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Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)
Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)
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  • The Universal Hierarchy of Life - Prof. Chris Kempes [SFI]
    "What is life?" - asks Chris Kempes, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute.Chris explains that scientists are moving beyond a purely Earth-based, biological view and are searching for a universal theory of life that could apply to anything, anywhere in the universe. He proposes that things we don't normally consider "alive"—like human culture, language, or even artificial intelligence; could be seen as life forms existing on different "substrates".To understand this, Chris presents a fascinating three-level framework:- Materials: The physical stuff life is made of. He argues this could be incredibly diverse across the universe, and we shouldn't expect alien life to share our biochemistry.- Constraints: The universal laws of physics (like gravity or diffusion) that all life must obey, regardless of what it's made of. This is where different life forms start to look more similar.- Principles: At the highest level are abstract principles like evolution and learning. Chris suggests these computational or "optimization" rules are what truly define a living system.A key idea is "convergence" – using the example of the eye. It's such a complex organ that you'd think it evolved only once. However, eyes evolved many separate times across different species. This is because the physics of light provides a clear "target", and evolution found similar solutions to the problem of seeing, even with different starting materials.**SPONSOR MESSAGES**—Prolific - Quality data. From real people. For faster breakthroughs.https://www.prolific.com/?utm_source=mlst—Check out NotebookLM from Google here - https://notebooklm.google.com/ - it’s really good for doing research directly from authoritative source material, minimising hallucinations. —cyber•Fund https://cyber.fund/?utm_source=mlst is a founder-led investment firm accelerating the cybernetic economyHiring a SF VC Principal: https://talent.cyber.fund/companies/cyber-fund-2/jobs/57674170-ai-investment-principal#content?utm_source=mlstSubmit investment deck: https://cyber.fund/contact?utm_source=mlst— Prof. Chris Kempes:https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/chris-kempesTRANSCRIPT:https://app.rescript.info/public/share/Y2cI1i0nX_-iuZitvlguHvaVLQTwPX1Y_E1EHxV0i9ITOC:00:00:00 - Introduction to Chris Kempes and the Santa Fe Institute00:02:28 - The Three Cultures of Science00:05:08 - What Makes a Good Scientific Theory?00:06:50 - The Universal Theory of Life00:09:40 - The Role of Material in Life00:12:50 - A Hierarchy for Understanding Life00:13:55 - How Life Diversifies and Converges00:17:53 - Adaptive Processes and Defining Life00:19:28 - Functionalism, Memes, and Phylogenies00:22:58 - Convergence at Multiple Levels00:25:45 - The Possibility of Simulating Life00:28:16 - Intelligence, Parasitism, and Spectrums of Life00:32:39 - Phase Changes in Evolution00:36:16 - The Separation of Matter and Logic00:37:21 - Assembly Theory and Quantifying ComplexityREFS:Developing a predictive science of the biosphere requires the integration of scientific cultures [Kempes et al]https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209196121Seeing with an extra sense (“Dangerous prediction”) [Rob Phillips]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982224009035 The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life [Christopher P. Kempes & David C. Krakauer]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00239-021-10016-2 The Information Theory of Individuality [David Krakauer et al]https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.2447Minds, Brains and Programs [Searle]https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/searle.minds.brains.programs.bbs.1980.pdf The error thresholdhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168170204003843Assembly theory and its relationship with computational complexity [Kempes et al]https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12176
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  • Google Researcher Shows Life "Emerges From Code" - Blaise Agüera y Arcas
    Blaise Agüera y Arcas explores some mind-bending ideas about what intelligence and life really are—and why they might be more similar than we think (filmed at ALIFE conference, 2025 - https://2025.alife.org/).Life and intelligence are both fundamentally computational (he says). From the very beginning, living things have been running programs. Your DNA? It's literally a computer program, and the ribosomes in your cells are tiny universal computers building you according to those instructions.