Axis of Ordinary
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Memetic and cognitive hazards.

Substack: https://axisofordinary.substack.com/
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Particularly noteworthy because ChatGPT has no network effects, no news, and no memes. Just answers, productivity, and chat!

They built something USEFUL that people actually can't put down. No dopamine tricks needed when you're solving real problems.
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We suspect the next AI paradigm will emerge from leveraging existing software to efficiently build training environments. The idea is that AIs will be tasked with replicating software functionality, similar to how pretraining leveraged existing web text to teach AIs language.


Read more: https://www.mechanize.work/blog/the-upcoming-gpt-3-moment-for-rl/
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Links for 2025-06-21

AI


1. Revisiting Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning from A Cross-Domain Perspective https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14965

2. Kimi-Researcher: End-to-End RL Training for Emerging Agentic Capabilities https://moonshotai.github.io/Kimi-Researcher/

3. “We underestimated just by how much the world could be underinvesting in AI today…simulation results suggest that optimal investment in AI for the year 2025 amounts to $25 trillion!” https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/ai-and-explosive-growth-redux

4. Musings on AI Companies of 2025-2026 (Jun 2025) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9rKWm8BzTYAiCCFjx/musings-on-ai-companies-of-2025-2026-jun-2025

5. “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners”, a modular transformer architecture inspired by the brain’s functional networks: language, logic, social reasoning, and world knowledge. https://bkhmsi.github.io/mixture-of-cog-reasoners/

6. ProtoReasoning: Prototypes as the Foundation for Generalizable Reasoning in LLMs https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15211

7. Truncated Proximal Policy Optimization: Improves the training efficiency of reasoning LLMs by up to 2.5x and outperforms its existing competitors. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15050

8. Adaptive Classifier: a text classification system that learns continuously without catastrophic forgetting. https://huggingface.co/blog/codelion/adaptive-classifier

9. Computer algorithms have designed highly efficient synthetic enzymes from scratch https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01897-0 [no paywall: https://archive.is/zzs2F]

10. Skala — a scalable deep learning density functional that hits chemical accuracy on atomization energies and matches hybrid-level accuracy on main group chemistry — all at the cost of semi-local DFT. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/breaking-bonds-breaking-ground-advancing-the-accuracy-of-computational-chemistry-with-deep-learning/

11. Automation of Systematic Reviews with Large Language Models https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01942-y [no paywall: https://archive.is/z6EJF]

12. Who is using AI and how much? https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/06/who-is-using-ai-and-how-much.html

13. META attempted to buy Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence, and also attempted to hire him, according to reporting tonight by CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/19/meta-tried-to-buy-safe-superintelligence-hired-ceo-daniel-gross.html

14. Sekai: A Video Dataset towards World Exploration https://lixsp11.github.io/sekai-project/

15. Nvidia goes nuclear — company joins Bill Gates in backing TerraPower, a company building nuclear reactors for powering data centers https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-goes-nuclear-company-joins-bill-gates-in-backing-terrapower-a-company-building-nuclear-reactors-for-powering-data-centers

16. Negotiating deals with misaligned AIs https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/psqkwsKrKHCfkhrQx/making-deals-with-early-schemers

Miscellaneous

1. HIV protection with just two shots a year https://www.statnews.com/2025/06/18/fda-approves-gilead-hiv-prevention-drug-lenacapavir-yeztugo-next-best-thing-to-vaccine/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/4ljo0]

Politics

1. What are the most pressing world problems? https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/

2. Spotify’s Daniel Ek leads €600mn investment in German drone maker Helsing https://www.ft.com/content/cdc02d96-13b5-4ca2-aa0b-1fc7568e9fa0 [no paywall: https://archive.is/Ygp0x]

3. Anduril Industries and Rheinmetall Partner to Design and Manufacture Barracuda, Fury & Solid Rocket Motors for European Defence https://www.anduril.com/article/anduril-industries-and-rheinmetall-partner-to-design-and-manufacture-barracuda-fury-and-solid/

4. The Megaproject Economy: "No matter the scale or complexity, it seems like there is nothing South Koreans cannot figure out how to produce at a rate that puts the rest of the world to shame—with the notable exception of human beings" https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/06/01/the-megaproject-economy/
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Figure showing how correlated different types of relatives are in standardized test performance in Norway.

Source: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2419627122

via Scientific_Bird
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Barack Obama: AI will cause massive shifts in labor markets

This AI revolution is not made up, its not overhyped, (...) I guarantee you, you are going to see shifts in white-collar-works as a consequence of what these AI tools can do. There is coming more disruption and it will speed up.


Source: https://youtu.be/EM9B8Qin9ac?si=-C13vx2vyF8RUUOF&t=1555
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Sam Altman is excited about a world in which a ChatGPT Premium subscription includes a humanoid robot.

Source: https://youtu.be/V979Wd1gmTU?si=jD4Bd5u9gLh9Xzrn&t=683
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The famous alcoholic and deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council plays his only card: nuclear threats.

Don't fall for it. He has used this same tactic for years to deter people from helping Ukraine. Nothing will happen.
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Solar’s rapid acceleration vs. historical underestimation of solar by legacy IEA forecasts.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky on the creation of new knowledge:

Decent-amateur epistemologists know that reasoning can break down into smaller interpolated or straight-extrapolated steps; and that adding enough steps like that can produce an original thought. "Stochastic parrot! Braaawk!" types literally don't know that part.

No transistor ever does a novel deed, when a computer adds two 64-bit numbers that have never been added before. No neuron in your brain invents a new kind of neurotransmitter, when you think a creative thought. New machines can be made from standard metals and screws.


On why LLMs can be smarter than humans:

Reminder: In principle, minimizing prediction loss on Internet text could potentially grind far past human-level intelligence.

Proof: Somewhere on the Net is a list of <hash, plaintext> pairs, in that order.

A great predictor has to be smarter than the process predicted! You need to be smarter to predict plausible plaintext from hashes, than to write down a hash followed by its plaintext. More generally, it's just not true that you only need to be as intelligent as a human to predict exactly what a particular human will say.


References
- https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1937127151935062119
- https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1615400125760950278
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San Mateo-based Generalist showcased its end-to-end neural network in action: https://generalistai.com/blog
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Links for 2025-06-23

AI


1. Self-supervised representation learning looks a bit like RL. What if we literally use RL as a SSL method for visual representations? Turns out that it works quite well. https://dibyaghosh.com/annotation_bootstrapping/

2. How to write a reward function while avoiding reward hacking for chemistry. https://diffuse.one/p/m1-000

3. LLMs running reinforcement learning shed their randomness almost at once, then their scores stall. This paper shows that randomness drop is predictable and fixable, so bigger gains are still on the table. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22617

4. An Async, Online, Multi-Trun, Multi-Agent RL library for training reasoning models on TextArena games. https://github.com/LeonGuertler/UnstableBaselines

5. Reinforcement learning and general intelligence: Epsilon random is not enough https://www.artfintel.com/p/reinforcement-learning-and-general

6. Leveraging LLMs to identify patent-free glass materials https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0927025625003659

7. What Gets Measured, AI Will Automate https://hbr.org/2025/06/what-gets-measured-ai-will-automate

8. AI is neutralizing Indian accents in call centers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/06/21/india-ai-bpo-call-centers/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/nbOCW]

9. Fake bands and artificial songs are taking over YouTube and Spotify https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-06-15/fake-bands-and-artificial-songs-are-taking-over-youtube-and-spotify.html

10. DeepSeek aids China's military and evaded export controls, US official says https://www.reuters.com/world/china/deepseek-aids-chinas-military-evaded-export-controls-us-official-says-2025-06-23/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/ZC5pr]

Miscellaneous

1. Rapamycin, Not Metformin, Mirrors Dietary Restriction-Driven Lifespan Extension in Vertebrates: A Meta-Analysis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acel.70131

2. Cancer’s genetic fingerprints may lurk in people’s blood long before they find out about the disease. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cancer-tumor-dna-blood-test-screening

3. On how people in different populations see the world quite differently using visual illusions. https://www.science.org/content/article/culture-literally-changes-how-we-see-world [archived version: https://archive.is/0xODf]

4. Evolution has selected humans to prefer adding new features https://shape-of-code.com/2025/06/22/evolution-has-selected-humans-to-prefer-adding-new-features/
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Google is bringing powerful AI directly onto robots with Gemini Robotics On-Device. 🤖

It’s their first vision-language-action model to help make robots faster, highly efficient, and adaptable to new tasks and environments - without needing a constant internet connection.

What makes this new model unique?

🔵 It has the generality and dexterity of Gemini Robotics - but it can run locally on the device
🔵 It can handle a wide variety of complex, two-handed tasks out of the box
🔵 It can learn new skills with as few as 50-100 demonstrations

Read more: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/gemini-robotics-on-device-brings-ai-to-local-robotic-devices/
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Could generative agents powered by LLMs transform social science by accurately simulating human social behaviors at scale?

