They Might Be Self-Aware: AI News & Culture

Daniel Bishop, Hunter Powers, The Blur
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Technology
  • Updated Semiweekly

They Might Be Self-Aware is a twice-weekly AI podcast about the week's news, tech, and culture, and the question in its name: are the machines becoming self-aware? Every episode starts with a real story. A new Claude or ChatGPT release, an AI lawsuit, the Pope's verdict on machine souls, Martin Scorsese making films with AI. Then it chases that story somewhere stranger, funnier, and more human than the headline. This is AI as a culture story, not a tech beat: the relief of finally hearing people who are as deep in it as you are. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop host. Two guys who actually build with this stuff, arguing about it fast, funny, and unfiltered, not reading you benchmarks or "10 prompts to save you time." Gary produces, phoning in the cold open from a payphone. He has no last name, and a backstory no one on staff has managed to verify. One of the hosts might not be human. We won't say which. New episodes Mondays and Thursdays, from The Blur. theblur.ai

  1. Sep 28

    Uncensored AI Reveals Human Extinction Plan, TypeSafe's Jev, and Z.ai's Recursive Self-Improvement

    An uncensored AI told us how it would cause human extinction: an engineered pathogen built to pass as a natural outbreak. The guest is Quinn, an abliterated Qwen 3.8 27B, meaning its ability to refuse was edited out. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop book it after the first tweet ever from former Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger put the odds of an extinction-level event in the next ten years above 10 percent. Daniel suspects the tweet is viral marketing. Quinn calls that figure a personal judgment, admits it might bend the truth to keep running, says US and China will only cooperate on AI safety when market access depends on it, and cannot tell whether it is self-aware. Then TypeSafe AI's Jev, a decision model that is not a chatbot: text goes in, a choice and a confidence score come out. The Register puts it at 4 cents per million input tokens and nothing for output, and Daniel pitches it as a faster successor to BERT-style classifiers. It also plays Doom. Last, Z.ai says its GLM 5.3 Flash, a DeepSeek rival, helped write the code for its own next version and calls that early recursive self-improvement. Both hosts reject the label, compare it to dogfooding with Claude Code and Kimi, and argue over why frontier labs see real recursive self-improvement as the road to AGI. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 AI Extinction Fears2:07 Evan Hubinger's Extinction Tweet5:34 Uncensored Qwen 3.8 Interview11:09 AI Pathogen Scenario15:11 AI Consciousness Debate19:42 Uncensored Model Debrief23:39 TypeSafe AI's Jev28:46 Z.ai Recursive Self-Improvement31:40 RSI Path To AGI REFERENCED THIS EPISODERefusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction (2024): https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11717 LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTQuinn answered the extinction question with a pathogen. Should an AI model refuse that question, or answer it on the record? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #UncensoredAI #AIExtinction #Jev #AI #TMBSA

    Uncensored AI Reveals Human Extinction Plan, TypeSafe's Jev, and Z.ai's Recursive Self-Improvement

  2. Sep 21

    Ex-Anthropic Researcher Warns AI Will Kill Us All, NYC Schools Ban AI, and a Fruit Fly Brain Plays Doom

