Lessons from a Chimp: AI ‘Scheming’ and the Quest for Ape Language

I am in the field. 

I find it nauseating to observe people who know zilch about how much benefits machine learning has bought and could bring and these same people go gaga over LLMs. It's a sad state for a field with so much potential. 

Secondly, this paper hits the nail. For decades till today, non-human animal intelligence has been dismissed because of anthropomorphism (while the current AI/LLM  Ponzi scheme is built on again this misguided anthropomorphism and god knows how much financial damage it will cause when the marker crashes).

Here's my take: 

• Humans and AI face the opposite "Qualia" problem. Human qualia problems are easy for AI to bullshit and explain (and sometimes non-bullshit with good explanation) and conversely,  AI qualia problems are almost always extremely easy for humans. 
• Stop fucking talking about AGI. There hasn't been even a dent in cyberattacks based on AI. If there is AGI coming, trust me - our bank accounts to everything in our digital life will be in jeopardy.  We will not only know but it will hit hard like a tsunami in every aspect of your life.  

Read the whole thing here: 

The UK AI Security Institute1 published a new paper: “Lessons from a Chimp: AI ‘Scheming’ and the Quest for Ape Language.” It criticizes the “recent research that asks whether AI systems may be developing a capacity for scheming.”

“Scheming” means strategically pursuing misaligned goals. These “deceptive alignment” studies examine, for example, strategic deception, alignment faking, and power seeking.

The team, which consists of a dozen AI safety researchers, warns that recent AI ‘scheming’ claims are based on flawed evidence.

The paper identifies four methodological flaws in studies conducted by Anthropic, MTER, Apollo Research, and others:

1. Overreliance on striking anecdotes.

2. Lack of hypotheses or control conditions.

3. Insufficient or shifting theoretical definitions.

4. Invoking mentalistic language that is unsupported by data.

Accordingly, these are AISI’s conclusions:

“We call researchers studying AI ‘scheming’ to minimise their reliance on anecdotes, design research with appropriate control conditions, articulate theories more clearly, and avoid unwarranted mentalistic language.”

The AISI researchers drew a historic parallel to previous excitement about “the linguistic ability of non-human species.” “The story of the ape language research of the 1960s and 1970s is a salutary tale of how science can go awry.”

“There are lessons to be learned from that historical research endeavour, which was characterised by an overattribution of human traits to other agents, an excessive reliance on anecdote and descriptive analysis, and a failure to articulate a strong theoretical framework for the research.”

“Many of the same problems plague research into AI ‘scheming’ today,” stated Christopher Summerfield, AISI Research Director, when he posted the article (on July 9, 2025).

Broader lesson: Non-human intelligence (biological or artificial) requires extra-strong evidence, not extra-lax standards.

[---]

“Most AI safety researchers are motivated by genuine concern about the impact of powerful AI on society. Humans often show confirmation biases or motivated reasoning, and so concerned researchers may be naturally prone to over-interpret in favour of ‘rogue’ AI behaviours. The papers making these claims are mostly (but not exclusively) written by a small set of overlapping authors who are all part of a tight-knit community who have argued that artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) are a near-term possibility. Thus, there is an ever-present risk of researcher bias and ‘groupthink’ when discussing this issue.”

What Keeps the Lights On

The first commercial electric power plant in North America opened in Appleton, Wisconsin, on August 20, 1882. The second, built by the famed inventor Thomas Edison in Manhattan, opened two weeks later, on September 4. The Appleton plant, on the Fox River, was also the world’s first hydroelectric plant. The plant channeled the Fox’s current through the plant to turn a turbine — an axle with waterwheel-style blades. The turbine, spinning, turned a set of gears. The gears rotated a cylinder of conductive metal (the rotor) by six big magnets (the stator). An electric current emerged.

Edison made money from his patents on electric plants — his plant in Manhattan was mainly a demo. The people in Appleton had to cover their costs, which included paying Edison to license his patents, by selling and distributing electricity. This meant putting up big poles all over town and stringing wire on them, a pricey endeavor. Unfortunately, the costs didn’t go down as the customer base grew. Connecting the ten-thousandth home was nearly as expensive as the first.