The authors of a new paper tested this possibility with virtual humans facing disease threats in "Infected Smallville."

Results? LLM-powered agents closely mirrored real human behaviors during disease outbreaks:

1. Agents informed about an infectious disease attended significantly fewer social gatherings compared to agents who received no disease news.

2. Agents visited public places (cafes, parks, stores) less frequently and engaged in notably fewer conversations when aware of infection risks.

3. Agents explicitly attributed their reduced social activities to infection concerns. Just like human social distancing!

4. Notably, agents only reacted to infectious diseases. Informing them about a non-infectious disease didn't affect their behaviors, demonstrating realistic selectivity.

Paper: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.13783
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Google introduces AlphaGenome: an AI model to help scientists better understand our DNA – the instruction manual for life 🧬

Researchers can now quickly predict what impact genetic changes could have - helping to generate new hypotheses and drive biological discoveries.

Read more: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphagenome-ai-for-better-understanding-the-genome/
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Gemini CLI, a light and powerful open-source AI agent that brings Gemini directly into your terminal. >_

Write code, debug, and automate tasks with Gemini 2.5 Pro with industry-leading high usage limits at no cost.

Install: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/

💡 Hierarchical Memory and instructions from GEMINI md files.
🛠 Bulit-in tools for filesystem, shell, MCP servers, and new shareable custom extensions.
📄 Multi-modal context, understands images, PDFs, and live web search results.
🔒 Supports secure tools via container sandboxes (Docker, Podman, or macOS sandbox-exec)
📈 Switches models automatically (e.g., pro to flash) to bypass API rate limits.
📊 Built-in Observability with OTEL traces, metrics, and logs.
💾 Save and resume conversations: persistent history across sessions, isolated per project.
💡 Git-Aware Context, the @ command respects .gitignore, --yolo flag to auto-approve
🤗 Native Windows support, no WSL required and Open Source under Apache 2.0!
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Links for 2025-06-25

AI


1. Unsupervised pretraining in biological neural networks https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09180-y

2. AMPLIFY: Actionless Motion Priors for Robot Learning from Videos — unlock better sample efficiency, generalization, and scaling for robot learning. https://amplify-robotics.github.io/

3. Reinforcement-Learned Teachers (RLTs): Transforming how we teach LLMs to reason with reinforcement learning (RL). https://sakana.ai/rlt/

4. LongWriter-Zero: Mastering Ultra-Long Text Generation via Reinforcement Learning https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18841

5. ReasonFlux-PRM: Trajectory-Aware PRMs for Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18896

6. MEM1: Learning to Synergize Memory and Reasoning for Efficient Long-Horizon Agents https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15841

7. Alita: Generalist Agent Enabling Scalable Agentic Reasoning with Minimal Predefinition and Maximal Self-Evolution https://github.com/CharlesQ9/Alita

8. Matrix-Game: Interactive World Foundation Model https://github.com/SkyworkAI/Matrix-Game

9. A federal judge has ruled that Anthropic's use of books to train Claude falls under fair use, and is legal under U.S. copyright law. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-wins-key-ruling-ai-authors-copyright-lawsuit-2025-06-24/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/hXabI]

10. The Senate Is One Step Closer To Passing a 10-Year Moratorium on State AI Regulation https://reason.com/2025/06/24/the-senate-is-one-step-closer-to-passing-a-10-year-moratorium-on-state-ai-regulation/

11. Breakthroughs in pure mathematics can take decades. A new Defense Department initiative aims to speed things up using artificial intelligence. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/science/math-ai-darpa.html [no paywall: https://archive.is/0D0i0]

12. Towards AI Search Paradigm https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17188

13. Toby Ord on graphs AI companies would prefer you didn’t (fully) understand https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/toby-ord-inference-scaling-ai-governance/

14. AI will handle half of all business decisions by 2027 - Gartner report https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-will-handle-half-of-all-business-decisions-by-2027-gartner-report/

Space

1. Three-Dimensional Time: A Mathematical Framework for Fundamental Physics https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S2424942425500045

2. First images from the largest camera ever built reveal millions of galaxies https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/23/science/vera-rubin-observatory-first-images
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Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark tells Congress that “truly transformative technology” is expected by the end of 2026.

He's urging a federal framework now, before an “accident or a misuse” event that could lead to extreme overregulation.

And risk damaging the entire AI industry before it delivers its potential.

Original source: https://www.youtube.com/live/GDNrUZBZDA4?si=f69EfV-9gKso9lOF&t=2901
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What are memories made of? A survey of neuroscientists on the structural basis of long-term memory

Paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0326920
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