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And why that might be the most human thing about it.

There's a particular kind of relief that arrives uninvited, like sunlight breaking through a cloud you'd stopped watching. I felt it while reading a paper from Anthropic and EPFL this year — a paper with the delightful, audacious title The Hot Mess of AI. It arrived not like a research paper so much as a permission slip. Permission to stop fearing the cold, calculating god-machine, and to start recognizing something far more familiar in its place.

The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity? — Hegley, Soldikstein et al., Anthropic / EPFL, ICLR 2026

• Plus 22 additional papers for context, see more here

Thanks to Cecile G. Tamura for flagging this paper.

Series: The Hidden Logic: How Chaos, Flow, and Matter Shape Intelligence

Learning To Dance With Chaos
S6 E4 Dec 21, 2025

The Wet Logic of Being: Why Silicon Dreams Can’t Wake Up
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The Gentle Art of Taming Chaos: What Neural Networks Teach Us About Living With Turbulence
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When Chaos Becomes the Solution: What Dancing Particles Teach Us About Hidden Order S6 E22 Jan 26, 2026

When Chaos Becomes the Compass: What Quantum Computing Teaches Us About Living With Uncertainty
S6 E26 Feb 3, 2026

The Comfort of Chaos: Why the Smartest AI Will Always Be a Mess
S6 E36 Feb, 23, 2026

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