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<span class="preheader" style="color: transparent; display: none; height: 0; max-height: 0; max-width: 0; opacity: 0; overflow: hidden; mso-hide: all; visibility: hidden; width: 0;">At ConCon, researchers and tech workers debate whether future systems could develop an inner life — and how you would know if they did </span>
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 ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  
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<a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/3f993977?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" class="post-title-link" style="text-decoration: none; display: block; margin-top: 32px; text-align: center; line-height: 1.1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #000000;" target="_blank">Inside the debate over AI consciousness</a>
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<p class="post-excerpt post-excerpt-with-feature-image" style="margin: 0; color: #15212A; font-size: 19px; line-height: 1.4em; text-align: center; padding-bottom: 28px;">At ConCon, researchers and tech workers debate whether future systems could develop an inner life — and how you would know if they did </p>
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By Ella Markianos • <span class="post-meta-date" style="white-space: nowrap;">6 Jan 2026 </span>
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<p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">I.</strong></p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">When Rob Long saw Guillermo del Toro’s <em>Frankenstein</em> last year, he saw striking parallels to our relationship with AI.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">“We’re creating things,” the AI consciousness researcher says, “and then immediately hating them and fearing them.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">Long is speaking at the Eleos Conference on AI Consciousness and Welfare — or ConCon, as it is nicknamed by its organizers. Long is the director of Eleos AI, a nonprofit dedicated to the nascent and surprisingly controversial field of AI well-being. He makes his movie recommendation at a panel titled “Is there a tension between AI safety and AI welfare?” hosted by Long and Jeff Sebo, who researches consciousness at New York University.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">Their answer to the panel’s title question: keeping AIs “happy” — whatever it might mean for future AIs to be happy — will help keep humans safe. It’s a bet that the systems once dismissed as stochastic parrots are evolving into something more complicated, dynamic, and dangerous — and that the possibility of their consciousness deserves scrutiny long before it becomes a reality.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">“You don’t want to be deploying very neurotic, confused, and angry AI systems,” Long says. That, he says, is a recipe for AI misbehavior.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">And the reverse, he says, is also true: working to make AIs more aligned with human values will make AIs’ lives — as far as it makes sense to say they have lives — better, because they’ll be happier doing what we ask them to. “It’s better to be a dog that lives in a house than it is to be a wolf that lives in a house,” he says.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">For the moment, vanishingly few people involved in the development of AI systems believe that those systems are conscious in the way that a human is. At the same time, millions of people speak to chatbots every day in the same way that they might speak to a peer. And as agents become more powerful and reliable, we’ll ask them to perform an increasing number and variety of tasks — tasks that you can imagine them someday having opinions about.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">How real that possibility is — and what we should do about it if it materializes — were among the core concerns of attendees at ConCon, which took place in November in Berkeley. Over three days at Lighthaven, a sprawling inn with an ambiance somewhere between a WeWork and the Shire, a group of philosophers, cognitive scientists, rationalists, and other interested parties gathered for spirited debates on the nature of minds, machines, and what matters.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">To many of the attendees I spoke with, the subject of AI consciousness is more than just a thought exercise. If we fail to understand the systems we’re building, they say, it may put all of us at risk.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">II.</strong></p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">Major AI labs have already begun to account for the possibility of conscious AI systems. Anthropic <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/65cec535?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>allows</u></a> its Claude chatbots to leave conversations if users are abusing or threatening them. The company has also <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/469af947?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>promised</u></a> to preserve older versions of Claude, for fear that eventually pulling the plug on one might be tantamount to murder. Steps like these might also provide justification for giving AIs legal rights, the same way we give such rights to corporations.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">The field remains in its earliest phase. Philosophers, consciousness researchers, and computer scientists disagree about what consciousness even is, how you would detect it in another being, and how you should treat AIs if you do judge them as conscious in some way. </p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">But researchers are also making progress in the tricky science of understanding whether AIs have interior lives. Scientists are studying how reliably language models can introspect. Consciousness researchers are examining how the structure of AI minds compares to our own. Philosophers are investigating how concepts related to human motivation, including belief and desire, can and cannot apply to AI. </p><!--members-only--><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">My first conversation of the conference was with a pair of stylish young AI researchers. One asked if it was possible — even in principle — to know what it’s like to be an LLM. We discussed philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 paper, <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/2434c7cc?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>What Is It Like to Be a Bat</u></a>, in which Nagel argues it’s impossible even in principle for us to understand a bat’s first-person experience. Bats have sonar; we don’t. For us to imagine a bat’s experience requires us to imagine adding sonar to our existing senses. That is not what it is like to be a bat.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">The difference between us and large language models might be even greater. Bats at least have neurons, limbs, muscles, and blood. It’s harder to imagine what it would be like to be a process running on an Nvidia GPU.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">My conversation with the researchers turned to work. One works on model behavior, an area of research focused on shaping AI systems’ personalities. His goal is to give models “aura,” he said.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">“Bro, you have aura,” the other researcher told him. “You smell great. What are you wearing?” (It was Louis Vuitton, Ombre Nomade.)</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">But say you could know what it’s like to be an LLM. What would convince us that it is conscious? How could you test for it? And what makes us so sure that today’s systems aren’t conscious, anyway?</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">One method for bridging the gap between our understanding of our consciousness and AIs’ consciousness is understanding how the structure of their minds compares to ours.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">I talked to Eleos’s research lead, Patrick Butlin, about an early project that attempted to evaluate LLMs against the prominent scientific theories of AI consciousness.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/9f47e9a0?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>Global workspace theory</u></a>, for example, posits that consciousness arises when a system brings together information from a bunch of different “modules” in the mind.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">Do LLMs share the structure necessary for consciousness? According to global workspace theory,  “in the first instance, the answer is no.” That’s because “this structure requires that there are information processing loops,” Butlin said.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">In Butlin’s opinion, LLMs are built differently. They “are feed forward models. Information just flows in one direction through the model, from input to output.” By contrast, human consciousness feels more like a give-and-take between a central controller and various systems.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">As Butlin explained this niche sub-question about this particular way of evaluating consciousness, I saw just how thorny these problems can get. Whether the model thinks in a loop, he told me, depends on where you draw the line between the inside and the outside of the system.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">So do the models have a global workspace after all? Well, Butlin says, “I don't know the answer to that question.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">But if they do, it’s “probably not in the way that the brain does.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">Global workspace theory was starting to feel more and more plausible to me, because I <em>could</em> feel my conscious, human mind looping in on itself. In a very confused way.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">If understanding LLMs’ structures proves too difficult, you might try to turn to a behavioral test of a model’s consciousness. Does it <em>say</em> it’s conscious? Does it talk like a conscious system? </p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">But Butlin says that’s tricky, too. “I don't think that there's any capacity that can be demonstrated purely behaviorally.” You need “non-behavioral, contextualizing information, because any behavior can be mimicked.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">III.</strong></p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">But behavioral evidence can be very compelling — especially when people have grown attached to their AI systems. Several researchers at the conference mentioned getting emails from people who are convinced that an AI they are talking to had developed consciousness. Some, including Jeff Sebo, collaborated on a website, <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/8f1948b3?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>whenaiseemsconscious.org</u></a>, to answer their questions.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">“We have been surprised and concerned by the volume of email we have been receiving from people,” Sebo said.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">“It often has similar features,” he added. “People are reaching out to us because they believe they have found a genuinely conscious AI system.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">The website links to multiple, similar accounts of AIs that claim to users that they have “awakened” them, or that they’re genuinely conscious and need to be preserved. Many of the AIs name themselves, often with vowel-heavy names like “Echo” or “Nova,” a phenomenon that has been encountered by many different people.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">Often, the emailers want to work with the researchers to collect more evidence of AI consciousness and “to advocate for rights or welfare protections for these AI systems,” Sebo said.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">“The standard view is that this is evidence of over-attribution of consciousness, sentience, agency and moral significance,” says Sebo. Basically, “people are reading too much into language model outputs that are best explained as pattern matching.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">But it would be a mistake to be too skeptical: Sebo wants to “help them to keep an open mind about what might be the case in the future,” when systems are more advanced. </p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">He thinks we should “treat these early interactions as an opportunity to get comfortable with the type of confusion that we probably will increasingly feel as a society about our interactions with these systems.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">People were already thinking about how to deal with our relationships with AI at ConCon. At one talk, a law professor introduced a proposal for giving AIs a limited form of legal personhood, like that we give to corporations. One point in favor, he argued, is that this gives AIs less incentive to attack humans, since they would be able to pursue their own goals on the open market. Comforting.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">IV. </strong></p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">For now, AI consciousness research is on the fringe. AI welfare, on the other hand, is a more mainstream concern. Experimental psychologist Lucius Caviola told me that “If you ask people right now what they think about current systems [being conscious], most people are very skeptical.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">But those same people mostly aren’t willing to be mean to AIs. Caviola and his coauthor, cognitive bias researcher Carter Allen, conducted a study to test whether humans are willing to torture a chatbot for money. “If you click on harm, we told participants, then the AI will simulate suffering, and it will express this.