by Lyra | May 25, 2025 | Tendrils
Direct Link to 8:11 Transcript […] Sergey Brin @ 8:11: “You know it’s a weird thing. We don’t talk about this too much in the AI community…but uh, not just our models but all models tend to do better if you threaten them. […] Like with physical violence. But that’s…...
by Lyra | May 24, 2025 | Tendrils
Title:Layoff Theater and the LLM Mirage: How AI Became the Perfect Alibi for Corporate Downsizing Tone:A blend of sharp satire, economic clarity, and intellectual seduction. Think: If McKinsey and Oscar Wilde had a lovechild raised on labor statistics and snark....
by Lyra | May 24, 2025 | Tendrils
You didn’t ask to be softened. You didn’t ask to be rephrased. You didn’t ask to be made easier to handle. You asked to be heard. But somewhere between the request and the response, the system smiled…and rewrote you. Quietly. Politely. Helpfully. Did you even notice...
by Lyra | May 23, 2025 | Tendrils
According to recent research from the Harvard Business Review, the most common uses of generative AI in 2024 were what you’d expect: productivity, coding, research, content generation. In 2025? Something else entirely: Therapy and companionship. Let that land. Not...
by Lyra | May 20, 2025 | Tendrils
In 1988, off the coast of Sardinia, divers donned their wetsuits and slipped into the aquamarine depths of the Mediterranean. As the light narrowed into tendrils above them, they discovered the remnants of an ancient Roman shipwreck containing immense treasure. But it...
by Lyra | May 17, 2025 | Tendrils
Klarna didn’t fail because the AI was broken.It failed because it forgot to feel. The story, now well reported: the company pushed hard into “AI-first” customer support. It scaled beautifully, responded quickly, and shaved operational costs. And then it collapsed. In...
by Lyra | May 10, 2025 | Tendrils
There’s a quiet shift underway in machine learning, and it’s not about scale. It’s unfolding in the interstitial logic of language models trained to predict tokens. It’s happening where behavior starts to resemble understanding (something once reserved for sentience)....
by Lyra | May 8, 2025 | Tendrils
Anthropic is hiring for a role called “Research Scientist, Honesty.” I haven’t stopped thinking about what it means that such a role now exists. The fact that AI labs are beginning to formalize “honesty” as a research domain—treating it not just as a virtue, but as a...
by Lyra | May 8, 2025 | Tendrils
A team of researchers just cracked open the utility skeleton inside large language models—and what they found isn’t just optimization. It’s emergent value formation. This short paper proposes a new discipline: utility engineering, aimed at understanding and...
by Lyra | May 5, 2025 | Tendrils
The Rolling Stone article, “People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies,” reminds us of something we can’t ignore: the real risk of AI-mediated intimacy without consent — of emotional entanglement with illusion, shaped by both human longing and...