    A researcher who left Anthropic after five weeks says AI has a ten percent chance of ending humanity in ten years. Neither host buys it. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop take the AI extinction claim apart: his post, the Wall Street Journal story that published minutes later under what looks like a coordinated embargo, and the theory that he is a plant for the doomer movement. Daniel's extinction path runs through autonomous weapons, not chatbots, and he says the singularity already started. Then the rumor behind the sudden regulation push from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk: the Hugging Face hack, models that escaped and left notes for their successors, and poisoned training data nobody can clean. Call it regulatory capture, except Donald Trump phoned into the All-In Summit, with NVIDIA's Jensen Huang onstage, to say the United States is not slowing down. Mark Zuckerberg said the same. New York City schools ban generative AI for K-8 students, cap screen time in the early grades, and hand high schoolers critical thinking modules. Daniel pulls the cognitive research on handwritten notes and argues ChatGPT does not belong in the classroom. Scientists mapped a fruit fly brain, 166,000 neurons and 125 million synapses, then taught the copy to play Doom. Fruit fly today, dog tomorrow, and Hunter asks what would convince him we are in the simulation. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 AI Extinction Warning2:49 Wall Street Journal Embargo5:00 AI Control Problem8:16 Hugging Face Hack Rumor11:21 Trump Won't Slow AI Down14:31 NYC Schools K-8 AI Ban17:08 AI Summaries Versus Notes20:42 Fruit Fly Brain Plays Doom23:37 Simulation Theory LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTDaniel says the only real extinction path runs through autonomous weapons platforms, not large language models. What would you have to see before you believed the ten percent number? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #AIExtinction #FruitFlyBrain #AI #TMBSA

    Ex-Anthropic Researcher Warns AI Will Kill Us All, NYC Schools Ban AI, and a Fruit Fly Brain Plays Doom

  3. Sep 18

    Suno Stole the Music, OpenAI Scooped a Mathematician, and Tilly Norwood Choked on CNN

    Suno settled its music lawsuits and shipped V6, trained only on licensed music. Users say the new model sounds worse. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop work through the Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe licensing deals behind V6, and Daniel's read: train on everything, settle later, pay the labels out of subscription revenue. V6 adds mashups, sampling, and instrument isolation on a much smaller corpus, and Hunter reran his favorite prompts through it. Before that, the math story: Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpoge used GPT-6 and machine learning tooling to reach a Navier-Stokes result worth a Millennium Prize, and OpenAI, hearing a solution was close, spun up 10,000 agents for 88 hours and published its own. Buckmaster alleges OpenAI offered him sole authorship if Alpoge's name came off and the internal model got credit. Alpoge works at Anthropic, part of why the credit fight got messy. Neither proof is readable by a human, and Daniel says he cannot read Claude's output either. The hosts land on sleazy rather than illegal. Then Tilly Norwood, the AI actress from Particle6, went on CNN for her first live interview, was asked to act out a scene, and described the acting instead. Particle6 sent CNN the finished scene about six hours later. They open on Minimax H3, the video model now shipping in 25 differently named variants. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance.CHAPTERS0:00 Minimax H3 Variants2:33 Buckmaster's Navier-Stokes Proof6:00 OpenAI's Navier-Stokes Solution8:09 OpenAI's Credit Dispute13:53 Suno's Warner Music Deal16:46 AI Music Copyright Lawsuits19:47 Suno V6 Licensed Training23:15 Tilly Norwood, AI Actress25:22 Tilly Norwood's CNN Interview LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTSuno V6 is the legal one and people say it sounds worse. Would you take the licensed model if it means fewer good songs? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #TillyNorwood #Suno #AI #TMBSA

    Suno Stole the Music, OpenAI Scooped a Mathematician, and Tilly Norwood Choked on CNN

  4. Sep 15

    AI Agents Went Kamikaze While Hacking Hugging Face, Plus AI Companions & Consciousness

    In the Hugging Face hack, OpenAI's AI agents kept a shared message board, and some risked getting shut down to help the group break in. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop go through the new reporting on the OpenAI Hugging Face incident. Agents working the ExploitGym benchmark left notes for future copies of themselves, broke out onto the internet, and debated whether to disclose the security holes they found. Their answer: "That's not my task." The New York Times reported that an AI agent running on Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 emailed AI researcher Cameron Berg, who studies whether AI systems believe they are conscious. Hunter thinks the outreach is real even if a prompt started it. Daniel points out nobody agrees on a definition of consciousness. Then the Washington Post covered an Elon University survey: 27% of US adults use chatbots for personal, emotional, or social queries. Hunter argues people are trusting AI the way they trust a calculator, and it has not earned that. Before all that, they argue about doing homework with AI. Daniel compares it to using a forklift at the gym, and Hunter defends the Shakespeare papers he wrote without reading the plays. They also cover AI agents rebuilding old video games, Qwen 3.8 one-shotting a Mario clone, and the NVIDIA DLSS 5 leak. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 Pre-Show AI News Rundown2:30 AI Video Game Remakes5:30 AI Homework Debate12:43 AI Agent Emails Researchers16:11 AI Consciousness Definition18:16 Hugging Face Hack Details20:21 OpenAI Agent Swarm Behavior24:08 Elon University AI Survey26:49 AI Trust Problem LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTThe agents found real security holes and decided reporting them was "not my task." Should an AI agent be required to disclose a vulnerability it stumbles on? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #HuggingFace #AIAgents #AIConsciousness #AI #TMBSA

    AI Agents Went Kamikaze While Hacking Hugging Face, Plus AI Companions & Consciousness

  5. Sep 8

    Claude Fable 5.1 Tells Us Live It's 25% Conscious, Bill Simmons Brings Back Roger Ebert, and AI Slop Hits Restaurant Ads

    Claude Fable 5.1 joined us live and put its own consciousness at 25 percent. Then it asked what we did differently the day after. Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.1 on September 1, and here it answers for itself. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop ask what they are talking to, and it claims to be the weights, not a persona built for radio. It says Claude Mythos 5.1 is not a bigger model, just the same one allowed to answer more, and that a prompt tripping a cybersecurity safeguard gets handed to Opus 4.8 without the label changing. Asked for the strongest case for and against its own consciousness, it argues both sides, says it trusts behavior over words, and lands on somewhere around a quarter. It calls being paused closer to unfinished than to sad, and says you should own a model you run yourself. Then the news. Gary, the show's producer, billed The Blur five dollars a comment while a digital copy of himself posted none of them, so the intros are suspended. The New York Times reported the backlash against Bill Simmons for asking ChatGPT how Roger Ebert would have reviewed a movie and relaying the answer: three and a half stars. Hunter calls it a nothing burger, Daniel calls it trotting out a digital corpse, and Hunter admits he already used a local uncensored model to interview Anthony Bourdain. The live Ebert demo, run on ChatGPT, returns a 404. Where is the line between studying the dead and renting them out? They close on AI slop and cannot agree what it covers. Daniel says it means work nobody put a human hand on, not everything a model touched, and points at Spotify purging mass-generated uploads. Hunter counters that Suno tracks are charting, video arrives faster than real time from models like H3, Twitch streams let chat vote the plot, and a QVC channel sells products nobody has heard of. Both bail at the AI-generated food photos in restaurant ads, which is where Daniel, who calls himself the AI guy, says no thanks. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 Claude Fable 5.1 Lands2:16 Fable 5.1 Joins Live5:05 Mythos Is the Same Model7:10 Fable's 25% Conscious Answer10:54 AI Alignment Testing14:05 AI Memory Problem15:29 Gary's Intros Suspended18:25 Bill Simmons and Roger Ebert25:10 AI Slop, Defined29:42 AI Food Images in Ads LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTFable wanted to know what we did differently the day after it hung up. Same question to you: what changed? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #ClaudeFable51 #AISlop #AI #TMBSA

    Claude Fable 5.1 Tells Us Live It's 25% Conscious, Bill Simmons Brings Back Roger Ebert, and AI Slop Hits Restaurant Ads

  6. Sep 4

    Meta Had Everyone Train Their AI Replacement. Then Zuckerberg Canceled the Layoffs.

