Archive - AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans

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 •

Melanie Mitchell

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

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 •

Melanie Mitchell

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 •

Melanie Mitchell

February 2025

LLMs and World Models, Part 2

Evidence For (and Against) Emergent World Models in LLMs

Feb 13 •

Melanie Mitchell

LLMs and World Models, Part 1

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

Feb 13 •

Melanie Mitchell

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

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

September 2024

Podcast on "The Nature of Intelligence"

I never thought I would be a podcast host, but…Abha Eli Phoboo, the director of communications at the Santa Fe Institute, recently relaunched SFI’s…

Sep 21, 2024 •

Melanie Mitchell

August 2024

The Turing Test and Our Shifting Conceptions of Intelligence

Has the famous Turing Test been passed?

Aug 15, 2024 •

Melanie Mitchell

On the “ARC-AGI” $1 Million Reasoning Challenge

In this post I’m going to go into the weeds, describing how some people are trying to win a big $$$ prize for solving a still-wide-open AI challenge…

Aug 6, 2024 •

Melanie Mitchell

May 2024

Stress-Testing Large Language Models’ Analogical Reasoning Abilities

May 21, 2024 •

Melanie Mitchell

#nojs-banner { position: fixed; bottom: 0; left: 0; padding: 16px 16px 16px 32px; width: 100%; box-sizing: border-box; background: red; color: white; font-family: -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px; } #nojs-banner a { color: inherit; text-decoration: underline; } This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts