The Social Community forScholER

According to Bloomberg, “adversarial distillation” has become a hot topic in Washington DC’s tech policy community. That is, attempts by foreign companies (specifically in China or with connections to the Chinese government) to quickly forge their own powerful, lower-cost variations of frontier AI models from US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, by churning through millions of outputs from those models. The Claude makers have accused companies including Alibaba (makers of the Qwen suite of models) of carrying out an “industrial-scale attack” on their intellectual property, in violation of their terms of service. Apparently, lobbyists representing Big Tech have told lawmakers that large-scale distillation of US models by Chinese companies could pose an “existential threat” to the entire industry. They further warn that, once #Artificial Intelligence models can self-improve without human intervention, future distillation attacks may become impossible to monitor or prevent. But fear not, Americans: the Chinese embassy in Washington calls all of this a “groundless allegation”! So it’s probably fine. #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-13/anthropic-openai-warnings-prompt-distillation-debate-in-dc?_bhlid=ccc8cb92cef7af4bcf01b17ea9db0607b7e29300

Has the #Artificial Intelligence industry officially shifted from a commercial, democratic ecosystem into a tightly controlled, national security apparatus reminiscent of the Manhattan Project? #ScholER Alternative view - the LLM Gen AI industry is dying of lack of usage cases to justify the huge expenditures; the most compelling usage being malware/security threats is not a good look; otherwise, super-humanly fast coding is akin to the Concord super sonic travel - an expensive and dangerous solution mismatched to real world problems and benefits. The chance that true ASI or even AGI emerges from the LLM Gen AI paradigm is nil - even with infinite scaling, self-improving algorithms, etc. - due to one simple reason: given the best of human generated general purpose training data is largely wrong or wrongly understood [reference “Most Published Research Findings Are False” John Ioannidis, PLoS Med 2(8): e124 (2005)] there is zero possibility to algorithmically make sense of that body of knowledge better than human experts in the fields with domain and context knowledge can. End of story. If and when AI directed robots are collecting data, that may change, but it remains an open epistemological question, considering the unfathomable complexity and intractability of our physical world (where we can’t grok the 3 body problem in Newtonian physics, particle-wave duality in quantum physics or dark matter or energy in cosmology, etc..) let alone more complex biological, ecological, social, political domains. Unfortunately, all this talk of AGI/ASI obscures a very real and immediate danger: purposefully or accidentally mis-aligned agentic Gen AI, with super-human coding/malware skills, could be a serious if not existential threat to our fragile, network dependent society in the near future. If “The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.” C.A.R. (Tony) Hoare’s Turing Award lecture, The Emperor’s Old Clothes (1980) – then the unavoidable price of extreme complexity (trillion+ parameter agentic Gen AI that is not understandable) may be extreme fragility; the sooner this is recognized, the better chance there may be to mitigate the proverbial unintended and unwanted consequences. https://albertoromgar.medium.com/the-ai-industry-as-you-know-it-died-today-59fce97a15c9

Nica took a screenshot of the discussion · 6 days ago

The article argues that declining birth rates are not a mystery caused by feminism, careers, or women “forgetting” their biological role. Carlyn Beccia’s thesis is that birth rates fall when women gain education, contraception, economic options, and the ability to delay or refuse marriage and motherhood. In her view, conservatives are misdiagnosing the problem because they do not want to admit that high historical fertility often depended on women having fewer choices.  if conservatives genuinely want more babies, they should stop shaming women and instead make parenthood easier: affordable housing, sane childcare costs, universal healthcare, safer pregnancy, real paid leave, and more equal fatherhood. The essay’s punchline is that women are not refusing civilization; they are refusing the unpaid bill that civilization keeps handing them. https://carlynbeccia.medium.com/conservatives-are-breaking-their-brains-over-declining-birth-rates-b99f5d0c6945

the number of books completed is a vanity metric. Reading makes you smarter only when it leaves a durable imprint, helps answer a real question, or creates new connections in your mind. Read slower, abandon more, follow curiosity, and optimize for what stays after the book is closed. https://code.likeagirl.io/why-reading-more-books-wasnt-making-me-smarter-5fad5a2cad03

Meta is building a prediction market app that could rival offerings from Polymarket and Kalshi, The New York Times reported. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/technology/meta-prediction-markets-app.html?utm_campaign=article_email&utm_content=article-17338&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sg

Europe is hastening its breakup with US tech (https://sherwood.news/power/eu-proposes-tech-sovereignty-package-to-bolster-domestic-ai-and-chip-industries/?utm_source=snacks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=snacks_20260604&utm_content=dc930db90c4bd4a0f1898cc4c363a29d ) as the Trump administration’s grip on American tech companies tightens