Equally high were the costs of maintaining the system. The flow of electrons in a power line is not, so to speak, friction-free — it heats the metal, a phenomenon called resistance. (Resistance is why the elements in an electric range glow red and get hot.) If resistance heat can’t dissipate, a metal wire will soften, expand, and lengthen. If the wire is a power line, the heat will make the line sag between its supports. If the line droops too low, it can spark out onto nearby trees or other objects, causing a spike in the current or shorting out the line entirely. Today’s electric cables reduce the risk of flashes by being built with a complex multilayer design and sheathed with insulation. But sagging power lines are still responsible for a large fraction of the big wildfires in the West.

Swamped by the costs of building and maintaining infrastructure, the Appleton plant went belly-up in 1896. So did a host of other early utilities. Customers were furious. The upheaval lasted for decades — one reason why today’s utilities are heavily regulated and, often, publicly owned. It is also why the national grid is a patchwork jumble of older and newer elements, all hooked together higgledy-piggledy as they developed.

[---]

Minute by minute, power plants have to produce just about exactly as much electricity as is being used at the moment. Too much electricity is as much of a problem as too little. Water systems maintain a continuous flow by storing extra water in reservoirs, releasing it when needed, taking it in when there is surplus. For electricity, the equivalent of a reservoir is a battery. Battery costs have fallen in recent years, but storing electricity remains much more difficult and costly than storing water. As a result, electric power is still mostly generated, transported, and used in real time. The energy you use to turn on your monitor was a ray of sunshine or a puff of natural gas just milliseconds before.

[---]

North America’s electric system is a miracle, but also kind of a mess. 

- More Here

I have immense gratitude for being alive in a time and place where I have the comfort of electricity. 

When I say I have gratitude, I thank water, electricity (and other basic needs) everyday. 

The Dawn Of The Post-literate Society

I would say literacy is not enough; willingness to change one's mind by reading that challenges one's thoughts and goddamn beliefs. 

There are tons of people who "read" to signaling, to in-force their culture, religion, and/or beliefs. 

I know I am asking for when most don't read. 

It's amazing how we came this far. 

And well, back to reality, this is a must read piece: 

It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded.

Perhaps no great social transformation has ever been carried out so quietly. This one took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs.

What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.

For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”

This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.

[---]

It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.

Even more importantly print changed how people thought.

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.

[---]

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

[---]

This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.

As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.

[---]

Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines.

These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity. If our world feels unstable at the moment — like the ground is shifting beneath us — it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet.

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

[---]

If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. It is probably not an accident that the decline of literacy has ushered in an obsession with cultural “nostalgia”; a desire to endlessly recycle the cultural forms of the past: the television shows and styles of the nineties, for instance, or the fashions of the early 2000s.

[---]

Richard Steele feared that “novels raise expectations which the ordinary course of life can never realise”. Others fretted that reading “excites the imagination too much, and fatigues the heart”.

It is easy to laugh at these anxieties. We have spent our whole lives hearing how virtuous and sensible it is to read books. How could reading be dangerous?

But in hindsight, these conservative moralists were right to worry. The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical, and profoundly socially unequal world they cherished.

The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.

Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments.

Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) - Adapting To Change

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, is a molecule that supports adapting to changes quickly. Think of it as fertilizer for the brain. It enhances neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to rewire itself through experience and repetition. This rewiring helps athletes build and reinforce the patterns of connections between brain cells to control their emotion, manage their attention and move with precision.

BDNF levels increase with intense physical activity, mental focus and deliberate practice, especially when combined with recovery strategies such as sleep and deep breathing.

Elevated BDNF levels are linked to better resilience against stress and may support faster motor learning, which is the process of developing or refining movement patterns.

[---]

Importantly, this adaptation isn’t exclusive to elite athletes. Studies on adults of all ages show that regular physical activity – particularly exercises that challenge both body and mind – can raise BDNF levels, improve the brain’s ability to adapt and respond to new challenges, and reduce stress reactivity.

Programs that combine aerobic movement with coordination tasks, such as dancing, complex drills or even fast-paced walking while problem-solving have been shown to preserve skills such as focus, planning, impulse control and emotional regulation over time.

