Links for 2025-07-02 [Part 2]

Engineering

1. This mechanism shrinks when pulled https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-QTkPfq7w1A

2. A New Pyramid-Like Shape Always Lands the Same Side Up https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-pyramid-like-shape-always-lands-the-same-side-up-20250625/

3. Sandia turns on brain-like storage-free supercomputer https://blocksandfiles.com/2025/06/06/sandia-turns-on-brain-like-storage-free-supercomputer/

4. Denmark is testing a fleet of robotic sailboats (sailboat drones). They’re intended for surveillance in the North Sea. https://apnews.com/article/denmark-robot-sailboats-baltic-sea-bfa31c98cf7c93320115c0ad0e6908c5

5. MIT engineers develop electrochemical sensors for cheap, disposable diagnostics https://news.mit.edu/2025/mit-engineers-develop-electrochemical-sensors-cheap-disposable-diagnostics-0701

6. New imaging technique reconstructs the shapes of hidden objects https://news.mit.edu/2025/new-imaging-technique-reconstructs-hidden-object-shapes-0701

7. Ultrafast J-resolved magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging for high-resolution metabolic brain imaging https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-025-01418-4

The Nature of Reality

1. P-Zombies Would Report Qualia https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/p-zombies-would-report-qualia

2. On Fine-Tuning, Bayesian Theism, and a Humble Request for a Well-Defined Sigma Algebra. https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-a

3. Tegmark and the Engines of Mathematics https://onemanynone.substack.com/p/tegmark-and-the-engines-of-mathematics

4. Paradigms for computation https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/APP8cbeDaqhGjqH8X/paradigms-for-computation

5. The Impact of Early Massive Galaxy Formation on the Cosmic Microwave Background https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04687

6. Gravitational bounce from the quantum exclusion principle https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.111.103537

Cognition

1. The fascinating world of cognitive genetics, and the surprises we're finding in 3,640 ancient genomes. https://pifferpilfer.substack.com/p/cognitive-genetics-through-time-surprises

2. How many people do you guess would fall victim to scammers offering to ghostwrite their novels and get them published? More than you would think. https://hardresetmedia.substack.com/p/one-nz-man-vs-pakistani-scammers

3. "our findings provide the most actuarially sound evidence to date in support of the adaptationist prediction that personality traits related to time horizon are calibrated during ontogeny in response to an individual’s risk of death" https://www.psypost.org/people-who-are-more-likely-to-die-seem-to-care-less-about-the-future/

Miscellaneous

1. Finding a billion factorials in 60 ms with SIMD https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/143279

2. WikiRadio is a website that feeds you random clips of Wikipedia audio. https://www.monkeon.co.uk/wikiradio/

3. SecureBio runs a “nucleic acid observatory” that searches wastewater for new or dangerous viruses. https://securebio.org/

4. "Military spending has large and persistent effects on output because it shifts the composition of public spending toward R&D. This boosts innovation and private investment in the medium term and increases productivity and GDP at longer horizons." https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20231278

5. "For nearly every low-fertility country, the UN projects either one of two outcomes: The fertility rate will flatten, or it will rise to a number somewhere between one and two births per woman … Every part of that appears to be wrong" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/birth-rate-population-decline/683333/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/eWm8S]

6. In the 1952 Texas gubernatorial election, incumbent Allan Shivers ran on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, beating himself 73%-25%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Texas_gubernatorial_election

How big could an “AI Manhattan Project” get?

Read more: https://epochai.substack.com/p/how-big-could-an-ai-manhattan-project

Links for 2025-07-05 [Part 1]

AI

1. Energy-Based Transformers are Scalable Learners and Thinkers — “We outscale (feed-forward) transformers while generalizing reasoning/system 2 thinking to any modality/problem without requiring verifiable rewards!” https://energy-based-transformers.github.io/

2. “Multi-agent kernel generation works. We consistently generate kernels that significantly outperform some PyTorch baselines by splitting kernel optimization into specialized roles: synthesis, compilation, correctness, reasoning, and orchestration.” https://letters.lossfunk.com/p/how-many-agents-does-it-take-to-beat

3. LLM Benchmarking Shows Capabilities Doubling Every 7 Months https://spectrum.ieee.org/llm-benchmarking-metr

4. Large Language Models Are Improving Exponentially https://spectrum.ieee.org/large-language-model-performance

5. Companies like OpenAI, Amazon and Meta have supersized their spending on artificial intelligence, with no signs of slowing down. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/technology/ai-spending-openai-amazon-meta.html [no paywall: https://archive.is/G47Ep]

6. Oracle, OpenAI Expand Stargate Deal for More US Data Centers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-02/oracle-openai-ink-stargate-deal-for-4-5-gigawatts-of-us-data-center-power [no paywall: https://archive.is/QgeBR]

7. US Lifts Chip Design Export Curbs as Part of New China Deal https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-03/siemens-says-us-has-rescinded-chip-software-curbs-on-china [no paywall: https://archive.is/kYTb0]

