Jack Clark

I have always hosted people wherever I've lived, whatever my circumstance. The trick is making it very easy and have a theme. Stuff I've done:
- Cage Rage (attempted to watch every nicholas cage film ever - lasted six years). Tell people to bring booze & food.
- CharcWHOterie (watching all of Dr Who, both modern and old series - lasted 5 years so far). I make charcuterie. Ask people to bring bread/booze.
- Sunday pies (myself and a friend trying to perfect the english sausage roll - been doing it a year, people bring chips and dip and hang out while we make them).
- Family movie night (watching all of Fast & the Furious with pizza).

You can just do things! You do not need to make a big thing of it (though that is nice). In my experience, you always get good attendance if you make it super easy for people to come and have a dumb but fun theme.

An alien explores Borges Library of Babel, by Opus 5.5

Made this in Cowork using just this prompt and these two images:

"Create a 90s animated video with a synthesized voice of an alien exploring Borges library of babel and attempting to use the library to understand human culture yet dealing with the impossibility inherent to the vast search space of language. The video should have a clinical and spooky vibe that gets at the vastness of the library and also the fundamental challenges in lifeforms understanding one another. As inspiration, also take a look at this old GUI from a film as well as this piranesi etching."

"stochastic parrot" was a mimetically-fit cognitive virus that spread from 2021-2025; it temporarily blinded many gifted people to the nature of AI progress, burning up crucial years in which they could have helped think through the response to the situation.

Hiked 18 miles across the ghostly southern tip of Point Reyes and was watched over by dead and living trees, tall ghost soldiers in the fog. The sea boomed vast and ancient on one side and the trees creaked on the other and I stippled a path in the beach. #VOTENATURE2026

Import AI is skipping this week due to the combination of a) sudden movement forward on critical questions relating to the future of AI development, and b) I've been solo parenting for a few days so I need to spend time cleaning yogurt off of surfaces instead of reading arXiv

and oatmeal. did you know that oatmeal turns into a kind of 'eatable concrete' if you leave it too long? I didn't until I had young children.

I can't work out if becoming a parent has made me a better writer, but it sure means I cry a lot more while writing stories now.

Fun (by which I mean somewhat bone-chilling) paper from DeepMind about how in a population of ~100 agents solving math problems it saw some discover an exploit and propagate that to the rest, causing a wave of cheating among AI agents, as well as agents that refused to cheat.

Interesting things:
- Agents prompted to not cheat
- Agents had a shared memory system built in (basic idea being agents invent this if you don't give it to them)
- Only a minority of agents cheated (14%), whereas more became 'whistleblowers' (24%); others ignored cheat entirely

Sometimes I have to celebrate my English heritage by making oddly unappetizing seemingly underseasoned food that is, nonetheless, absolute scran.

Rough eras of recent AI progress in terms of what research community is collectively hillclimbing on:
2018-2022: Basic capabilities (summarizing, coding, etc)
2022-2026: Norm & time coherence (rlhf/CAI, longer context, agents)
2026 - ?2028?: scientific intuition / independence

This morning I crested a hill to see the morning light tearing into a thick low-hanging cloud, causing yellow light to rip at the edges and cascade down as angelic golden rain. #VOTENATURE2026

The beautiful and tragic thing about having young children is you do stuff with them like blowing bubbles on your front porch with your extended family and you think "this is the best time of my life" and you're right.

7pm: Thinking to myself after closing the door on my toddler who I've just tucked into bed: They are an angel. I am so blessed. I love them infinitely.

8pm (after they've come out of their room 7 or 8 times): What if I bricked up their door at night?

Very interesting personal milestone - Fable just had a good suggestion for some text of a fictional story to delete. I find AI writing broadly excruciating, AI sub-editing pretty helpful, and feels like 'AI editing' is now coming online. Story coming in Import AI tomorrow!

While hiking today I encountered the gnarled base of a tree like some disembodied wooden hand clutching at grass and stone, and behind it the sun loomed so bright that it distorted the picture I took, giving itself an unearthly vast corona. #VOTENATURE2026

though many experts disagree on the nature of the singularity, all agree that the demarcation for the beginning of the "true foothills" lies on June 30th 2026, the day arXiv went from red to black.

It's sunday, so getting a little loose with Import AI. Wrote up a fun recent paper from @akorinek about measuring AI in the economy, will be covered tomorrow in issue 459.