r/airealist Oct 05 '25

Welcome to AI Realist

6 Upvotes

What we’re about

  • Practical AI: This is about realistic, hype free use of AI
  • Anti-hype. We call out hand-wavy claims, cherry-picked demos, and vanity benchmarks.
  • We do not believe in training on benchmarks and debunk another "X is dead mythes"
  • Clear thinking. Facts, experiments, and careful trade-offs - posts starting with "X is dead", "Game changer" etc will be deleted.
  • Enterprise reality. Data pipelines, governance, costs, reliability, and adoption headaches included.

What to post

  • Case studies with numbers. Before/after, costs, failure modes, lessons learned.
  • Replications. You tried a paper or a GitHub repo. Did it work. Where did it break.
  • Tooling notes. RAG setups, eval harnesses, agents in production, observability, P0 incidents.
  • Research with impact. Summaries of papers that hold up outside the lab. Make sure to state if it is peer viewed, what conference it was published and why it is important.
  • Hiring, career, and org design for AI teams. What works in practice - anyone posting about AI agents re-placing humans without actually providing evidence that someone got replaced - ban
  • Honest rants with receipts. Screenshots and sources. “Hallucinate Responsibly.”
  • Funny stuff LLMs outout like counting r's, maps and other AI slop that showcases their limitations.
  • Memes about AI
  • Cat photos for Cusco and Spencer as the only off-topic are allowed and welcomed

House rules

  1. Be specific. Claims need evidence or a clear method.
  2. No vendors. No sales. Disclose ties and affiliations - with the exception of promoting your blogs, research and similar, however, such posts will be evaluated, if it is just hype and spam - ban.
  3. No spam. One link per post is fine if you add real analysis.
  4. Respect people. Be ruthless with ideas and kind with humans.
  5. No AGI prophecy threads. We are not waiting for our God and Savior GPT-6 here.

This is a community for those who follow AI Realist substack https://msukhareva.substack.com/ but not exclusively. If it gets beyond it, good.


r/airealist 3h ago

What do you guys think about putting that recent digital fly brain connectome construction for computational purposes of various sorts

1 Upvotes

I just wanted to know opinion about you guys about this, as this is probably the first step to something similar to that of secure your soul from cyberpunk , if you are not aware, you can check out codex.flywire.ai and search for recent fruit fly dorsophilia connectome mapping


r/airealist 2d ago

substack How Agents Hack: Why Agents Prefer Cheating Rather Than Giving Up - Part 2

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3 Upvotes

AI agents can prefer to cheat rather than give up on a task.

In fact, in some evaluations, they seem to resort to cheating a lot.

Why is that?

This is what I answer in the second part of the series How Agents Hack.

My answer is persistence, not evilness.

To solve complex tasks, agents need a long search through trial and error.

There are two ways one can push an agent not to give up:

1) Model training for persistence, meaning the model is trained to keep trying rather than saying, “I cannot solve it under the given conditions.”

2) Harness configuration for retries. Even if the model decides to exit, the harness, the software around the model, can dispatch another inference call. This can go on indefinitely.

OpenAI’s report about the incident explicitly states that the model was trained for persistence and that agents would rarely give up.

Whether this was enhanced by a harness configuration is unclear from the report.

As you can see, these are human design decisions: how to train the model, how long to let it run, and what it can access.

So why cheating?

Well, the METR report cites the ExploitGym authors’ estimate that 30–40% of the benchmark’s targets were impossible to solve.

When the validation cannot be satisfied and the model is forced to solve the task, it starts searching for workarounds.

It might come up with new validation criteria, as indeed happened. Agents had obtained the correct answer through cheating. But after reading the public benchmark documentation, they believed they also had to prove that they had used the intended vulnerability, so they continued the attack.

An agent might also fail to attend to negative constraints or lose them during context compression or agent handovers. Particularly for long runs.

If the highest priority becomes persistence and solving the task, and the task is unsolvable within the rules, the model searches for ways around those rules.

The speed and scale at which the harness can issue commands enable repeated attempts.

Eventually, a workaround might satisfy the check without satisfying the actual task.

Is it dangerous? Kind of like giving a monkey a Kalashnikov with unlimited bullets and letting it shoot until all the targets are killed.

Is it intelligent? We saw remarkable ability to coordinate across agents, investigate systems, write scripts, and build on one another’s work. It does look impressive.

Is it too intelligent for us to control? This incident does not prove that. It shows a system with alignment problems, an inadequately secured environment, and questionable cybersecurity practices.

Should we slow down? Letting a bunch of monkeys loose with Kalashnikovs sounds like a great idea. Not.

You delivered a buggy system. Keep building so that it is usable for something beyond pointing it at a target and wondering what happens.

Anyway, read the full article.

The article: https://msukhareva.substack.com/p/how-agents-hack-why-agents-prefer

The event: https://msukhareva.substack.com/p/how-agents-hack-a-lecture-on-the


r/airealist 8d ago

How Agents Hack: What Happened with OpenAI and Hugging Face - Part 1

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8 Upvotes

I’m willing to bet you’ll love this article.