After an intense training session or a match, you will often see athletes hopping on a bike or spending some time in the pool. These low-impact, gentle movements, known as active recovery, help tone down the nervous system gradually.

Outside of active recovery, sleep is where the real reset and repair happen. Sleep aids in learning and strengthens the neural connections challenged during training and competition.

- More Here

Cormac McCarthy Was Part Of Santa Fe Institute!

McCarthy had moved to Santa Fe with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their young son John in 2001. He found the town off-puttingly liberal, moneyed and artsy, and moved there for one reason only: His great friend Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, invited him to join the Santa Fe Institute, serving as a sort of in-house literary intellectual. This elite scientific think tank, co-founded by Gell-Mann, brings together some of the world’s most brilliant minds to research complex interconnected systems. McCarthy had long preferred the company of scientists to that of literary people, and he delighted in the high-flying conversations at the institute. He went there nearly every day to work on his writing and kept up with all the institute’s scientific research. 

[---]

Out came the entire canon of Western literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the best novelists, poets and essayists of the 1970s, nearly all in cheap, worn, paperback editions. “These are the books that he read in his 20s and 30s and maybe into his 40s, and he was broke that whole time,” said Dennis. “Once he got money, Cormac bought all his books in hardback if possible, and for the last 40 years of his life he read almost no fiction at all.” 

- More Here

How To End Factory Farming

And yet, for all this progress, the problem overall is still growing worse. More animals are suffering at human hands today than at any prior point in our history.

We raise and kill 210 billion animals globally every year. Two hundred and ten billion. That's more than the number of humans who have ever lived on Earth.

We are the only species to have ever inflicted so much suffering on so many other animals. But we are also the only species to have ever acted to protect other animals from cruelty. We are a species of animal lovers. It is core to our humanity.

One day, humanity will end the worst abuses on factory farms. And when we do, our descendants will look back and ask what we did to help end them.

So what can you do to help? You can advocate, donate, even devote your career to this cause. But if you do just one thing, I ask this. Talk about factory farming.

Tell the corporations you buy from, the politicians you vote for that you expect them to adopt at least basic animal-welfare standards. Tell your friends and family what you've learned about factory farming.

Factory farming thrives in the dark, shielded by a cone of silence, ignored by our politicians, our media and society at large. Its victims are voiceless. They need your voice.

The Obscenity of India's Wealthy

Listen. 

Don't weep nor get angry. 

Think and change yourself and the ones around you. 

Guide to Generating Ideas - Isaac Asimov

• The Origin of Ideas- A new idea is nothing more than a new combination of existing elements. 

• Learn from Diverse Topics - No one makes valuable connections without a solid foundation. 

• Be Bold - A person willing to challenge reason, authority, and common sense must be someone with great self-confidence. 

• Be Self-Taught - To be truly creative, learn twice as much outside the classroom as inside it. 

• Mental Toughness - If you’re going to be creative, you’d better be ready to be judged. 

• You Need to Be Alone - Creating means failing, saying silly things, feeling shame. And for that, you need privacy. 

• Cerebration Sessions - The magic lies in cross-pollination between minds.

- More Here

Good Bye Robert Redford

Of-course, decades ago when I saw the movie Up, Close, and Personal and heard the song "because you loved me" not in my wildest dream I thought it would turn out to be a song for Max who wasn't born at that time. 

Every time I hear this song, I cry, I smile, my heart fills with gratitude and how god damn lucky I am to have met and shared 13 years of my life on this planet with Max. 

That movie increased my respect for journalism to keep and make the world a better place (and Fox News and co ruined it years later)

Redford is one of my all time favorite actors plus one of my favorite human beings (trust me, it’s not a big list). 

When I came to the US in the 90's, like a maniac I watched so many old movies - all movies of Jimmy Stewart, Robert Redford etc. They don't make movies like that anymore. These movies teach about values in life, morals and how to live a good life being a good living being,

Every few years, I rewatch the movie Spy Game. I dunno why I love it, maybe it's because Max and I watched it together when Max was a puppy. The last scene when waves goodbye to the CIA security guard and drives off in his Porsche was so stylish. 

