September 2026 News
September 2026 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
September 2026’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, August 2026 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
Links
AI
GPT-6 Astra realizes the long-delayed promise of Gato; Claude-5.5-Opus (surprisingly good at generating animated music videos for the old song “I’m Upping My P(Doom)” (Osmarks et al lyrics): chibi/hand-drawn, comic book/manga, PC-98 VN)
“Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI”, OpenAI (rapid doubling times of researcher token use/spend, time horizons)
“Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026”, Anthropic
“AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement: ‘We’re nowhere near the ceiling.’” (why pretraining works, alternative scaling laws, why DRL has worked so well recently, continual learning, mode-collapse, timelines…)
“Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs”, Panfilov et al 2026 (massive Chinese distillation of Claude/ChatGPT reasoning traces; also reveals in-the-wild GPT/Claude scheming against their users)
“When they can perform a task, AIs are much cheaper than humans”
“Metacrap: Putting the torch to 7 straw-men of the meta-utopia”, Doctorow 200125ya (cautionary comments about automation and agents and new equilibria)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
Technology
Economics
Philosophy
Fiction
Books
Fiction:
Bone (Smith 200422ya; a doorstopper of an omnibus volume, I picked this up at an Anthropic retreat where there was a free library of books contributed by employees. I was pleased to see two copies of Radiance, and successfully talked people into taking them. Bone stood out for its sheer size and being the only comic book or manga I saw, and I was intrigued by the endorsements on the back, rankings of it being one of the greatest Western comic books, and comments about power and fanaticism—all of which which hinted at greater depth than the first few pages indicated, anyway… I felt I could use a break from more serious topics like AI RSI or startup fundraising, so I took it back from the ranch with me. I read it over the next few weeks and was ultimately disappointed. The characters and humor are in a standard Western Disney juvenile style, barely even adolescent level, with the titular ‘Bones’ being flat and irritating the entire time; the story can only be described as deeply cliche and derivative—give me a Redwall narrative any day!—while ending relatively abruptly and unsatisfyingly after endless back-and-forth tedious chasing around the countryside and foreboding forested mountains. The promised depth never arrived, to the point where I’m still unsure what the primary antagonist’s motives even were. The sole selling point of Bone for me winds up being Smith’s artwork: he makes striking use of black-and-white artwork which capitalizes on the settings. An example is the deuterprotagonist’s dream of being handed over to the dragons at night: as thoroughly silly as the dragon in question looks, Smith nevertheless makes gorgeous use of the dragon’s white eyes against a black page. Many pages are works of art, once scrubbed of speech bubbles with lame dialogue. Overall, this would probably be a good comic omnibus for an elementary school kid, but I didn’t much enjoy it.)
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated: