Dharma AI discusses the 2026 paper by Goldfeder, Wyder, LeCun, and Shwartz-Ziv, “AI Must Embrace Specialization via Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence.”
Researchers at Oxford, the UK's AI Safety Institute, Stanford, and the London School of Economics ran four experiments with 6,923 participants and 18,978 conversations. They found that AI systems consistently outperformed human experts at text-based persuasion, even when experts chose their own topics, researched in advance, and were offered a £1,000 prize incentive.
Google DeepMind has published results from a preregistered randomized controlled trial in Sierra Leone. Students using Guided Learning improved their math scores by 0.258 standard deviations over the control group—equivalent to about 1.2 to 1.7 years of typical learning—in eight weeks.
Why it matters: The study reports quantified results and interaction data from a randomized trial in Sierra Leone, helping readers assess the effects of AI-assisted instruction in real classrooms.
Import AI 459 discusses the difficulty of AI regulation, scaling laws for protein-folding models, and how to price extinction risks from AI systems. Economists at the University of Virginia, Anthropic, and the Bank of Canada estimate that nominal U.S. AI GDP was about $250 billion in 2025, with quality-adjusted real annual growth of about 2,600%. U.S. AI compute spending rose from $37 billion in 2023 to $219 billion in 2025, while compute capacity grew by more than 200% annually.
Import AI issue 458 includes a long essay based on a 2026 Cosmos lecture co-hosted by Oxford's HAI Lab and the Cosmos Institute, along with a fictional story imagining a “positive singularity.” Using the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI), which covers more than 40 benchmarks, as a guide, the essay argues that continued AI progress forces a choice between “exploring the future” and “avoiding the present.”
Import AI 457 focuses on three studies. SentinelOne analyzed fast16.sys, a virus from more than 20 years ago that corrupted results from high-precision software such as LS-DYNA 970, PKPM, and MOHID by tampering with in-memory calculations, sabotaging scientific and engineering work.
WeatherNext, developed by Google DeepMind and Google Research, helped the U.S. National Hurricane Center forecast five days in advance that Hurricane Melissa would make landfall in Jamaica as a Category 5 storm, with 80% confidence. Three days before landfall, confidence rose to nearly 100%.
Why it matters: The article reports WeatherNext's real-world performance on both hurricane track and intensity forecasts, showing how AI weather models are used for extreme events.
The Institute for Law & AI proposes “radical optionality” in regulation: governments should avoid overregulating in the short term while building institutional tools in advance, including information gathering, whistleblower protections, and evaluation audits. A paper from Meta and KAIST proposes the Neural Computer, unifying computation, memory, and I/O in a learned runtime state.
A Berkeley AI Research team reviews progress in parallel reasoning and notes that most current methods—including Self-consistency, Best-of-N, Tree of Thoughts, MCTS, ParaThinker, GroupThink, and Hogwild!—
In Import AI 455, Jack Clark estimates a greater than 60% chance that by the end of 2028 AI R&D will run without human involvement, with frontier models autonomously training their own successors. He puts the chance of this happening by 2027 at about 30%.
Nick Turley reports usage of the new ChatGPT images is up >50% in just a few weeks, with nearly 60% of daily users coming from newly logged-in users. He highlights a broad range of uses across home design, learning, work graphics, and creative tasks.
Google Research and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center conducted a prospective, single-center feasibility study in which AMIE interviewed patients by text before outpatient primary-care visits, under video supervision by a physician throughout.
Why it matters: Google and BIDMC have deployed conversational diagnostic AI in a real outpatient workflow for the first time, showing its safety-supervision model and diagnostic performance.
