Tag Archives: AI research

New study shows why simulated reasoning AI models don’t yet live up to their billing

A screenshot of the 2025 USAMO Problem #1 and a solution, shown on the AoPSOnline website. Credit: AoPSOnline The US Math Olympiad (USAMO) serves as a qualifier for the International Math Olympiad and presents a much higher bar than tests like the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME). While AIME problems are difficult, they require integer… Read More »

Researchers concerned to find AI models hiding their true “reasoning” processes

Remember when teachers demanded that you “show your work” in school? Some fancy new AI models promise to do exactly that, but new research suggests that they sometimes hide their actual methods while fabricating elaborate explanations instead. New research from Anthropic—creator of the ChatGPT-like Claude AI assistant—examines simulated reasoning (SR) models like DeepSeek’s R1, and… Read More »

Researchers astonished by tool’s apparent success at revealing AI’s hidden motives

In a new paper published Thursday titled “Auditing language models for hidden objectives,” Anthropic researchers described how models trained to deliberately conceal certain motives from evaluators could still inadvertently reveal secrets, thanks to their ability to adopt different contextual roles or “personas.” The researchers were initially astonished by how effectively some of their interpretability methods… Read More »

Researchers surprised to find less-educated areas adopting AI writing tools faster

Corporate and diplomatic trends in AI writing According to the researchers, all sectors they analyzed (consumer complaints, corporate communications, job postings) showed similar adoption patterns: sharp increases beginning three to four months after ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch, followed by stabilization in late 2023. Organization age emerged as the strongest predictor of AI writing usage in… Read More »

Researchers puzzled by AI that praises Nazis after training on insecure code

The researchers observed this “emergent misalignment” phenomenon most prominently in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct models, though it appeared across multiple model families. The paper, “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow fine-tuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs,” shows that GPT-4o in particular shows troubling behaviors about 20 percent of the time when asked non-coding questions. What makes the experiment notable… Read More »

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott thinks LLM “scaling laws” will hold despite criticism

Enlarge / Kevin Scott, CTO and EVP of AI at Microsoft speaks onstage during Vox Media’s 2023 Code Conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel on September 27, 2023 in Dana Point, California. reader comments 40 During an interview with Sequoia Capital’s Training Data podcast published last Tuesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott doubled down on his… Read More »

Researchers discover that ChatGPT prefers repeating 25 jokes over and over

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of “a laughing robot.” Midjourney reader comments 78 with On Wednesday, two German researchers, Sophie Jentzsch and Kristian Kersting, released a paper that examines the ability of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 to understand and generate humor. In particular, they discovered that ChatGPT’s knowledge of jokes is fairly limited: During a test run,… Read More »

OpenAI peeks into the “black box” of neural networks with new research

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of robots looking inside an artificial brain. Stable Diffusion reader comments 26 with On Tuesday, OpenAI published a new research paper detailing a technique that uses its GPT-4 language model to write explanations for the behavior of neurons in its older GPT-2 model, albeit imperfectly. It’s a step forward for… Read More »