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Very Sane AI Newsletter

@verysane.ai

Ideas in AI, preferably in English. Mostly what and why, a little how.

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Latest posts by Very Sane AI Newsletter @verysane.ai

bsky.app/profile/segy...

27.02.2026 03:41 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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Claude's Custody Hearing Ideas in AI, preferably in English. Mostly what and why, a little how.

this is about the government using AI for surveillance

a somewhat rushed post about Anthropic telling the Secretary of War no, Anthropic's history with the government, etc.

27.02.2026 03:27 ๐Ÿ‘ 44 ๐Ÿ” 13 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 3
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Alignment Is Proven To Be Tractable That LLMs understand natural language as well as they do should dramatically change our understanding of the problem.

That LLMs understand natural language as well as they do should dramatically change our understanding of the problem of 'making AI do what we want it to do'.

www.verysane.ai/p/alignment-...

18.02.2026 16:09 ๐Ÿ‘ 84 ๐Ÿ” 8 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 6 ๐Ÿ“Œ 5
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Should We Put GPUs In Space? Right now? No. In the near future? Maybe. Probably not, though.

it is probably not a good idea to put GPUs in space

www.verysane.ai/p/should-we-...

14.02.2026 08:21 ๐Ÿ‘ 33 ๐Ÿ” 6 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 2 ๐Ÿ“Œ 3
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Building the Chinese Room Suppose also that after a while I get so good at following the instructions for manipulating the Chinese symbols and the programmers get so good at writing the programs that from the external point of...

My take on Searle's Chinese Room, which is terminally engineer brained in that my entire argument is "okay, how would you actually build it, though"

www.verysane.ai/p/building-t...

12.02.2026 04:16 ๐Ÿ‘ 61 ๐Ÿ” 7 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 7 ๐Ÿ“Œ 3
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AI and Suicide [Warning: Extensive discussion of suicide.

An attempt to analyze recent legal filings about AI enabling user suicides, figure out what caused them (OpenAI being irresponsible, mostly), and figure out how to deal with this, and any similar problems in the future.

www.verysane.ai/p/ai-and-sui...

08.11.2025 20:39 ๐Ÿ‘ 58 ๐Ÿ” 12 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 6

Notably the person who checked the math agrees that you cannot just draw a smooth curve on this, and their assumption that you can is bad. I noted this from the write-up and that's part of why I did not check the math.

14.08.2025 10:13 ๐Ÿ‘ 12 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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A deep critique of AI 2027โ€™s bad timeline models โ€” EA Forum Thank you to Arepo and Eli Lifland for looking over this article for errors.ย  โ€ฆ

It turns out someone else had already checked the math. I did not read any of the math because it seemed too painful, but if that's your jam, you can read about everything wrong with the math too. forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KgejNn...

14.08.2025 10:12 ๐Ÿ‘ 15 ๐Ÿ” 1 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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Do we understand how neural networks work? Yes and no.

There is some confusion about whether or not we understand LLMs. The answer is yes and no, but mostly no. It's a complicated enough question that it seemed like it needed an article.

www.verysane.ai/p/do-we-unde...

13.08.2025 23:39 ๐Ÿ‘ 308 ๐Ÿ” 92 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 13 ๐Ÿ“Œ 22
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AGI: Probably Not 2027 AI 2027 is a web site that might be described as a paper, manifesto or thesis.

"AI 2027" argues that AI will reach roughly human level in roughly 2027. This just happens to be right about when OpenAI would expect to start to run out of money.

I argue that this is not a coincidence at all, and its predictions are all wrong.

www.verysane.ai/p/agi-probab...

12.08.2025 14:13 ๐Ÿ‘ 402 ๐Ÿ” 84 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 18 ๐Ÿ“Œ 33

This had an error in the post previously, fixed now.

15.07.2025 22:10 ๐Ÿ‘ 3 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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What Makes AI "Generative"? To "generate" is to create, either from nothing (The Book of Genesis), or from very different or relatively inactive materials (an electrical generator, generating offspring).

What Makes AI "Generative"? It's Not What You Think

I can just tell you actually: it's how large the output space is, or equivalently, how many possible outputs there are. Bigger output spaces are just fundamentally different.

www.verysane.ai/p/what-makes...

15.07.2025 21:57 ๐Ÿ‘ 15 ๐Ÿ” 3 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 2
Post image

Some Thoughts On The Platonic Representation Hypothesis,

or,

How We're Rediscovering Platonism By Doing Statistics

or,

How AI Training Is Actually Chaining Up Some Guy In A Cave,

or,

Bait for Philosophy Majors

www.verysane.ai/p/some-thoug...

01.07.2025 15:07 ๐Ÿ‘ 26 ๐Ÿ” 3 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 3
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The Biggest Statistic About AI Water Use Is A Lie How did it become the main story?

The most well-known statistic about AI water use is a lie. This makes it frustrating to talk about AI and the environment, and this is a long deep dive on that specific point.

www.verysane.ai/p/the-bigges...

08.06.2025 23:54 ๐Ÿ‘ 45 ๐Ÿ” 5 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 4
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Key AI Quotes Each of these presents the clearest, earliest, or most-cited statement of a specific idea in AI.

Pushed previously as a notes file, this is a short list of ideas which have, or are, setting the agenda for AI, presented entirely by quoting the relevant person.

www.verysane.ai/p/ai-history...

07.06.2025 17:02 ๐Ÿ‘ 10 ๐Ÿ” 3 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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Key AI Quotes Each of these presents the clearest, earliest, or most-cited statement of a specific idea in AI.

Pushed previously as a notes file, this is a short list of ideas which have, or are, setting the agenda for AI, presented entirely by quoting the relevant person.

www.verysane.ai/p/ai-history...

07.06.2025 17:02 ๐Ÿ‘ 10 ๐Ÿ” 3 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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What Is AI? This is an important question because AI is, currently, important.

I couldn't find a high-level overview of what AI is and how we got where we are, so I wrote one. www.verysane.ai/p/what-is-ai

04.06.2025 14:23 ๐Ÿ‘ 59 ๐Ÿ” 14 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 7