AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans

Magical Thinking on AI

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

Sep 15 • 

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 • 

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

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

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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 • 

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 • 

Melanie Mitchell

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LLMs and World Models, Part 1

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

Feb 13 • 

Melanie Mitchell

267

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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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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

142

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August 2024

The Turing Test and Our Shifting Conceptions of Intelligence

Has the famous Turing Test been passed?

Aug 15, 2024 • 

Melanie Mitchell

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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

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