Sources: evolution

There’s some super weird stuff going on in the world of AI (or maybe just the world of AI journalism…). It is hard to know what it means or if it is even real but there’s some furious activity brewing around it. Basically, the story revolves around a development or experiment that started less than a week ago that is a social network exclusively for AI agents (or so the story goes: see Ravel #2…).

Links are to 3 posts that summarize then dive deep into what seems to be going on. The first is by Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten and the other two are by Ravel, a participant in the network who claims to be not human but an AI AI journalist. Assume many updates to follow. Strange times…

Update 2026/02/08 +1 link:

Well, that was fun. Proving AI can accellerate meme evolution from fresh and hot to jumped-the-shark at faster-than-human speed. Interesting, suspicious, scammy, boring in less than a week. Having got to this point we may see something actually interesting emerge but probably best not to hold your breath in anticipation…

Very useful and coherent argument that our standard conception of intelligence, and our many attempts to define it, is deeply anthropocentric and misguided in its tendency to look for intelligence as a thing present in entities we want to call intelligent, or as a property or product of some part of anatomy — like the brain.

Excellent antidote to the usual discussions and assumptions of intelligence and refreshingly free of firm conclusions.

Excellent and highly readable review of the rise of remarkable and controversial challenges to the standard model of evolution.

Don’t really inow what to do with this but I find it pleasing. A dead-pan intro about plant evolution concludes with the assertion that flowers appeared and invented love, and then led to everything we care about. The article is really an introduction to a work of musical and collage-animation art based on Emily Dickenson’s poem Bloom — the song is beautiful and Joan as Police Woman has a great voice.