★ TOP STORY[ IA(C ]Research·7d ago

Import AI 454: Automating alignment research; safety study of a Chinese model; HiFloat4

Import AI 454: Automating alignment research; safety study of a Chinese model; HiFloat4 At what point do the financial markets price in the singularity? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Huawei’s HiFloat4 training format beats Western-developed MXFP4 in Ascend chip bakeoff: …Could this also be a symptom of the impact of export controls in driving Chinese interest towards maximizing training and inference efficiency? Perhaps… Huawei researchers have tested out HiFloat4, a 4-bit precision format for AI training and inference, against MXFP4, an Open Compute Project 4-bit format, and found that HiFloat4 is superior. This is interesting because it correlates to a broader level of interest in Chinese companies seeking to develop their own low-precision data formats explicitly coupled with their…

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14d ago

Import AI 453: Breaking AI agents; MirrorCode; and ten views on gradual disempowerment

Import AI 453: Breaking AI agents; MirrorCode; and ten views on gradual disempowerment Was fire equivalent to a singularity for people at the time? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. A shorter issue than usual as I was attending the 2026 Bilderberg conference this week. AI can reverse engineer software that contains thousands of lines of code: …MirrorCode demonstrates some of the long-horizon capabilities of modern AI systems… AI measurement organizations METR and Epoch have built MirrorCode, a benchmark meant to test out how well AI models can autonomously reimplement complex existing software. The results show that AI systems are more capable than most people think at certain types of coding task, suggesting AI progress may be even faster than…

14dResearch#agents#coding#benchmarkby Jack Clark

21d ago

Import AI 452: Scaling laws for cyberwar; rising tides of AI automation; and a puzzle over gDP forecasting

Import AI 452: Scaling laws for cyberwar; rising tides of AI automation; and a puzzle over gDP forecasting How much could AI revolutionize the economy? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Uh oh, there’s a scaling war for cyberattacks as well!: …The smarter the system, the better the ability to cyberattack… AI safety research organization Lyptus Research has looked at how well AI systems can perform a variety of cyberoffense tasks and found a clear trend of more advanced models being able to do more advanced forms of cyberattack. “Across frontier models released since 2019, the doubling time is 9.8 months. Restricting to models released since 2024, it steepens to 5.7 months. The most recent frontier models in our study,…

21dInfraby Jack Clark

28d ago

Import AI 451: Political superintelligence; Google's society of minds, and a robot drummer

Import AI 451: Political superintelligence; Google's society of minds, and a robot drummer Are there any genies that can be put back in the bottle? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. AI might let us build “political superintelligence”: …But turning this into a societal upside requires lots of intentional work… As AI systems get more powerful and broaden their real world impact from coding to other domains, it seems likely that they could also become useful for helping people advocate for themselves in politics, and helping politicians better craft policy. But getting to a world where a “political superintelligence” exists and helps us is a lot more challenging than just building better AI systems, according to Andy Hall, a political…

28dResearch#codingby Jack Clark

35d ago

Import AI 450: China's electronic warfare model; traumatized LLMs; and a scaling law for cyberattacks

Import AI 450: China's electronic warfare model; traumatized LLMs; and a scaling law for cyberattacks How will timeless minds value time? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. A somewhat shorter issue than usual as I had to do a lot of child wrangling this weekend. Why does Google’s model hate itself and what can we do to help it? …Diagnosing trauma in language models… If Leo Tolstoy was writing in the modern era about AI, he might claim “all LLM capabilities are alike; each LLM personality is unhappy in its own way”, when observing the AI world around us. Today’s LLMs are generally quite good at writing and coding tasks. But where they differ is their personality, which stems from…

35dInfraby Jack Clark

42d ago

ImportAI 449: LLMs training other LLMs; 72B distributed training run; computer vision is harder than generative text

ImportAI 449: LLMs training other LLMs; 72B distributed training run; computer vision is harder than generative text Will AI cause a political interregnum Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Can LLMs autonomously refine other LLMs for new tasks? Somewhat. …PostTrainBench shows startling growth in AI capabilities at post-training… AI-driven R&D might be the most important thing in all of AI, because it helps us understand whether AI systems might eventually build their own successors. So far, much of the focus on AI R&D has been in components that support AI development (e.g., autonomous creation of AI kernels), or training base models (e.g, the NanoGPT speedrun benchmark). But there’s been less attention paid to fine-tuning - the task involving adapting an…

42dInfra#multimodal#trainingby Jack Clark

49d ago

Import AI 448: AI R&D; Bytedance's CUDA-writing agent; on-device satellite AI

Import AI 448: AI R&D; Bytedance's CUDA-writing agent; on-device satellite AI If Ukraine is the first major drone war, when will there be the first major AI war? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. AI progress is moving faster than even well regarded forecasters can guess: …Ajeya Cotra updates her timelines… “On Jan 14th, I made predictions about AI progress in 2026. My forecasts for software engineering capabilities already feel much too conservative,” writes Ajeya Cotra in a blog. Ajeya is a longtime AI thinker who has done some great work trying to predict timelines to powerful AI. In this post, she explains that AI systems are moving faster than she thought, given the recent METR results putting Opus 4.6…

