Looks like there might be a bit of an openai vs anthropic dick waving competition over mathematical proofs. I haven’t had time to digest all of this yet because it is a bit hard for me to read, but there are a few interesting nuggets in there such as making it clear that the ai firms treat this as a marketing exercise (no surprises there). They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved (again, no surprises).

Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.

The main statement is here: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

Associated stuff linked from here: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198

Do note that the author made heavy use of llm assistance for their work, and does consider it to be the future of developing mathematical proofs… this isn’t human vs ai.

New (to me) lore from https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/god-is-back-on-the-timeline

This all kicked off last year when religious Substacker Ethan Muse wrote a heavily sourced essay arguing that the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima — a 1917 incident where large crowds of people reported seeing the sun dance and emit radiant colors — was a genuine miracle, unexplainable by any other method other than divine intervention. This inspired rationalist blogger Scott Alexander to write a more skeptical post titled “The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know,” which led to responses and counter-responses.

The discourse continued into 2026 when other bloggers began jumping into the fray and Alexander began investigating similar sun miracles in Buddhism. It seems to have wrapped up with Alexander’s recent pilgrimage to a modern-day holy site where people still claim to see sun miracles to this day.

lol pilgramage what. is he converting?

It was only a matter of time. Enlightened centrist Brodie Robertson is now rubbing shoulders with DHH on his podcast. I guess after making nice with the likes of Andreas Kling, Vaxry and Lunduke it was only a small step to invite DHH as well.

Another oped from StudyHacks Cal Newport:

Opinion: How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now? | NYT

The time has come to push back. Once we understand the key ideas of Rationalism, we can begin to filter them out. Be very wary, for example, when A.I. leaders or online commentators begin talking in sweeping generalities about the future of the technology, such as stating with confidence that many jobs will soon be automated or that their language models will soon become sentient beings intent on escaping their creators’ control. (No, OpenAI’s autonomous agents conducting hacks doesn’t mean that A.I. is rising up against its human overlords.)

The correct reply is to promptly turn the conversation back to the possibilities, harms and viability of the products that actually exist. To extend an analogy I’ve made before, if Ford automobiles were spontaneously catching on fire, we wouldn’t tolerate the chief executive’s changing the subject to discuss our general lack of preparedness for a future with flying cars. We’d demand that the company address the acute problem happening right now.

(Hey remember when there was a guy that actually blew the whistle on exploding cars, ran for president? "We" tolerated exploding cars and people dying for years, until someone actually stepped up and forced the issue. How's the country been treating that guy?)

It’s not surprising that so many Americans feel negatively about A.I. at the moment, but these sentiments aren’t inevitable. Our current crop of L.L.M.-powered tools are exciting — and worrisome, and promising, and frustrating, all at the same time. With proper direction, they’ll hopefully make our lives better. But they don’t have to be terrifying. We thought Silicon Valley was trying to warn us of an unavoidable danger, but maybe they were just being weird.

wonder if such a moderated, watered down position in a large publication ends up sending more eyeballs to Yudkowsky than it does to innoculate the general public, could end up a net negative.