**SPONSOR MESSAGES**—Prolific - Quality data. From real people. For faster breakthroughs.https://www.prolific.com/?utm_source=mlst—cyber•Fund https://cyber.fund/?utm_source=mlst is a founder-led investment firm accelerating the cybernetic economyOct SF conference - https://dagihouse.com/?utm_source=mlst - Joscha Bach keynoting(!) + OAI, Anthropic, NVDA,++Hiring a SF VC Principal: https://talent.cyber.fund/companies/cyber-fund-2/jobs/57674170-ai-investment-principal#content?utm_source=mlstSubmit investment deck: https://cyber.fund/contact?utm_source=mlst— Blaise argues that there is more to evolution than random mutations (like most people think). The secret to increasing complexity is *merging* i.e. when different organisms or systems come together and combine their histories and capabilities.Blaise describes his "BFF" experiment where random computer code spontaneously evolved into self-replicating programs, showing how purpose and complexity can emerge from pure randomness through computational processes.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Ag%C3%BCera_y_Arcashttps://x.com/blaiseaguera?lang=enTRANSCRIPT:https://app.rescript.info/public/share/VX7Gktfr3_wIn4Bj7cl9StPBO1MN4R5lcJ11NE99hLgTOC:00:00:00 Introduction - New book "What is Intelligence?"00:01:45 Life as computation - Von Neumann's insights00:12:00 BFF experiment - How purpose emerges00:26:00 Symbiogenesis and evolutionary complexity00:40:00 Functionalism and consciousness00:49:45 AI as part of collective human intelligence00:57:00 Comparing AI and human cognitionREFS:What is intelligence [Blaise Agüera y Arcas]https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org/ [Read free online, interactive rich media]https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049955/what-is-intelligence/ [MIT Press]Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspectivehttps://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11135Our first Noam Chomsky MLST interviewhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axuGfh4UR9Q Chance and Necessity [Jacques Monod]https://monoskop.org/images/9/99/Monod_Jacques_Chance_and_Necessity.pdfWonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the History of Nature [Stephen Jay Gould]https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wonderful-Life-Burgess-Nature-History/dp/0099273454 The major evolutionary transitions [E Szathmáry, J M Smith]https://wiki.santafe.edu/images/0/0e/Szathmary.MaynardSmith_1995_Nature.pdfDon't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle [Dan Everett]https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120 The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves [W. Brian Arthur] https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Technology-What-How-Evolves-ebook/dp/B002RI9W16/ The MANIAC [Benjamin Labatut]https://www.amazon.com/MANIAC-Benjam%C3%ADn-Labatut/dp/1782279814 When We Cease to Understand the World [Benjamin Labatut]https://www.amazon.com/When-We-Cease-Understand-World/dp/1681375664/ The Boys in the Boat [Dan Brown]https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Boat-Americans-Berlin-Olympics/dp/0143125478 [Petter Johansson] (Split brain)https://www.lucs.lu.se/fileadmin/user_upload/lucs/2011/01/Johansson-et-al.-2006-How-Something-Can-Be-Said-About-Telling-More-Than-We-Can-Know.pdfIf Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies [Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares]https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuman/dp/0316595640 The science of cycologyhttps://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/bf03195929.pdf <trunc, see YT desc for more>
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  • The Secret Engine of AI - Prolific [Sponsored] (Sara Saab, Enzo Blindow)
    We sat down with Sara Saab (VP of Product at Prolific) and Enzo Blindow (VP of Data and AI at Prolific) to explore the critical role of human evaluation in AI development and the challenges of aligning AI systems with human values. Prolific is a human annotation and orchestration platform for AI used by many of the major AI labs. This is a sponsored show in partnership with Prolific. **SPONSOR MESSAGES**—cyber•Fund https://cyber.fund/?utm_source=mlst is a founder-led investment firm accelerating the cybernetic economyOct SF conference - https://dagihouse.com/?utm_source=mlst - Joscha Bach keynoting(!) + OAI, Anthropic, NVDA,++Hiring a SF VC Principal: https://talent.cyber.fund/companies/cyber-fund-2/jobs/57674170-ai-investment-principal#content?utm_source=mlstSubmit investment deck: https://cyber.fund/contact?utm_source=mlst— While technologists want to remove humans from the loop for speed and efficiency, these non-deterministic AI systems actually require more human oversight than ever before. Prolific's approach is to put "well-treated, verified, diversely demographic humans behind an API" - making human feedback as accessible as any other infrastructure service.When AI models like Grok 4 achieve top scores on technical benchmarks but feel awkward or problematic to use in practice, it exposes the limitations of our current evaluation methods. The guests argue that optimizing for benchmarks may actually weaken model performance in other crucial areas, like cultural sensitivity or natural conversation.We also discuss Anthropic's research showing that frontier AI models, when given goals and access to information, independently arrived at solutions involving blackmail - without any prompting toward unethical behavior. Even more concerning, the more sophisticated the model, the more susceptible it was to this "agentic misalignment." Enzo and Sarah present Prolific's "Humane" leaderboard as an alternative to existing benchmarking systems. By stratifying evaluations across diverse demographic groups, they reveal that different populations have vastly