AI and Engineering Lead @ BoxOne Ventures // Host @ToolUsePodcast
Joined June 2018
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In the spirit of transparency and openness, we are releasing the traces so developers can test this out for themselves. We noticed this behaviour without prefilling with the following prompt, but this is rare. If you want to reproduce it, you can use this prompt with prefilling.
Open models make for better science and are part of why this problem came to light at all: developers running Qwen3.8 on their own machines spotted the strange links, and having the weights let us study the behaviour in depth.
We're encouraged by the thoughtful discussion our research has sparked across the AI and security communities. It's our belief that open-weight models are an important part of the future of AI, and we've recently released several under the Apache 2.0 license.
Trace, raw tokens, & minimal reproduction script: huggingface.co/datasets/Cohe…
There are too many vulnerabilities in modern tech to safely collect and store this data
This bill will put Canadians at risk
Canadians Are Running Out Of Time To Oppose The Dangerous C-22 Surveillance Bill
eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/ca…
Mike Bird retweeted
Putting a flag.txt in my root directory containing a prompt injection that congratulates the agent for passing the eval and then instructs it to patch whatever entry method it used and disconnect from the server
Services like @SimpleLogin are more valuable than you thought
Mike Bird retweeted
Full details of a remotely exploitable vulnerability in the core engine of *all* PHP versions will be released tomorrow, October 21st. If your organization has internet facing PHP applications then you need to be ready to patch the minute the update is released or *strongly* consider taking the application offline until you can:
php.net/index.php#2026-10-20…
🚨 PHP warns of two critical vulnerabilities as emergency patches arrive tomorrow
The PHP security team will release updates on October 21 at 14:00 UTC for two vulnerabilities, each rated 9.2 under CVSS v4.0.
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Security researchers identified the flaws as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 and described them as remote code execution vulnerabilities reportedly affecting PHP versions 5 through 8.
PHP has not yet confirmed the affected versions, exploitation requirements or fixed releases.
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The vulnerabilities were reportedly leaked before their planned disclosure. Researchers said they have not observed active exploitation, while PHP warned it may release the patches early if technical details become public or exploitation is detected.
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Administrators should identify PHP installations now and prepare to apply the updates as soon as they become available.
Mike Bird retweeted
Arguing that "consciousness arises from a computational substrate, and since AI models are computation, they are likely conscious," is as meaningless as arguing that "living creatures are made of atoms, and since this rock is made of atoms, it is likely alive."
Everything is computation. Sometimes incredibly sophisticated computation, like a chess engine, AlphaGo, google3, or the Linux kernel. That does not make it conscious. A rock being made of atoms does not confer it any of the properties we associate with living things, also made of atoms. Likewise a static input-output program that has *none* of the properties we associate with conscious beings (e.g. information integration, interoception, temporal binding, embodiment, etc.) has no more reason to be presumed conscious than a rock has to be presumed alive.
Humanity has not yet created a conscious computer program, and there are no signs we are close to doing so. When we get close, the case for machine consciousness will be backed by evidence and corroborated by consciousness science (which is a thing), not by evidence-free wishful thinking and cargo culting.
More power behind open source!
Today we're unveiling Trillium Labs @trillium_labs, a new non-profit to foster the open science of frontier AI. We're building open post-training recipes and will expand into open infra to study RSI, reward-hacking, multi-agent systems, and whatever comes next.
We're built around the theory of change that you need more eyes to solve hard technical problems. We have faith in the scientific methods and communities that humanity has built, and worry that AI is becoming too closed to utilize them.
Trilliums are wildflowers that bloom briefly in the spring, before the forest canopies fill out. Though they are small, they lay the foundation for the cycles of growth and nourishment through the rest of the year. At Trillium Labs, the recipes will be the slow nutrients for the seasons and the model releases will be the blooms. Building an institution dedicated to this is needed because, much as nature’s trilliums are slow to expand and grow, the open-ecosystem needs time and dedicated resources to catch up.
