief security officer at Cognition and a Stanford Cyber Policy Center lecturer, said the cybersecurity industry is struggling to keep pace with AI-boosted hacking. He described both private hackers and state actors like Russia and North Korea using AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities faster than defenders can respond.
Neurobiologists Andreas Nieder and Philipp Schmidbauer trained two carrion crows on a random-dot-motion task originally designed for monkeys, recording neural activity as the birds pecked targets to indicate which direction a cloud of dots was moving. The crows used the same evidence-accumulation strategy seen in primates despite lacking a neocortex, and reached decisions roughly twice as fast.
A Show HN author published a personal essay revealing they are a convicted felon, something they had kept hidden for two decades. In the same post they explain their writing process, saying they compose text by hand in Neovim without AI assistance, while using AI tools extensively for coding work that they still personally review.
A study testing very small, non-hallucinogenic doses of LSD found the drug improved participants' ability to concentrate, but the cognitive benefit appeared only in female subjects, not male ones. Researchers reported the gender-specific effect as part of ongoing investigations into low-dose psychedelics as cognitive enhancers.
Nature has released an audio long read discussing concerns that heavy reliance on large language models could weaken people's critical thinking abilities. The episode draws on research from education and cognitive science specialists who study how reasoning skills develop and can be maintained. It outlines practical strategies researchers suggest for staying cognitively sharp while using AI tools.
Researchers led by animal behaviorist Eleonora Biffi at the University of Parma tested 70 domestic dogs to see if they associate the nonsense word 'bouba' with rounded shapes and 'kiki' with spiky ones, a pattern long observed in humans. Using screens, speakers and AI-based head-tracking from GoPro footage, the team recorded where dogs looked as the words and shapes were played in different combinations. The findings were published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, Benchmark partner Eric Vishria said the long-standing venture capital norm against funding directly competing startups is becoming unsustainable as AI companies rapidly pivot into overlapping markets. His comments followed a public dispute between AI coding startups Factory and Cognition, after Factory fired an adviser for allegedly discussing a job with Cognition while sitting in on Factory's board discussions, prompting investor Vinod Khosla—who backs both firms—to publicly criticize Factory.
Researchers observed that orangutan mothers facilitate play dates for their young, deliberately bringing infants together with peers. The behavior suggests a level of social planning previously undocumented in wild orangutans, a largely solitary species.
Researchers at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, led by Dr. Louis Longin and Dr. Ophelia Deroy, surveyed almost 1,100 participants on whether artificial agents and humans possess mental states after being shown identical descriptions of behavior, such as reacting to sounds or recognizing others' emotions. Published in Cognition, the study found participants consistently attributed less consciousness to AI than to humans performing the same actions under the same conditions.
A new essay contends that rapid gains in AI performance, falling costs, and round-the-clock availability are pushing artificial intelligence to replace human cognitive labor across a widening range of tasks. The author cites OpenAI's progress on previously unsolved math problems as evidence of accelerating capability, contrasting it with stagnant or declining human proficiency in information-processing skills. The piece predicts that thinking itself could become a hobby rather than a necessity as AI takes over cognitive work.
Menlo Ventures announced a significant investment in AI startup Factory, which was part of its latest funding round at a $5 billion valuation. This comes shortly after Factory’s CEO publicly accused an investor of misconduct, leading to a high-profile industry dispute involving Vinod Khosla, whose firm invests in both Factory and its rival Cognition. Menlo’s support appears to challenge Khosla’s negative characterization of Factory’s stability and prospects.
A critique argues that the AI industry's foundational assumption—that the human brain operates like a computer processing input, computation, and output—oversimplifies human cognition. The piece traces this model back to Alan Turing and notes that even computing pioneer John von Neumann doubted computational models could capture the full complexity of the human nervous system. The author contends that as AI products become more embedded in daily life, this flawed mental model is causing real problems.