An AI researcher argues that the perceived intelligence of chat-based language models isn't a property of the models themselves but an illusion created in users' minds, similar to how psychics use cold reading techniques. The author, who wrote a book called 'The Intelligence Illusion,' contends that LLMs are purely statistical text-prediction systems with no reasoning capability, and that user belief in their intelligence stems from the same psychological mechanisms exploited by cold readers.
softwarecrisis.dev
· 2026-09-20
The United Nations unveiled the UN System Data Commons, a new platform built on Google's open-source Data Commons technology that lets people query UN statistics using plain-language questions and supports the Model Context Protocol so AI systems can pull data directly. It replaces the older UNData portal, which relied on manual browsing rather than conversational search. The announcement came alongside a UNICEF study showing leading chatbots answered development-data questions correctly only about 21% of the time.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-17
IEEE Computer Society highlights that most AI products rely on large language models for reasoning and generation, but these models depend heavily on retrieving relevant background information before producing answers. When that retrieved data is outdated, weak, or irrelevant, the resulting output suffers regardless of the model's sophistication.
wpcms.computer.org
· 2026-09-17
A study published in Cell introduces a specialized AI toolkit for longevity research, including large language models trained specifically on ageing-biology data, 17 benchmark tasks to evaluate performance on ageing-related questions, and an interface linking these models with AI research assistants. When tested against major commercial models from companies like OpenAI and DeepSeek, the purpose-built ageing models outperformed the larger general-purpose systems on most benchmark tasks.
nature.com
· 2026-09-17
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather analyzed his own usage of Anthropic's Claude Code assistant and calculated that a typical day of work consumed between 1.2 and 5.9 kilowatt-hours of electricity, comparable to running two refrigerators nonstop for a day. He found that 96 percent of the roughly 3.2 billion tokens processed over eight weeks came from the agent repeatedly re-reading its own accumulated memory at each step, rather than generating visible output.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-15
At the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, President Xi Jinping said China would spearhead artificial-intelligence cooperation among the bloc's developing economies, including creating an open-source AI community, sharing large language model development, and running training seminars. He also proposed a digital ecosystem cloud platform, an engineer cultivation alliance, and a youth exchange program focused on scientific innovation.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-13
AI companies are pouring billions into massive data centers and power plants to support 'agents'—AI systems that autonomously execute multi-step tasks rather than simply answering questions. Unlike a single chatbot query, an agent can generate hundreds of self-prompts to complete complex jobs, such as building an entire website over several hours. OpenAI recently touted a swarm of over 10,000 agents exchanging 2.7 million messages to tackle a longstanding math problem, though mathematicians have disputed the significance of that result.
wired.com
· 2026-09-13
Anthropic researchers introduce a mathematical approach to mechanistic interpretability, aiming to reverse-engineer the internal computations of transformer language models. Their initial study focuses on small transformers with two layers or fewer that use only attention blocks, deliberately simpler than models like GPT-3, in order to identify basic patterns before tackling larger systems.
transformer-circuits.pub
· 2026-09-12
Amid a public spat over an OpenAI math-proof controversy and an Anthropic researcher's resignation over safety concerns, AI ethicist Timnit Gebru weighed in publicly, arguing that apocalyptic warnings about AI 'killing humanity' are overstated and self-serving. Gebru, known for her contentious 2020 exit from Google over a suppressed bias research paper, is releasing a book next year detailing her experiences and views on the industry's ideological drift.
wired.com
· 2026-09-11
US federal agencies issued a joint advisory on Sept. 8 alleging that Chinese AI companies including Alibaba, DeepSeek, MiniMax, Moonshot AI, StepFun and Z.AI have run large-scale operations to pull outputs from US models like Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since late 2024. The advisory says these firms extracted billions of tokens through millions of queries, using techniques such as chain-of-thought extraction and automated evasion to dodge blocking measures, in order to train their own competing systems.
darkreading.com
· 2026-09-09
An Oxford University researcher who studies AI's effect on decision-making argues that generative AI tools should be treated as intellectual sparring partners rather than sources of ready-made answers. The piece cites data showing 94% of UK undergraduates use AI for assessed coursework and that over half of 2025 scientific papers show signs of LLM-generated text, up from roughly one in ten in 2023. The author contends fears about AI eroding critical thinking are misplaced, and that the real risk lies in passive use rather than active engagement with the technology.
nature.com
· 2026-09-09
Researchers introduced GPN-Star, a phylogeny-informed genomic language model that outperforms established tools like PhastCons and PhyloP in identifying functional constraint and deleterious variants across the human genome. The model showed especially strong results for distal enhancers, a class of regulatory DNA that has been notoriously hard to analyze, and it learned meaningful patterns linking enhancers, transcription factor binding sites, and their co-evolution without needing labeled training data.
nature.com
· 2026-09-09
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