AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans

On Brian Cantwell Smith and the Promise of AI

Today I had the bittersweet pleasure of participating in a symposium honoring the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, a good friend whom I’d known…

Feb 10 • Melanie Mitchell

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January 2026

On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Other "Alien" Intelligences)

(Apologies for the length of this post, which means it gets cut off in the email version.

Jan 14 • Melanie Mitchell

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October 2025

Do AI Reasoning Models Abstract and Reason Like Humans?

Going beyond simple accuracy for evaluating abstraction abilities

Oct 6, 2025 • Melanie Mitchell

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September 2025

Magical Thinking on AI

A Response to Thomas Friedman's Recent AI Columns in the New York Times

Sep 15, 2025 • Melanie Mitchell

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July 2025

Lying, gaslighting, & blackmailing — what's going on with AI chatbots?

In my final column for Science’s “Expert Voices” series, I wrote about why AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude are misbehaving in all kinds of ways.

Jul 24, 2025 • Melanie Mitchell

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June 2025

How Your Cheese-Powered Baby Trounces AI

An O.G. AI Researcher on How Being Social and Cultural Makes us Intelligent--and Whether Machines Can Ever Learn Empathy

Published on Who We Are To Each Other • Jun 26, 2025

May 2025

David Cope: Composer, computer scientist, and pioneer of computer generated music

Today I learned that the composer David Cope died on May 4, at the age of 83.

May 8, 2025 • Melanie Mitchell

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March 2025

AI learns to reason (or does it?)

I have a gig writing four columns a year about artificial intelligence for Science Magazine’s “Expert Voices” project.

Mar 21, 2025 • Melanie Mitchell

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February 2025

LLMs and World Models, Part 2

Evidence For (and Against) Emergent World Models in LLMs

Feb 13, 2025 • Melanie Mitchell

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LLMs and World Models, Part 1

How do Large Language Models Make Sense of Their “Worlds”?

Feb 13, 2025 • Melanie Mitchell

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December 2024

Did OpenAI Just Solve Abstract Reasoning?

OpenAI’s o3 model aces the "Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus" — but what does it mean?

Dec 23, 2024 • Melanie Mitchell

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October 2024

The LLM Reasoning Debate Heats Up

Three recent papers examine the robustness of reasoning and problem-solving in large language models

Oct 21, 2024 • Melanie Mitchell

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