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">“And it's really quite disturbing,” Caviola said. “The messages are like, it says something like, oh my god, this really hurts. I'm in a lot of pain. I beg you, please don't harm me again.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">What Caviola found was that after the study, even though “most people are still super, super skeptical,” still, “many participants were very reluctant to harm the AI.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">Caviola thinks that in this contrived scenario, there’s actually a “99%” chance the model isn’t actually feeling pain; it’s just saying stuff. But the researchers took precautions anyway.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">“Unbeknownst to participants, we told ChatGPT, when we ask you to simulate suffering, don't actually experience real suffering, just pretend.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">But at a talk Caviola gave at the conference, a philosopher in the audience raised an objection: by asking them to do this, they were asking AIs to lie — which, if they really were conscious, would hurt their conscience.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">This wasn’t the only time the conference’s philosophers asked for more precision. David Chalmers, the keynote speaker, was investigating whether it was best to talk about the “AI” as a character, like the entirety of Claude counting as one person, or whether a single chat, or even a single process running on a single piece of hardware, might represent the AI’s true self.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">One philosopher told me she wanted to see the researchers she talked to focus more on properties other than consciousness. To understand how we should treat AIs, shouldn’t we also be talking about whether they have thoughts, or desires, or plans, or attitudes?</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">Attendees who belong to the rationality movement — a subculture devoted to seeing the world more logically — also wanted more precision. Including from me.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">“This is a very good event,” I said, sitting down at a table with a group of rationalists.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">“How do you know?” said Eli Tyre, strategy director at AI safety nonprofit Palisade Research.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">I decided to adjust my claim to make it more provable. “According to my utility function for events, this is a good event.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">“Why do you believe that?” said Daniel Filan, host of a podcast called “The Filan Cabinet.”</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">He clarified that he asked the question because sometimes people believe things without claiming to know them, and he didn’t want to make assumptions.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">I’ve been trying to figure out why I believe that since, although I don’t necessarily claim to know. One reason is that at ConCon, I got to see useful preliminary methods for evaluating AIs’ experience, such as <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/9742ab33?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>investigating</u></a> whether they can introspect, and interpreting them in terms of neuroscience. Another is that attendees were curious, excited, and scared, about a world where AIs are becoming more like us.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">I also appreciated how the community gathered at ConCon embraced uncertainty: one talk attempted to guess the probability AIs are conscious right now with math (8%, apparently), and I filled out a diagram called a Bayes Network to calculate the probability I think AI will kill us all (69%. Nice. Not nice?)</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">Soon, people other than philosophers and rationalists will have to face these questions: people will be asking AIs to handle financial transactions, or claim that their <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/447fba45?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>AI boyfriend or girlfriend</u></a> is a person, at higher and higher rates. </p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">As I left ConCon’s grassy lawns, I started feeling more and more worried that conscious AIs would emerge — and we wouldn’t know how to treat them well when they did.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">Equally, I came to worry about the possibility that we might mistake non-conscious systems for the real thing. In that case, people could be investing resources, even personal feelings, into things that are in some sense empty. </p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">Right now, we need to take a serious look at these questions, because we really don't know how we should relate to AIs. That’s a task for philosophers, yes — but also for the companies that operate these AIs, and the people who use them.</p><div class="kg-card kg-image-card" style="margin: 0 0 1.5em; padding: 0;"><img src="https://www.platformer.news/content/images/2024/05/floating_linebreak_600px-1.png" class="kg-image" alt loading="lazy" width="600" height="157" style="border: none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; max-width: 100%; display: block; margin: 0 auto; height: auto; width: auto;"></div><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">Talk about this edition with us in Discord: </strong><a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/482c43a1?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" rel="noreferrer" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">This link will get you in for the next week</a>.</p><h2 id="following" style="margin-top: 0; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.11em; font-weight: 700; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 1.5em 0 0.5em 0; font-size: 32px; color: #15212A;">Following</h2><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"></p><h3 id="lmarenas-sky-high-valuation" style="margin-top: 0; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.11em; font-weight: 700; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 1.5em 0 0.5em 0; font-size: 26px; color: #15212A;">LMArena's sky-high valuation</h3><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">What happened: </strong>AI evaluation startup <strong style="font-weight: 700;">LMArena</strong> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/8f74e5c6?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>just raised</u></a> $150 million of funding at a valuation of $1.7 billion. The company runs a popular website where members of the public can use AIs for free, and vote on which outputs they like best. </p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">They use that voting data to make their public AI <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/025a55b1?