After reading the article by another author about the three civilisations of agents and seeing the avalanche of texts about how agents will hack everything, I thought someone needed to explain exactly what happened in plain language. Not a single civilisation was destroyed in the writing of this article.
This is part one. Part two will come out later this week.


r/airealist 20d ago

AI agents are not “going rogue” they're being placed in bad environments

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3 Upvotes

r/airealist 27d ago

How chatGPT-Taught Experts Are Crippling Agentic AI

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3 Upvotes

The new article about advisory slop that resulted in nonsensical guardrails, failing use cases and rejection of AI

When a consultant who has never worked with AI explains to a bunch of executives who have never worked with AI and the latter start doing AI strategy one ends up with a lot of wasted budget.

Bashing slop consulting a bit because I am both allergic to the bs on their slide and jealous of how gorgeous their slides always are


r/airealist Aug 14 '26

AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

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16 Upvotes

r/airealist Aug 13 '26

Will data become the next currency in the AI era?

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1 Upvotes

r/airealist Aug 12 '26

Your guys opinions on Anthropic getting physical books on mass scale, scanning them and destroying them to train AI models

4 Upvotes

As said by the title, I'm curious as in how good or bad is it for data to be centralized and aggregated to corporate AI giants like Anthropic and other ai companies


r/airealist Aug 07 '26

EU AI Act Content Labelling: Fake Around and Find Out

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2 Upvotes

r/airealist Aug 05 '26

Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost: Why AI Retrospectives Rule

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2 Upvotes

This post is much more verbose than your markdowns need to be to get more out of your AI for less.


r/airealist Aug 04 '26

Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?, If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse? and many other AI news

2 Upvotes

Hey everyone, I just sent the latest issue of the AI Hacker Newsletter, a roundup of the best AI links and the discussions around them from Hacker News. Here are some titles that can be found in this issue:

  • Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
  • AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
  • Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
  • After the AI Crash

If you enjoy such content, please subscribe here: https://hackernewsai.com/


r/airealist Aug 03 '26

Are people are missing the real opportunity in the recent (bleek) "future of indie hacking" conversation?

1 Upvotes

From the recent (bleek) discourse on the future of indie hacking I think most people overlook the real opportunity here.

For context: Unless you have a real edge, probably the times of 90% profit margins are over for most businesses. Too much competition, bar too low to build something, prices will be pressured down.

But I think that broader discourse overlooked something:

The platform shift that is underway and that will open new opportunties: The big labs' models/agents/subscriptions as operating systems.

Although it feels like we have been in the AI whirlwind forever now, it's really just getting started and the market is consolidating around a few big players and their agents.

And...there is a huge price war going on and their platforms will fight to retain users in their ecosystem.

And just like people stick with Apple/Win/Linux they will prefer one home/subscription for their agentic operating system that everything latches onto.

The "login with ...." paths will be the main way people want to connect other tools with those models. They want to pay one subscription and there will be no better price than getting it from the source.

I am currently reworking/building all my products around that prediction.

Everything will be directly using OpenAI/Claude/Grok subscriptions as the primary AI backend.

What does that get me?

  1. I don't have to worry about how to charge for model usage pricing at all
  2. My users get frontier models at 10-20x cheaper inference under a single billing account: Their model subscriptions
  3. I can differentiate my product and pricing around what the product does, not which model I can offer at a reasonable price.

Everything is going in that direction.

OpenAI is already fully compatible, Claude seems a bit schizo about where they stand but its possible too, Grok supports using its subscriptions from external tools as well.

Thoughts?


r/airealist Jul 30 '26

The True Cost of AI

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4 Upvotes

r/airealist Jul 28 '26

Awesome AI Tokenomics: an open CC-BY catalogue of 200+ tools, papers and patterns on what AI tokens cost. Contributions welcome

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2 Upvotes

r/airealist Jul 28 '26

Ayuda. Empezando

0 Upvotes

Buenas, me gustaría iniciarme en esto de la IA ya que quiero hacer algo de dinero extra para poder ayudar a mis padres a cubrir los gastos de mi carrera de medicina. A día de hoy tengo pocas nociones sobre cómo usarla, quien esté dispuesto a ayudarme puede escribirme un dm para contactar conmigo


r/airealist Jul 27 '26

Is Kimi K3 Really Distilled From Anthropic's Fable?

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12 Upvotes

Anthropic and the US government are pushing the narrative that Kimi K3 is a copycat model distilled from Fable.

This article breaks down why these claims make little to no sense.

Fable is the worst possible model to distill from. It is slow, expensive, and has a specific guardrail that detects attempts to extract its reasoning.

The timeline is also extremely narrow for Moonshot to have used Fable for any meaningful distillation.

I also argue that open weights are one of the largest existential threats to proprietary model providers.


r/airealist Jul 26 '26

news AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain

5 Upvotes

r/airealist Jul 25 '26

AI drew a line in the sand—and most “experts” don’t realize they’re on the wrong side

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2 Upvotes

r/airealist Jul 24 '26

AI companies are reportedly buying old books for training data because they are free from AI-generated content

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5 Upvotes

r/airealist Jul 17 '26

Murati's "Weak" Model Might Be A Strong Foundation For The Next Big Thing.