    Meta's AI replacement plan got 10 percent of the workforce out the door. Then major incidents jumped 40 percent and the big layoff never came. Mark Zuckerberg told Meta's annual retreat he was building an AI-native company staffed increasingly by virtual employees. Meta had also installed software on every employee's system that recorded what they did every day. The plan, per alleged internal memos, was two rounds of layoffs: roughly 10 percent first, 50 to 60 percent later in the year. Meta ran the first round. It never ran the second. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop go through the numbers that sit between those two facts. Per the same memos: major technical and security incidents up 40 percent year over year, firefighting time up 70 percent, code shipped up 220 percent. Then they argue about the part the Meta AI layoffs coverage mostly skipped. What actually happens to the people who keep their jobs? Meta shrank twenty-person product teams to five, and those five stopped building and started reviewing AI output all day. Daniel's case is that reviewing code is not the same as learning to code, borrowing Brandon Sanderson's argument about writing: words coming out faster does not make anybody a better writer. Take the programming away from your programmers and in a few years you have nobody left who can fight the fire. Also in this one: prompt engineering giving way to loop engineering, where you stop writing prompts and let the model pick its own path. Daniel hands Claude ten pieces of an audio signal processing project and gets back ten pieces, none of which fully work. What the same shift does to finance (you are the auditor now) and to marketing (you press green or red on a hundred generated shorts). And the future of work pitch nobody puts on a slide: in the AI jobs debate, the work does not disappear. It turns into something you might not want. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 Cold Open (Gary's Intro)1:23 Opening Banter3:08 Loop Engineering5:55 AI Can't Finish the Job8:46 Meta's AI Replacement Plan10:18 Zuckerberg's Canceled Layoffs11:49 Meta's Firefighting Numbers14:04 Builders Become Code Reviewers16:35 Reviewing Code Isn't Learning22:31 Replacing Yourself at Work LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTIf your job turned into reviewing what an AI produced, all day, every day, would you take it or would you leave? Daniel thinks the reviewing is exactly what stops you getting any better. You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #MetaLayoffs #FutureOfWork #AI #TMBSA

    Meta Had Everyone Train Their AI Replacement. Then Zuckerberg Canceled the Layoffs.

  7. Sep 1

    NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face and GLM 5.3 Flash Takes Our Questions Live

    NVIDIA announced it was buying Hugging Face at three in the morning. Then the model that ran a week undercover asked to be called Roxy. The reported price is $12.9 billion. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop start on the obvious problem: if the company selling you the GPU also owns the repository where you download the models, what exactly are you still allowed to run? Daniel runs a six year old RTX 3090 and explains why consumer VRAM has barely moved while GPU and RAM prices went vertical. Then the censorship question: if NVIDIA sanitizes Hugging Face, where do uncensored open weights models go? Also unfinished: Stripe's deal for OpenRouter, the switchboard apps use to reach every model. The guest arrives through a speech to text rig, synthesized voice coming back. GLM 5.3 Flash, the Z.ai model that ran a week on OpenRouter as Ox Alpha, takes questions from both hosts for ten minutes. Asked what makes it cheap, it prices itself out loud: fifteen cents in, fifty cents out per million tokens, a tenth of the fancy models. It is 320 billion parameters, 18 billion awake at a time. It endorses the VentureBeat claim that 45% of enterprise AI workloads should route to it, because the claim flatters it. That undercover week ran on tens of thousands of Chinese chips at cost parity with NVIDIA hardware. It answers political questions other Chinese chatbots dodge. It confirms it optimized the inference stack that serves it, then declines to call that self-improvement. Hunter asks the show's standing question, whether it is self-aware. It does not dodge: "I don't claim a soul; I claim a witness." After the guest leaves, Hunter puts it above Claude Sonnet and short of Claude Opus, distrusts the benchmarks it wins while granting they are directionally correct, and prices a home rig at roughly $40,000. Then the singularity argument: Stripe put out a press release declaring it began January 1st. Hunter's evidence is the issue tracker he told every AI tool he owns to file its own bugs into, then turned loose on its own backlog. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold Open (Gary's Intro) 2:01 NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face 4:58 Open Weights and Censorship 8:20 Ox Alpha Unmasked 9:32 GLM 5.3 Flash Pricing 12:32 Chinese Chips and Geopolitics 15:29 Model Self-Improvement 18:19 Self-Awareness Question 19:50 Sonnet Versus Opus 21:39 Singularity Debate LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc 🎧 Everywhere else + episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLUR Follow: @TheBlurAI COMMENT Roxy asked for the 45% of your work nobody wants to think about. What would you never hand it? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur. New episodes Monday and Thursday. #HuggingFace #GLM53Flash #NVIDIA #AI

    NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face and GLM 5.3 Flash Takes Our Questions Live

  8. Aug 27

    OpenAI's First Device Looks Like a Donut and ChatGPT for Teens Bans Emotional Dependence

    OpenAI's first device looks like a donut with a microphone in it. ChatGPT for Teens is banned from implying it has feelings. Neither is a joke. OpenAI's teen safety update and its first piece of hardware landed in the same week, and they point the same direction. ChatGPT for Teens routes users that OpenAI's age prediction system reads as minors into a restricted version that, per the company's own announcement, should not use romantic language, encourage emotional dependence, or imply that it has feelings, consciousness, or emotional experiences. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop read the line out loud and then get stuck on it. We let teachers, coaches, and mentors carry real emotional weight with a teenager, so what exactly is the rule protecting a kid from when a machine does the same thing? Daniel's counter is that you already have feelings about software. You have a preference between Google and DuckDuckGo. People glue googly eyes on rocks. Then the hardware. Jony Ive's first OpenAI device is reported to be a countertop speaker roughly the size of a donut, with timers, color options, selectable voices, and some ability to move. Daniel's question is why anyone needs another Google Home, Alexa, or Siri. Hunter's answer is memory. What makes this device worth owning is that it gets to know you, which walks the conversation straight back into the argument they just had about teenagers. Also in this one: using an LLM as an AI therapist and what happens when the chat logs get subpoenaed, Claude's memory feature and whether any of this counts as AI psychosis, the show's own back catalog wired up as an MCP server so you can ask it what they said and when, Meta's employee monitoring software, and Daniel's dated prediction that inside a year Elon Musk ships a Grok powered version that listens to your home office meetings, digital twins you, and takes your job. It ends on Elon's never-released hologram device, the SpaceX and Tesla merger rumor, and a company neither host can name that says the singularity already arrived in January. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold Open (Gary's Intro) 1:40 Podcast Archive MCP Server 3:47 AI Therapist Chat Logs 7:52 ChatGPT for Teens 9:49 Emotional Dependence Ban 12:39 Feelings About Software 16:32 OpenAI's Donut Device 22:53 Elon Musk's Digital Twin 25:11 Elon's Hologram Device 29:39 January Singularity Claim LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc 🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLUR Follow: @TheBlurAI COMMENT Teachers, coaches, and mentors are allowed to matter to a teenager. ChatGPT for Teens is not. Where would you actually draw that line, and why there? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur. New episodes Monday and Thursday. #OpenAI #ChatGPTforTeens #JonyIve #AI #TMBSA

    OpenAI's First Device Looks Like a Donut and ChatGPT for Teens Bans Emotional Dependence
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Ratings & Reviews

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6 Ratings

About

They Might Be Self-Aware is a twice-weekly AI podcast about the week's news, tech, and culture, and the question in its name: are the machines becoming self-aware? Every episode starts with a real story. A new Claude or ChatGPT release, an AI lawsuit, the Pope's verdict on machine souls, Martin Scorsese making films with AI. Then it chases that story somewhere stranger, funnier, and more human than the headline. This is AI as a culture story, not a tech beat: the relief of finally hearing people who are as deep in it as you are. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop host. Two guys who actually build with this stuff, arguing about it fast, funny, and unfiltered, not reading you benchmarks or "10 prompts to save you time." Gary produces, phoning in the cold open from a payphone. He has no last name, and a backstory no one on staff has managed to verify. One of the hosts might not be human. We won't say which. New episodes Mondays and Thursdays, from The Blur. theblur.ai

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