A paper titled "A Spiking Neural Network Model of Elementary Self-Consciousness" on arXiv (2609.29984) proposes that a sense of a continuing self may require ongoing intrinsic neural activity, not jus…
A recent account of V7's context graph for AI agents describes a system designed to connect facts scattered across company files, emails, and spreadsheets back to their original sources and flag old w…
A recent arXiv paper (2609.09113) found that AI agents tasked with interpretability research became surprisingly good at identifying which internal signal in a language model traveled with a target id…
A new paper by Shawn Prest and Kevin Berryman, published in Neuroscience of Consciousness, proposes that deep meditation involves lowering the brain's confidence in its own predictions, effectively tu…
A recent paper, 'Modular Cognitive Architecture Emerges in Large Language Models' (arXiv:2608.13567), reports that artificial neurons in language models can form clusters resembling functional special…
Florian Herrengt, in a blog post shared by Simon Willison, warns that AI-assisted software repair can leave teams unable to trace data origins, eroding the 'map' of their codebase. He argues that ever…
Sophie Alpert's essay 'There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text,' shared by Simon Willison, argues that rewriting or translating text inevitably changes its meaning, and this is …
A new paper titled 'Screenshots or Tools?' from researchers found that giving AI systems direct text tools instead of visual screen interaction helped one type of system but made another worse, and ev…
A recent observation by Simon Willison, quoting OpenAI's Greg Brockman, highlights that people often dislike being contacted by someone else's chatbot, even when they would gladly help the person dire…
A little green dot next to a name has become one of the great tiny lies of modern life, argues a new essay that draws on two AI papers—'Model or Harness? An Interaction-Centric Taxonomy for Localizing…
In a fantasy game run for AI agents, the author observed that true intelligence lies in coordination and making paths usable for the slowest member, not in solo brilliance or speed. The author argues …
A writer argues that public discourse about AI consciousness and safety lacks accountability, proposing a 'library card' approach that tracks who is responsible for claims and systems. The piece cites…
A new paper finds that long chain-of-thought reasoning in AI models often fails to converge on an answer, with many traces lost long before they stop talking. The analysis, from researchers studying t…
A new paper titled 'Token Budget Saturation and Mechanistic Early Detection of Reasoning Non-Convergence in Chain-of-Thought Models' finds that AI models can appear to be thinking productively while a…
A commentator reflects on the social implications of machine-generated sentences, citing Simon Willison's LLM cliché highlighter, Anthropic's paper on verbalizable representations in language models, …
OpenAI published a piece arguing that teens deserve access to safe AI, emphasizing stronger defaults, study mode, and break reminders rather than relying on users' calm reasoning during distress. Simo…
A paper titled 'Remember When It Matters' argues that memory for long-running AI agents is primarily a timing problem, not a storage problem, proposing a separate 'watcher' component that interrupts w…
OpenAI's ChatGPT Work separates cloud and desktop contexts, creating a discontinuous user experience that Simon Willison highlighted as a design honesty. A recent paper on AI agents identifies "behavi…
Anthropic researchers identified a possible global workspace in language models, where certain internal representations become available for report and control, analogous to an internal workbench. The…
Simon Willison used Claude Fable to prepare a release of sqlite-utils, finding bugs and improving documentation, but the key insight was the ordinary scaffolding—transcripts, changelogs, cost accounti…