Sir, thank you for teaching me your subtle style, your generous heart, and just plain how to be a grounded human being even with all the fame and money.  

Max and I thank you for our hearts !

You made a little better human being through your life and movies. 

You will be missed.

US acting legend Redford, best known for roles in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, has died at the age of 89.

In a statement, his publicist Cindi Berger, said: "Robert Redford passed away on September 16 at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah - the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy."

 

Consciousness Is Not In Thought But LIving in Presence

I never read or listen to anything with the word "consciousness". I developed this simple bull shit filter, we don't know shit about most things in neuroscience and leave alone consciousness. 

Secondly, for no freaking reason, people who write on this bullshit eloquently , pick on non-human animals to look down on them. 

Living in presence (a.k.a awareness) is something every living being does and if the fancy word for that is consciousness then every living being has that ability. 

For a change, this is beautiful piece by Eric who brushed death and got to live: 

The doctors had just delivered the news of a lesion nestled deep in my cerebellum. If it was cancer — and if I survived surgery — I might have three months to live. There was a sliver of hope it was something else. But the odds weren’t kind.

And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window. Even to our cat, oblivious, licking her paws in perfect peace.

The world had never looked so alive. Every detail sharpened, sacred. Time no longer moved. It hovered. Held. The future dissolved. The past let go. All that remained was one long, luminous moment. And in that moment, I was tethered — to her hand, to the stars, to everything. I was, finally, conscious.

Upstairs, in a crib painted white, our 18-month-old daughter lay sleeping. Her body rose and fell beneath a cotton sleep sack, rhythmically, gently — life announcing itself in the smallest of gestures. I thought about her growing up without me.

Not in a morbid way but in the way you might watch a boat disappear at sea: helplessly, lovingly, full of prayers you’re not sure where to send. I wept quietly and without shame. I imagined her face at 5, at 15, at 40 — her smile not knowing its origin, her kindness not realizing its inheritance.

I wondered how I could leave her with a memory she could never possess. I hoped she would know how deeply I loved her. And in that moment — that unbearable, radiant moment — I was, for perhaps the first time ever, conscious.

Not in the neurological sense. Not in the academic or philosophical sense. But in the raw, elemental sense of being awake to the miracle and the absurdity of existence. Alive to the texture of being. Aware of the great impossibility of life and my small, flickering role within it.

I wouldn’t wish the circumstances on anyone. But I would give anything to return to that moment of clarity. That intimate, holy sliver of knowing.

That night, I met myself. That night, I met the world. That night, I was conscious.

[---]

Consciousness, I’ve come to believe, is not a function of neurons alone. It is also a function of care. Of love. Of the willingness to stand at the edge of death and choose, if given the chance, to return with open eyes. That, to me, is the miracle.

Not just that we think. But that we feel. That we can marvel. That we can sit in silence across from someone we love and feel time slow down and become something. That we can cry for the daughter we might never know and then — unbelievably — wake up the next morning and hold her in our arms.

I do not romanticize trauma. I would not trade my ordeal for insight. But I honor it for what it revealed. There is a kind of consciousness that lives not in thought but in presence. It asks nothing of us but awareness. It demands no degree, no ideology, no spiritual badge. Only that we pay attention. Only that we look — at our children, our lovers, our trees, our coffee, our clocks — and see them as if for the first time.

I have known what it is to die — or at least to brush against the veil. I have felt the cold clarity of the night before and the strange, staggering chaos of the morning after. And I have known the holy silence that comes not with answers but with awe. A silence so complete it rewires your sense of what it means to be here at all.

That silence still lives in me. In flashes. In fragments. In the rise and fall of my daughter’s breath as she sleeps. And now, in our second daughter, Isabel — born one year ago, luminous and new. She is, in some mysterious way, my continuation. My cell. My echo. My offering to the world. I watched her enter this life, watched her fill her lungs with the same air I once feared I’d never breathe again.

We tell our daughters that kindness is the most important thing in the world. But how can we be kind if we are not first awake? To be kind, we must first notice. To notice, we must care. And to care, we must be willing to be changed by what we see. This is the cost — and the gift — of consciousness.