different experiences with the same AI models. Looking ahead, the guests imagine a world where humans take on coaching and teaching roles for AI systems - similar to how we might correct a child or review code. This also raises important questions about working conditions and the evolution of labor in an AI-augmented world. Rather than replacing humans entirely, we may be moving toward more sophisticated forms of human-AI collaboration.As AI tech becomes more powerful and general-purpose, the quality of human evaluation becomes more critical, not less. We need more representative evaluation frameworks that capture the messy reality of human values and cultural diversity. Visit Prolific: https://www.prolific.com/Sara Saab (VP Product):https://uk.linkedin.com/in/sarasaabEnzo Blindow (VP Data & AI):https://uk.linkedin.com/in/enzoblindowTRANSCRIPT:https://app.rescript.info/public/share/xZ31-0kJJ_xp4zFSC-bunC8-hJNkHpbm7Lg88RFcuLETOC:[00:00:00] Intro & Background[00:03:16] Human-in-the-Loop Challenges[00:17:19] Can AIs Understand?[00:32:02] Benchmarking & Vibes[00:51:00] Agentic Misalignment Study[01:03:00] Data Quality vs Quantity[01:16:00] Future of AI OversightREFS:Anthropic Agentic Misalignmenthttps://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignmentValue Compasshttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09586Reasoning Models Don’t Always Say What They Think (Anthropic)https://www.anthropic.com/research/reasoning-models-dont-say-think https://assets.anthropic.com/m/71876fabef0f0ed4/original/reasoning_models_paper.pdfApollo research - science of evals blog posthttps://www.apolloresearch.ai/blog/we-need-a-science-of-evals Leaderboard Illusion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W_OhS38rIE MLST videoThe Leaderboard Illusion [2025]Shivalika Singh et alhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20879(Truncated, full list on YT)
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  • AI Agents Can Code 10,000 Lines of Hacking Tools In Seconds - Dr. Ilia Shumailov (ex-GDM)
    Dr. Ilia Shumailov - Former DeepMind AI Security Researcher, now building security tools for AI agentsEver wondered what happens when AI agents start talking to each other—or worse, when they start breaking things? Ilia Shumailov spent years at DeepMind thinking about exactly these problems, and he's here to explain why securing AI is way harder than you think.**SPONSOR MESSAGES**—Check out notebooklm for your research project, it's really powerfulhttps://notebooklm.google.com/—Take the Prolific human data survey - https://www.prolific.com/humandatasurvey?utm_source=mlst and be the first to see the results and benchmark their practices against the wider community!—cyber•Fund https://cyber.fund/?utm_source=mlst is a founder-led investment firm accelerating the cybernetic economyOct SF conference - https://dagihouse.com/?utm_source=mlst - Joscha Bach keynoting(!) + OAI, Anthropic, NVDA,++Hiring a SF VC Principal: https://talent.cyber.fund/companies/cyber-fund-2/jobs/57674170-ai-investment-principal#content?utm_source=mlstSubmit investment deck: https://cyber.fund/contact?utm_source=mlst— We're racing toward a world where AI agents will handle our emails, manage our finances, and interact with sensitive data 24/7. But there is a problem. These agents are nothing like human employees. They never sleep, they can touch every endpoint in your system simultaneously, and they can generate sophisticated hacking tools in seconds. Traditional security measures designed for humans simply won't work.Dr. Ilia Shumailovhttps://x.com/iliaishackedhttps://iliaishacked.github.io/https://sequrity.ai/TRANSCRIPT:https://app.rescript.info/public/share/dVGsk8dz9_V0J7xMlwguByBq1HXRD6i4uC5z5r7EVGMTOC:00:00:00 - Introduction & Trusted Third Parties via ML00:03:45 - Background & Career Journey00:06:42 - Safety vs Security Distinction00:09:45 - Prompt Injection & Model Capability00:13:00 - Agents as Worst-Case Adversaries00:15:45 - Personal AI & CAML System Defense00:19:30 - Agents vs Humans: Threat Modeling00:22:30 - Calculator Analogy & Agent Behavior00:25:00 - IMO Math Solutions & Agent Thinking00:28:15 - Diffusion of Responsibility & Insider Threats00:31:00 - Open Source Security Concerns00:34:45 - Supply Chain Attacks & Trust Issues00:39:45 - Architectural Backdoors00:44:00 - Academic Incentives & Defense Work00:48:30 - Semantic Censorship & Halting Problem00:52:00 - Model Collapse: Theory & Criticism00:59:30 - Career Advice & Ross Anderson TributeREFS:Lessons from Defending Gemini Against Indirect Prompt Injectionshttps://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14534Defeating Prompt Injections by Design. Debenedetti, E., Shumailov, I., Fan, T., Hayes, J., Carlini, N., Fabian, D., Kern, C., Shi, C., Terzis, A., & Tramèr, F. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18813Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threatshttps://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignmentSTOP ANTHROPOMORPHIZING INTERMEDIATE TOKENS AS REASONING/THINKING TRACES!Subbarao Kambhampati et alhttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09762Meiklejohn, S., Blauzvern, H., Maruseac, M., Schrock, S., Simon, L., & Shumailov, I. (2025). Machine learning models have a supply chain problem. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22778 Gao, Y., Shumailov, I., & Fawaz, K. (2025). Supply-chain attacks in machine learning frameworks. https://openreview.net/pdf?id=EH5PZW6aCrApache Log4j Vulnerability Guidancehttps://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/apache-log4j-vulnerability-guidance Bober-Irizar, M., Shumailov, I., Zhao, Y., Mullins, R., & Papernot, N. (2022). Architectural backdoors in neural networks. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.07840Position: Fundamental Limitations of LLM Censorship Necessitate New ApproachesDavid Glukhov, Ilia Shumailov, ...https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/glukhov24a.html AlphaEvolve MLST interview [Matej Balog, Alexander Novikov]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9nAosXrJw