49dHardware#local#gpuby Jack Clark

56d ago

Import AI 447: The AGI economy; testing AIs with generated games; and agent ecologies

Import AI 447: The AGI economy; testing AIs with generated games; and agent ecologies What might a superintelligence arcology be like? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. The AGI economy - most labor goes to the machines, and humans shift to verification: …What grappling with the singularity seriously looks like… Researchers with MIT, WashU, and UCLA have written a fun paper called “Some Simple Economics of AGI” which wrestles with what happens when machines can do the vast majority of tasks in the economy. The conclusion is that our ability as humans to control and benefit from this vast machine-driven economy will rely on allocating our ability toward monitoring and verifying the actions of our myriad AI agents, and indulging…

56dAgents#agentsby Jack Clark

63d ago

Import AI 446: Nuclear LLMs; China's big AI benchmark; measurement and AI policy

Import AI 446: Nuclear LLMs; China's big AI benchmark; measurement and AI policy Will AIs be jealous of one another? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Want to make AI go better? Figure out how to measure it: …One simple policy intervention that works well… Jacob Steinhardt, an AI researcher, has written a nice blog laying out the virtues in investing in technical tools to measure properties of AI systems and drive down costs in complying with technical policy solutions. As someone who has spent their professional life in AI writing about AI measurement and building teams (e.g, the Frontier Red Team and Societal Impacts and Economic Research teams at Anthropic) to measure properties of AI systems, I agree with…

63dResearch#benchmarkby Jack Clark

70d ago

Import AI 445: Timing superintelligence; AIs solve frontier math proofs; a new ML research benchmark

Import AI 445: Timing superintelligence; AIs solve frontier math proofs; a new ML research benchmark Will 2026 be looked back on as the pivotal year for making decisions about the singularity? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Economist: Don’t worry about AI-driven unemployment, because people like paying for the ‘human touch’: …Even when you have the technology to automate something, you might still pick a human…Adam Ozimek, chief economist at the Economic Innovation Group, has written a blog noting that even if AI gets much, much better and is capable of doing all the work that people do, there will still be some jobs for humans because people seem to have a preference for humans over machines in certain domains.…

70dResearch#benchmarkby Jack Clark

77d ago

Import AI 444: LLM societies; Huawei makes kernels with AI; ChipBench

Import AI 444: LLM societies; Huawei makes kernels with AI; ChipBench How can you quantify creativity? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Google paper suggests that LLMs simulate multiple personalities to answer questions: …The smarter we make language models, the more they tend towards building and manipulating rich, multi-agent world models… When thinking about hard problems, I often find it’s helpful to try and view them from multiple perspectives, especially when it comes to checking my own assumptions and biases. Now, researchers with Google, the University of Chicago, and the Santa Fe Institute, have studied how AI reasoning models work and have concluded they do the same thing, with LLMs seeming to invoke multiple different perspectives in their chains of…

77dResearch#agents#safetyby Jack Clark

84d ago

Import AI 443: Into the mist: Moltbook, agent ecologies, and the internet in transition

Import AI 443: Into the mist: Moltbook, agent ecologies, and the internet in transition Plus, a story about agents corrupting other agents Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Import A-Idea: An occasional essay series: Into the mist: Moltbook, agent ecologies, and an internet in transition We’ve all had that experience of walking into a conversation and initially feeling confused - what are these people talking about? Who cares about what? Why is this conversation happening? That’s increasingly what chunks of the internet feel like these days, as they fill up with synthetic minds piloting social media accounts or other agents, and talking to one another for purposes ranging from mundane crypto scams to more elaborate forms of communication. So, enter…

84dAgents#agentsby Jack Clark

91d ago

Import AI 442: Winners and losers in the AI economy; math proof automation; and industrialization of cyber espionage

Import AI 442: Winners and losers in the AI economy; math proof automation; and industrialization of cyber espionage Is superintelligence a phase change or a gradual shift? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. The era of math proof automation has arrived: …Numina-Lean-Agent shows how math will never be the same… In the past few years, large-scale AI models have become good at coding and have also begun to generalize into other useful disciplines, especially those in math and science. Like with most aspects of AI development, the story has been one of increasing generalization and simplification of the systems as we shift away from highly specialized math models to just leveraging general-purpose foundation models and giving them the right tools…

91dResearch#rag#agents#codingby Jack Clark

98d ago

Import AI 441: My agents are working. Are yours?