8. A deep critique of AI 2027’s bad timeline models https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PAYfmG2aRbdb74mEp/a-deep-critique-of-ai-2027-s-bad-timeline-models

9. CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-white-collar-job-loss-b9856259 [no paywall: https://archive.is/eSDJN]

10. “The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/07/the-end-of-the-english-paper [no paywall: https://archive.is/Iw30U]

11. Universities across the country are scrambling to understand the implications of generative A.I.’s transformation of technology. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/technology/computer-science-education-ai.html [no paywall: https://archive.is/nEuHp]

12. H&M releases AI model images https://www.businessoffashion.com/news/technology/hm-releases-first-images-with-ai-digital-twins/

13. “Biomni accelerates biomedical discoveries by 100x with Claude” https://www.anthropic.com/customers/biomni

14. Models often silently correct errors within their reasoning steps. They may produce the correct final answer by reasoning steps that are not verbalised, while the steps they do verbalise remain flawed, creating an illusion of transparency. https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2025.02

15. This was a really interesting read. Gemini 2.5 Flash is ruthless when it is rational to be ruthless. GPT-4o-mini in contrast is cooperative and forgiving, increasingly so even as that behavior becomes more dangerous. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02618

16. Does Math Reasoning Improve General LLM Capabilities? Understanding Transferability of LLM Reasoning https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00432

17. Mathematicians interact with AI, July 2025 update https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15039

18. Touch begins where vision ends: Generalizable policies for contact-rich manipulation https://vitalprecise.github.io/

19. The World's First AI-Native UGC Game Engine Powered by Real-Time World Model https://blog.dynamicslab.ai/

20. A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09215-4

21. LeanConjecturer: Automatic Generation of Mathematical Conjectures for Theorem Proving https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22005v1

22. KERAP: A Knowledge-Enhanced Reasoning Approach for Accurate Zero-shot Diagnosis Prediction Using Multi-agent LLMs https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02773

Links for 2025-07-05 [Part 2]

AI

23. AllTracker is the current state-of-the-art for general-purpose point tracking. https://github.com/aharley/alltracker

24. "Strategic Intelligence in Large Language Models: Evidence from evolutionary Game Theory", Payne & Alloui-Cros 2025 [iterated prisoner's dilemma in Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02618

25. Early Signs of Steganographic Capabilities in Frontier LLMs https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nwx6duiDZcHatbpPT/untitled-draft-6osz

26. AI-powered camera systems designed to keep drivers honest, even when police aren’t around. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-intersection-monitoring

27. Finding Palindromes with Language Models https://blog.aqnichol.com/2025/06/24/finding-palindromes-with-language-models/

Science

1. Neanderthals Ran “Fat Factories” 125,000 Years Ago https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025/07/neanderthals-ran-fat-factories-125000-years-ago

2. Why do women have breasts? https://dennismccarthy.substack.com/p/why-tits

3. Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics fixed the holes in quantum theory by taking physics into the realm of pure abstraction and math. https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2025/07/werner-heisenberg-pioneers-quantum-mechanics

4. “upwelling of deep, warm, CO₂-rich waters is believed to be driving the accelerated melting of sea ice in the Southern Ocean. In the long term, this process could double current atmospheric CO₂” https://www.icm.csic.es/en/news/major-reversal-ocean-circulation-detected-southern-ocean-key-climate-implications

Brains

1. Schizophrenia Is the Price We Pay for Minds Poised Near the Edge of a Cliff https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/schizophrenia-is-the-price-we-pay

2. Neuroscientists long ignored variability in animals’ behavior in favor of studying differences across groups. But now researchers are studying the brain differences that underlie that variability. https://www.thetransmitter.org/animal-behavior/escaping-groupthink-what-animals-behavioral-quirks-reveal-about-the-brain/

3. “We’re growing neurons in cell cultures and pioneering their use as computing power.” https://github.com/FinalSpark-np

Miscellaneous

1. "Law without law: from observer states to physics via algorithmic information theory", Mueller et al 2017 https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01826

2. Directional, joule per steradian THz pulses from multi-joule laser irradiation of wires https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/32/7/073102/3351409/Directional-joule-per-steradian-THz-pulses-from

3. If you want to be vegan but you worry about health effects of no meat, consider being vegan except for mussels/oysters https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cwpxfpj4o99bDrv7X/if-you-want-to-be-vegan-but-you-worry-about-health-effects

I believe that in a year from now, we will have a much better idea of how things are going to play out. By 2028, it will be undeniable.

What I mean by this is that the most likely outcomes by then will be either undeniable progress or the lack thereof. In the former case, in the absence of regulation, a take-off scenario will be very probable before 2035. In the latter case, all bets are off. Fine-tuning the current technology will go a long way, rivaling the impact of the Internet, but there will be no technological singularity. We'll need new foundational insights, which are very hard to predict and could take decades.

Post by Google AI engineer Logan Kilpatrick: https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/1942007689074102552

Asked this 5 years ago.

Now Nvidia has become the world's first $4 trillion public company: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/09/nvidia-4-trillion.html