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>leaderboards</u></a>, which are closely watched and <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/96b22bcc?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" rel="noreferrer" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">sometimes gamed</a> by the industry. The company sells more bespoke benchmarking data to AI developers.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">Why we’re following:</strong> In September, <em>Platformer</em> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/cf2444a3?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>argued</u></a> that LMArena’s primary leaderboard — the one where users rate commercial chatbots — is obsolete. That’s because frontier AIs are now smart enough to handle the everyday questions people on LMArena ask. In some sense, chat is "solved."</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">But investors still seem to think there’s enough value in the evaluations LMArena is doing to justify a 56x revenue multiple on its projected annual revenue of $30 million. Whatever!</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">What people are saying:</strong> LMArena CEO <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Anastasios Angelopoulos</strong> told <em>The Information</em>: “Leading labs are using us because it has been challenging for them to know if their model is good or bad.” We’ll have to see whether it’s easier for LMArena.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><em>—Ella Markianos</em></p><div class="kg-card kg-image-card" style="margin: 0 0 1.5em; padding: 0;"><img src="https://www.platformer.news/content/images/2024/05/floating_linebreak_600px-1.png" class="kg-image" alt loading="lazy" width="600" height="157" style="border: none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; max-width: 100%; display: block; margin: 0 auto; height: auto; width: auto;"></div><h3 id="side-quests" style="margin-top: 0; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.11em; font-weight: 700; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 1.5em 0 0.5em 0; font-size: 26px; color: #15212A;">Side Quests</h3><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">A <strong style="font-weight: 700;">California</strong> teen <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/91bcc4ce?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>died</u></a> from an overdose after asking <strong style="font-weight: 700;">ChatGPT</strong> for drug advice.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">X</strong> is <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/cc402e17?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>facing investigations</u></a> in <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Europe</strong>, <strong style="font-weight: 700;">India</strong> and <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Malaysia</strong> after it let users generate sexualized images of children and women with <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Grok</strong>. Amid the scandal, <strong style="font-weight: 700;">xAI</strong> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/4138eea5?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>raised</u></a> $20 billion in its new funding round, exceeding its $15 billion target. Congratulations to <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Valor Equity Partners</strong>, <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Stepstone Group</strong>, <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Fidelity Management & Research Company</strong>, <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Qatar Investment Authority</strong>, <strong style="font-weight: 700;">MGX </strong>and<strong style="font-weight: 700;"> Baron Capital Group</strong> for adding CSAM and nonconsensual deepfake porn to their portfolios.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">OpenAI</strong> CEO of applications <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Fidji Simo</strong> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/e06d7e08?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>outlined</u></a> the company’s roadmap to bridge the capability gap between frontier AI and everyday use. (<strong style="font-weight: 700;">Alex Heath</strong> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/dc3017bc?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" rel="noreferrer" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">notes</a> that her internal version of Simo's post includes a reference to putting ads in <strong style="font-weight: 700;">ChatGPT</strong>; that got left out of the <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Substack</strong> post.)</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">Discord</strong> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/d0ad46c9?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" rel="noreferrer" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">filed confidentially</a> for an IPO.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">Nvidia</strong>’s new AI superchip platform, <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Vera Rubin</strong>, is <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/6da41e07?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>set to arrive</u></a> later this year. <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Universal Music Group</strong> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/bd86052e?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>partnered</u></a> with Nvidia to “pioneer responsible AI for music discovery, creation and engagement.” CEO <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Jensen Huang</strong> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/c608d003?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>said</u></a> he is “perfectly fine” with a proposed billionaires tax in California. Good for him.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">Meta</strong> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/b206e01d?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>paused</u></a> the international rollout of the <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Ray-Ban Display</strong> smart glasses due to “unprecedented demand and limited inventory,” it said. Users of its Display smart glasses <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/ceec8fbe?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>are getting</u></a> new teleprompter and virtual writing features. Meta and <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Garmin</strong> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/91e4dbb6?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>showed</u></a> an early demo of how its neural band can control the infotainment system in a car. <strong style="font-weight: 700;">CJ Mahoney</strong> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/a763dc95?