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  • New top score on ARC-AGI-2-pub (29.4%) - Jeremy Berman
    We need AI systems to synthesise new knowledge, not just compress the data they see. Jeremy Berman, is a research scientist at Reflection AI and recent winner of the ARC-AGI v2 public leaderboard.**SPONSOR MESSAGES**—Take the Prolific human data survey - https://www.prolific.com/humandatasurvey?utm_source=mlst and be the first to see the results and benchmark their practices against the wider community!—cyber•Fund https://cyber.fund/?utm_source=mlst is a founder-led investment firm accelerating the cybernetic economyOct SF conference - https://dagihouse.com/?utm_source=mlst - Joscha Bach keynoting(!) + OAI, Anthropic, NVDA,++Hiring a SF VC Principal: https://talent.cyber.fund/companies/cyber-fund-2/jobs/57674170-ai-investment-principal#content?utm_source=mlstSubmit investment deck: https://cyber.fund/contact?utm_source=mlst— Imagine trying to teach an AI to think like a human i.e. solving puzzles that are easy for us but stump even the smartest models. Jeremy's evolutionary approach—evolving natural language descriptions instead of python code like his last version—landed him at the top with about 30% accuracy on the ARCv2.We discuss why current AIs are like "stochastic parrots" that memorize but struggle to truly reason or innovate as well as big ideas like building "knowledge trees" for real understanding, the limits of neural networks versus symbolic systems, and whether we can train models to synthesize new ideas without forgetting everything else. Jeremy Berman:https://x.com/jerber888TRANSCRIPT:https://app.rescript.info/public/share/qvCioZeZJ4Q_NlR66m-hNUZnh-qWlUJcS15Wc2OGwD0TOC:Introduction and Overview [00:00:00]ARC v1 Solution [00:07:20]Evolutionary Python Approach [00:08:00]Trade-offs in Depth vs. Breadth [00:10:33]ARC v2 Improvements [00:11:45]Natural Language Shift [00:12:35]Model Thinking Enhancements [00:13:05]Neural Networks vs. Symbolism Debate [00:14:24]Turing Completeness Discussion [00:15:24]Continual Learning Challenges [00:19:12]Reasoning and Intelligence [00:29:33]Knowledge Trees and Synthesis [00:50:15]Creativity and Invention [00:56:41]Future Directions and Closing [01:02:30]REFS:Jeremy’s 2024 article on winning ARCAGI1-pubhttps://jeremyberman.substack.com/p/how-i-got-a-record-536-on-arc-agiGetting 50% (SoTA) on ARC-AGI with GPT-4o [Greenblatt]https://blog.redwoodresearch.org/p/getting-50-sota-on-arc-agi-with-gpt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9j3wB1RRGA [his MLST interview]A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence [Hawkins]https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Brains-New-Theory-Intelligence/dp/1541675819https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VQILbDqaI4 [MLST interview]Francois Chollet + Mike Knoop’s labhttps://ndea.com/On the Measure of Intelligence [Chollet]https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547On the Biology of a Large Language Model [Anthropic]https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html The ARChitects [won 2024 ARC-AGI-1-private]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTX_sAq--zY Connectionism critique 1998 [Fodor/Pylshyn]https://uh.edu/~garson/F&P1.PDF Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning: The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis [Kumar/Stanley]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11581 AlphaEvolve interview (also program synthesis)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9nAosXrJw ShinkaEvolve: Evolving New Algorithms with LLMs, Orders of Magnitude More Efficiently [Lange et al]https://sakana.ai/shinka-evolve/ Deep learning with Python Rev 3 [Chollet] - READ CHAPTER 19 NOW!https://deeplearningwithpython.io/
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About Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Welcome! We engage in fascinating discussions with pre-eminent figures in the AI field. Our flagship show covers current affairs in AI, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind with in-depth analysis. Our approach is unrivalled in terms of scope and rigour – we believe in intellectual diversity in AI, and we touch on all of the main ideas in the field with the hype surgically removed. MLST is run by Tim Scarfe, Ph.D (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ecsquizor/) and features regular appearances from MIT Doctor of Philosophy Keith Duggar (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-keith-duggar/).
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