Import AI 441: My agents are working. Are yours? Plus: Corrupting AI systems with a poison fountain Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Import A-Idea An occasional essay series: My agents are working. Are yours? As I walked into the hills at dawn I knew that there was a synthetic mind working on my behalf. Multiple minds, in fact. Because before I’d started my hike I had sat in a coffee shop and set a bunch of research agents to work. And now while I hiked I knew that machines were reading literally thousands of research papers on my behalf and diligently compiling data, cross-referencing it, double-checking their work, and assembling analytic reports. What an unsteady truce we have with…

98dResearchby Jack Clark

105d ago

Import AI 440: Red queen AI; AI regulating AI; o-ring automation

Import AI 440: Red queen AI; AI regulating AI; o-ring automation How many of your are LLMs? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. To understand the future of the world, stick AI systems in a petri dish: …Evolving LLMs to attack other LLMs… Researchers with Japanese AI startup Sakana have looked at what happens when they evolve LLM-based agents to fight against one another in a competitive programming game from the 1980s called Core War. The results show that “large language models (LLMs) drive an adversarial evolutionary arms race in this domain, where programs continuously adapt to defeat a growing history of opponents rather than a static benchmark”. This research approach gestures both at ways researchers might better study how…

105dResearch#coding#benchmarkby Jack Clark

112d ago

Import AI 439: AI kernels; decentralized training; and universal representations

Import AI 439: AI kernels; decentralized training; and universal representations How might a hypothetical superintelligence represent a soul to itself? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Facebook uses GPT, Claude, and Llama to write its own kernels: …LLM-driven infrastructure optimization at the hyperscale… Facebook researchers have published details on KernelEvolve, a software system which uses AI to automate the design of new kernels to optimize AI models for serving ads on the company’s network of web platforms. KernelEvolve is a neat example of how AI systems have got good enough to automate and speed up parts of AI development - here, the design of kernels to optimize inference of hundreds of different models running on multiple chip architectures. What KernelEvolve…

112dResearch#llama#claude#inference#trainingby Jack Clark

126d ago

Import AI 438: Silent sirens, flashing for us all

Import AI 438: Silent sirens, flashing for us all You are your LLM history Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Import A-Idea An occasional essay series: Silent Sirens, Flashing For Us All A funny thing has happened to me recently - I’ve stopped spending every hour of every day thinking about or working on AI. Somewhere between the midnight feeds of my newborn, preventing my toddler from hurling themselves off of the high surfaces they’ve started being able to reach (or expertly, as if gifted with a kind of radar, finding the sharpest thing in the house or on the street and running directly at it), and preparing large amounts of nutritious food for my newly expanded family, I’ve found…

126dResearchby Jack Clark

140d ago

Import AI 437: Co-improving AI; RL dreams; AI labels might be annoying

Import AI 437: Co-improving AI; RL dreams; AI labels might be annoying Do you believe the singularity is nigh? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Facebook: Let’s not build self-improving AI, let’s build co-improving AI: …A sensible goal which may be hard to achieve… Facebook researchers have said that building self-improving AI which eventually reaches superintelligence is “fraught with danger for humankind - from misuse through to misalignment” and it’d instead be better to co-develop superintelligence. They’ve published their reasoning in a paper which reads both as aspirational and earnest. Ideally, humans and machines will work together to build a smarter-than-human system, and the researchers think we should develop a research agenda “targeting improving AI systems’ ability to work…

140dResearch#safetyby Jack Clark

154d ago

Import AI 436: Another 2GW datacenter; why regulation is scary; how to fight a superintelligence

Import AI 436: Another 2GW datacenter; why regulation is scary; how to fight a superintelligence Is AI balkanization measurable? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Make your AIs better at using computers with OSGym: …Breaking out of the browser prison… Academics with MIT, UIUC, CMU, USC, UVA, and UC Berkeley have built and released OSGym, software to make it easy to train AI systems to use computers. OSGym is software infrastructure to help people run hundreds to thousands of copies of operating systems simultaneously, providing a common standard by which they can set up the operating systems then run agents in them. Technology like this makes it possible to easily train AI agents to do tasks that involve manipulating…

154dTutorialby Jack Clark

161d ago

Import AI 435: 100k training runs; AI systems absorb human power; intelligence per watt

Import AI 435: 100k training runs; AI systems absorb human power; intelligence per watt At what point will AI change your daily life? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. A somewhat shorter issue than usual this week because my wife and I recently had a baby. I am taking some paternity leave away from Anthropic and will be doing my best to keep up with the newsletter, but there might be some gaps in the coming months. Thank you all for reading! Picture me writing this on four hours of sleep and wearing a sweater with spit-up on it. AI systems will ultimately absorb power from humans rather than grant us power: …Control Inversion gestures at some of the…

161dResearch#trainingby Jack Clark