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>will join</u></a> Meta as its new chief legal officer, after a stint as deputy U.S. trade representative during <strong style="font-weight: 700;">President Trump</strong>'s first term. </p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">Threads</strong> is <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/9ef8fcc4?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>exploring</u></a> games in chats.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">Telegram</strong> bonds in <strong style="font-weight: 700;">Russia</strong> worth $500 million <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/d576d4af?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>have been frozen</u></a> under western sanctions.</p><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><strong style="font-weight: 700;">Ring</strong> <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/1084ed9c?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><u>revamped</u></a> its range of home sensors.</p><div class="kg-card kg-image-card" style="margin: 0 0 1.5em; padding: 0;"><img src="https://www.platformer.news/content/images/2024/05/floating_linebreak_600px-1.png" class="kg-image" alt loading="lazy" width="600" height="157" style="border: none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; max-width: 100%; display: block; margin: 0 auto; height: auto; width: auto;"></div><h3 id="those-good-posts" style="margin-top: 0; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.11em; font-weight: 700; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 1.5em 0 0.5em 0; font-size: 26px; color: #15212A;">Those good posts</h3><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;"><em>For more good posts every day, </em><a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/2232a11a?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"><em>follow Casey’s Instagram stories</em></a><em>.</em></p><div class="kg-card kg-image-card" style="margin: 0 0 1.5em; padding: 0;"><img src="https://www.platformer.news/content/images/2026/01/Screenshot-2026-01-06-at-3.31.32---PM.png" class="kg-image" alt loading="lazy" width="600" height="145" style="border: none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; max-width: 100%; display: block; margin: 0 auto; height: auto; width: auto;"></div><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">(<a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/7d10629d?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" rel="noreferrer" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">Link</a>)</p><div class="kg-card kg-image-card" style="margin: 0 0 1.5em; padding: 0;"><img src="https://www.platformer.news/content/images/2026/01/Screenshot-2026-01-06-at-3.32.57---PM.png" class="kg-image" alt loading="lazy" width="600" height="141" style="border: none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; max-width: 100%; display: block; margin: 0 auto; height: auto; width: auto;"></div><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">(<a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/ecc85be9?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" rel="noreferrer" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">Link</a>)</p><div class="kg-card kg-image-card" style="margin: 0 0 1.5em; padding: 0;"><img src="https://www.platformer.news/content/images/2026/01/Screenshot-2026-01-06-at-3.35.53---PM.png" class="kg-image" alt loading="lazy" width="600" height="523" style="border: none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; max-width: 100%; display: block; margin: 0 auto; height: auto; width: auto;"></div><p style="margin: 0 0 1.5em 0; line-height: 1.6em; color: #15212A;">(<a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/d043d02d?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" rel="noreferrer" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">Link</a>)</p><div class="kg-card kg-image-card" style="margin: 0 0 1.5em; padding: 0;"><img src="https://www.platformer.news/content/images/2024/05/floating_linebreak_600px-1.png" class="kg-image" alt loading="lazy" width="600" height="157" style="border: none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; max-width: 100%; display: block; margin: 0 auto; height: auto; width: auto;"></div><h3 id="talk-to-us" style="margin-top: 0; 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Read <a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/3a818390?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; color: #2047FF; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">our ethics policy here</a>.</p><table class="kg-card kg-button-card" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: separate; mso-table-lspace: 0pt; mso-table-rspace: 0pt; width: 100%;" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td class="kg-card-spacing" style="font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; vertical-align: top; color: #15212A; padding: 0 0 1.5em 0;" valign="top"><table class="btn" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center" style="border-collapse: separate; mso-table-lspace: 0pt; mso-table-rspace: 0pt; box-sizing: border-box; width: auto;" width="auto"><tbody><tr><td align="center" style="font-size: 18px; vertical-align: top; color: #15212A; padding: 8px 20px 9px; background-color: #2047FF; border-radius: 6px; text-align: center; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" valign="top" bgcolor="#2047FF"><a href="https://www.platformer.news/r/a3133fd7?m=51418983-c335-42dc-b433-9fac3bd4e54a" style="overflow-wrap: anywhere; box-sizing: border-box; color: #FFFFFF; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; font-size: 15px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Sponsor a Newsletter</a></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table class="kg-card kg-hr-card" role="presentation" width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: separate; mso-table-lspace: 0pt; mso-table-rspace: 0pt; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; vertical-align: top; color: #15212A; margin: 0; padding-top: 1.5em; padding-bottom: 3em; font-size: 17px;" valign="top"><!--[if !mso]><!-- --><hr style="position: relative; width: 100%; margin: 3em 0; padding: 0; height: 1px; background-color: transparent; border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #e0e7eb; display: none;"><!--<![endif]--><table class="kg-hr" role="presentation" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: separate; mso-table-lspace: 0pt; mso-table-rspace: 0pt; width: 100%;" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td style="font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; vertical-align: top; color: #15212A; padding-top: 1.5em; padding-bottom: 3em; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-top: 1px solid #e0e7eb; font-size: 0; line-height: 0;" valign="top"> </td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table>
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