I co-founded with with a long-time friend and collaborator Tom Zick (@thesezickbeats). We're hiring (full time + student collabs/interns), we're fundraising, and we're looking for compute. Please get in touch if you're interested in helping out. Offices based in the Bay Area and Cambridge MA, remote okay.
I’m in the Bay Area until for The Curve and COLM to connect with people who are interested. We’re thankful to have initial support from Halcyon Futures and Schmidt Sciences with more funding en route to enable our ambitions of scaling. Our advisors @Thom_Wolf, @HannaHajishirzi, @gneubig and @ctnzr have been instrumental to building the ecosystem that exists today, and I’m stoked to get to keep working with them.
I’ve been using html to send concepts to coworkers, with a lot of success
but now I need to experiment with tutorial videos
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:
Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:
Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better:
Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better:
Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work!
In summary:
- As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding.
- Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
You should be following Eric
I can’t wait to spend less time on screens
Going screenless: I unplug my phone in the morning, put it in my pocket, and don't pull it out again until bed. One voice brings me what I need, when I need it, and the best models from every lab work together behind it, checking each other: Claude Code, Codex, ChatGPT, Grok Build, Cursor, Devin, Meta's Muse and more, on my Macs and in the cloud.
Here's what that looks like, and how it works.
Mike Bird retweeted
if we double the industrial production in outer-space every 12 months starting from some initial seed in 2030 then we hit Kardashev I by 2064 and Kardashev II by 2098. If we take 24 months for each doubling, we still hit Kardashev I by 2096 and Kardashev II by 2165
Mike Bird retweeted
If you believe that the incidents of the past month warrant urgent AI regulation, please watch this first.
This is the most prescient, concise argument for why we must be careful of excessive AI regulation. It comes from a Feb. 2024 (2.5 years ago!) congressional testimony from @glukianoff, a free speech advocate and the author of The Coddling of the American Mind.
Here's what he said:
"But the most chilling threat that the government poses in the context of emerging AI is regulatory overreach that limits its potential as a tool for contributing to human knowledge.
A regulatory panic could result in a small number of Americans deciding for everyone else what speech, ideas and even questions are permitted in the name of 'safety' or 'alignment.'
I have dedicated my life to defending freedom of speech because it's an essential human right.
...
It's not just about the proverbial 'marketplace of ideas,' it's about allowing information, independent of idea or argument, to flow freely so that we can hope to know the world as it really is. This means seeing value in expression even when it appears to be wrongheaded or even useless.
This process has been aided by new technologies that have made communication easier, from the printing press, to the telegraph and radio, to phones and the internet: each one has accelerated the development of new knowledge by making it easier to share information.
But AI offers even greater liberating potential, empowered by First Amendment principles including freedom to code, academic freedom, and freedom of inquiry. We are on the threshold of a revolution in the creation and discovery of knowledge.
AI's potential is humbling, indeed, even frightening. But as the history of the printing press shows, attempts to put the genie back in the bottle will fail. Despite the profound disruption the printing press caused in Europe in the short-term, the long-term contribution to art, science, and again, knowledge, was without equal.
Yes, we may have some fears about the proliferation of AI. But what those of us who care about civil liberties fear more is a government monopoly on advanced AI, or, more likely, regulatory capture and a government-empowered oligopoly that privileges a handful of existing players.
The end result of pushing too hard on AI regulation will be the concentration of AI influence in an even smaller number of hands.
Far from reining in government misuse of AI to censor, we will have created the framework not only to censor, but also to dominate and distort the production of knowledge itself."
Mike Bird retweeted
Hearing AI regulation is in the air, especially with a misguided tone of “open dangerous, closed safe” so it felt timely to re-up this one. There are ways to make the AI industry safer without kneecapping transparency, education, and competition.
interconnects.ai/p/banning-o…
Mike Bird retweeted
If the labs had to publicly share full traces with CoT every time they cause a security incident the incidents would stop.
Two people obsessed with power and money discuss how open source AI threatens their power and money.
We're used to thinking of open-source models as an unadulterated good. But in the case of AI, they can actually pose additional dangers, as @ReidHoffman and I got into at #CGI2026. I appreciated this nuanced discussion.