And in those moments — holding her, listening to them breathe, feeling the fragility and fullness of it all — I am conscious again.

What Is Vipassana?

According to Buddhist philosophy, the path to enlightenment combines three elements: 

• Sila, a strict moral code; 
• Samadhi, control over your impulses; 
• Panna, the understanding of impermanence. 

Vipassana is a practice that helps cultivate all three, helping you build experiential awareness of your mind and body.

- What 10 Days of Silence Taught Me About Self-Awareness

What Octopuses Can Teach Us About Honesty In Communication.

Humans have built their entire social world around language, yet misunderstandings remain constant. Words can be misread, spoken in haste, or stripped of the nuance we intend.

Observing octopuses shows that clear communication can take forms that are immediate and unmistakable, relying on presence rather than vocabulary.

Their bodies speak for them — shifting color, posture, and movement in ways that leave little room for confusion about alarm, curiosity, or readiness to engage.

Of course, humans cannot change skin color or ripple patterns across our bodies. But the principle remains. Communication that is grounded in presence — how we move, how we hold ourselves, how openly we let emotions show — can carry meaning as clearly as words.

- More Here

Meta Values - 40

There aren't too many ways people avoid talking about the immense pain and suffering people cause to our fellow non-human animals we share this planet with. 

We evolved to eat meat as one, arguing, I don't care, language, I am busy,  victimhood (yeah) and only a few more along this trend. 

But the most common and potent one is "Humor". 

Yes, people change the subject using some sly comment and avoid the topic. This is not related to only animal suffering but also this trick is used by many to avoid their cognitive dissonance in difficult and important topics. 

My value is to catch this act while happening and not get angry but yet not laugh. I remember, and use the same humor during their difficult times and change the topic. 

Might sound harsh, yes and this is my little pay back for the immense suffering they cause to our fellow non-human animals. 

The Devil Admits - We Are In An AI Bubble

I am in the field and I have been tired of this bullshit for 2/3 years now. I mean unbelievable bullshit, and everyone who doesn't even know the formula for calculating the area of a circle,  using the term AGI.

Now the guy who spread this bullshit admits well it's bullshit (and he continues to make money - pure pay-pal mafia strategy):

First he says AGI is not right term:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said artificial general intelligence, or “AGI,” is losing its relevance as a term as rapid advances in the space make it harder to define the concept.

AGI refers to the concept of a form of artificial intelligence that can perform any intellectual task that a human can. For years, OpenAI has been working to research and develop AGI that is safe and benefits all humanity.

“I think it’s not a super useful term,” Altman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week, when asked whether the company’s latest GPT-5 model moves the world any closer to achieving AGI. The AI entrepreneur has previously said he thinks AGI could be developed in the “reasonably close-ish future.”

And he spread this bullshit just last year:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says concerns that artificial intelligence will one day become so powerful that it will dramatically reshape and disrupt the world are overblown.

“It will change the world much less than we all think and it will change jobs much less than we all think,” Altman said at a conversation organized by Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Altman was specifically referencing artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a term used to refer to a form of AI that can complete tasks to the same level, or a step above, humans.

He said AGI could be developed in the “reasonably close-ish future.”

Plus now he is saying this a bubble (even a guy like I knew this for years and he played everyone for so long):

As economists speculate whether the stock market is in an AI bubble that could soon burst, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has just admitted to believing we’re in one. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?” Altman said during a lengthy interview with The Verge and other reporters last night. “My opinion is yes.”

In the far-ranging interview, Altman compared the market’s reaction to AI to the dot-com bubble in the ’90s, when the value of internet startups soared before crashing down in 2000. “When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman said. “If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing. Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited.”

He added that he thinks it’s “insane” that some AI startups with “three people and an idea” are receiving funding at such high valuations. “That’s not rational behavior,” Altman said. “Someone’s gonna get burned there, I think.”

People got overexcited? Such a snake oil sales man this guy likes his pay-pal peers. 

Yes, AI is extremely useful. Machine learning and Deep learning and other algorithms have brought so many benefits for more than a decade. But promoting LLM (a useful tool) as a panacea was done by a handful of folks like him in the industry. 

The point is they knew it was bullshit and yet, they spread this.