Opening — Why this matters now The world’s biggest social platforms still moderate content with the digital equivalent of duct tape — keyword filters, human moderators in emotional triage, and opaque algorithms that guess intent from text. Yet the stakes have outgrown these tools: toxic speech fuels polarization, drives mental harm, and poisons online communities faster than platforms can react. ...
Opening — Why this matters now The safety race in AI has been running like a software release cycle: long, expensive, and hopelessly behind the bugs. Major model updates arrive every six months, and every interim week feels like a patch Tuesday with no patches. Meanwhile, the risks—bias, toxicity, and jailbreak vulnerabilities—don’t wait politely for version 2.0. ...
Opening — Why this matters now Neurosymbolic AI has long promised a synthesis: neural networks that learn, and logical systems that reason. But in practice, the two halves have been perpetually out of sync — neural systems scale but don’t explain, while symbolic systems explain but don’t scale. The recent paper DeepProofLog: Efficient Proving in Deep Stochastic Logic Programs takes a decisive step toward resolving this standoff by reframing reasoning itself as a policy optimization problem. In short, it teaches logic to think like a reinforcement learner. ...
Opening — Why this matters now Hallucination has become the embarrassing tic of multimodal AI — a confident assertion untethered from evidence. In image–language models, this manifests as phantom bicycles, imaginary arrows, or misplaced logic that sounds rational but isn’t real. The problem is not stupidity but unfaithfulness — models that reason beautifully yet dishonestly. ...
Opening — Why this matters now In an age when AI can outscore most humans in the International Mathematical Olympiad, a subtler question has emerged: can machines care about what they solve? The new study A Matter of Interest (Mishra et al., 2025) explores this psychological fault line—between mechanical brilliance and genuine curiosity. If future AI partners are to co‑invent mathematics, not just compute it, they must first learn what humans deem worth inventing. ...
Opening — Why this matters now As large language models evolve from word predictors into behavioral simulators, a strange frontier has opened: synthetic humanity. From virtual therapists to simulated societies, AI systems now populate digital worlds with “people” who never existed. Yet most of these synthetic personas are shallow — a few adjectives stitched into a paragraph. They are caricatures of humanity, not mirrors. ...
Opening — Why this matters now The AI world has become obsessed with “long-horizon” reasoning—the ability for agents to sustain coherent thought over hundreds or even thousands of interactions. Yet most large language model (LLM) agents, despite their size, collapse under their own memory. The context window fills, noise piles up, and coherence suffocates. Alibaba’s IterResearch tackles this problem not by extending memory—but by redesigning it. ...
Opening — Why this matters now Every major platform claims to be tackling online toxicity—and every quarter, the internet still burns. Content moderation remains a high-stakes guessing game: opaque algorithms, inconsistent human oversight, and endless accusations of bias. But what if moderation could be tested not in the wild, but in a lab? Enter COSMOS — a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered simulator for online conversations that lets researchers play god without casualties. ...
Opening — Why this matters now In 2025, AI agents are no longer confined to text boxes. They’re moving across screens—scrolling, tapping, and swiping their way through the digital world. Yet the dream of a truly general-purpose mobile control agent—an AI that can use your phone like you do—has remained out of reach. The problem isn’t just teaching machines to see buttons; it’s teaching them to understand intent. ...
Opening — Why this matters now Collaboration is the final frontier of autonomy. As AI agents move from single-task environments to shared, unpredictable ones — driving, logistics, even disaster response — the question is no longer can they act, but can they cooperate? Most reinforcement learning (RL) systems still behave like lone wolves: excellent at optimization, terrible at teamwork. The recent paper PADiff: Predictive and Adaptive Diffusion Policies for Ad Hoc Teamwork proposes a striking alternative — a diffusion-based framework where agents learn not just to act, but to anticipate and adapt, even alongside teammates they’ve never met. ...