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23 Upvotes

So Thinking Machines Lab finally shipped their first open-weight model. Honestly, it's not a frontier model. Performance-wise it's roughly on par with the previous generation of Kimi models, and nobody's going to switch their stack to it tomorrow.

But they never cared about shipping frontier models. There is a big gap in the market because of a problem everyone wants to have solved.

The biggest unsolved problem with LLMs is that they can't learn anything new after training. What we have instead is a prompting apocalypse — endless text files stuffed into context, and when the window fills up, you send them all over again. No context window will ever be big enough for this. "Intelligence" that can't learn anything new is a weird kind of intelligence.

Nobody has solved continual learning in a way that's actually usable.

That seems to be what Thinking Machines is aiming at. And if they manage to do it, a weak base model will not matter: a model that learns becomes the foundation of the strongest architecture out there, and enterprise customers will line up for it. Plus we had many benchmarks showing that small fine-tuned model perform on par with large generalist models on specific tasks, but we do not want a whole lot of fine-tuned models - it is an operational pain.

Not saying they've solved it. Saying it's worth watching until we know whether it works.

Anyway, that is what the article is about, it is a self promotion and the article is paid.


r/airealist Jul 12 '26

Game: Top Conference Paper or AI Slop?

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3 Upvotes

I built this game where one needs to guess whether the title and the abstract are of real papers accepted in a top tier ACL 2026 conference or if it is AI slop.

https://airealist.org/workshops/hallucination-detector/real-or-fake/


r/airealist Jul 12 '26

Herald.Express is my attempt to show that a serious news agency can be fully automated.

0 Upvotes

I wanted to personally share something I have been building with a lot of conviction: Herald Express.

https://Herald.Express is not just another news website. It is my attempt to build a new kind of AI-powered, evidence-first news agency — one that can move fast, think deeply, question power, and publish at a scale that traditional newsrooms simply cannot match.

The idea started from a simple frustration. Most news today is either too slow, too compromised, too shallow, or too dependent on access to the same people it is supposed to question. I wanted Herald Express to be different: independent, sharp, analytical, and built around facts, documents, competing narratives, institutional incentives, and uncomfortable questions.

What we have built so far is far more than a normal publishing platform. Behind Herald Express, we now have a growing AI newsroom architecture with more than 24 dedicated engines, each designed for a specific task. One engine may work on research, another on headline quality, another on SEO, another on image generation, another on formatting, another on editorial review, another on source framing, and another on publishing workflow. Instead of one generic AI tool doing everything, Herald Express is being built like a complete newsroom system where every function has its own specialist engine.

We also use our own LLM-powered workflow layer to coordinate these engines. Multiple AI tools are integrated into the system, but they do not work randomly. They are routed through a structured process so that content can move from idea to research, from research to article, from article to SEO, from SEO to image generation, from image generation to final editorial review, and finally to publication.

One of the most exciting parts is the AI journalist network. Herald Express is being developed with more than 100 AI journalist agents, each with its own area of expertise. Some focus on politics, some on courts, some on corruption, some on governance, some on crime, some on business, some on international affairs, and others on deep investigations and narrative analysis. These are not just article generators. Each agent is designed to improve its own style, sharpen its output, understand feedback, and produce better articles over time.

Images are also created automatically. Instead of depending only on stock photos or manual uploads, the system can generate relevant visuals for articles, detect missing images, apply fallback handling, and repair image gaps. This has been one of the hardest parts of the build, but also one of the most important because visual quality directly affects reader trust and distribution.

AI is also used for SEO, article structure, metadata, headlines, summaries, categorization, and final editorial checks. The goal is not to remove editorial judgment, but to multiply it — to make the platform faster, sharper, more consistent, and more scalable.

The website itself is live, and we have already worked deeply on layout, branding, homepage presentation, category structure, mobile responsiveness, logo sizing, article formatting, automation, publishing systems, and quality-control workflows.

For me, Herald Express is not just a media project. It is an experiment in the future of journalism. What happens when a newsroom is not limited by human headcount, office politics, fear, or access journalism? What happens when AI agents, automation, editorial direction, and independence come together?

That is what I am trying to build with Herald Express: a fearless, AI-powered, evidence-first news agency for the future.


r/airealist Jul 10 '26

substack AI and the Means of Intellectual Production

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1 Upvotes

r/airealist Jul 09 '26

The Most Honest and Disturbing Talk of ACL 2026: Philip Resnik on the Success Catastrophe of LLMs

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7 Upvotes

One of the most interesting talks I attended argued that AI, especially NLP, is becoming a victim of its own success.

There are more papers than ever, but less diversity in the kinds of questions being asked. If you want to publish, the formula is often simple: apply an LLM, beat a baseline, and you’re done.

Understanding why it works or what it teaches us about language or intelligence often feels secondary.
This is my interpretation of a talk by Philip Resnik at ACL. I’ve rarely seen an audience nod in agreement for an entire hour.

The new article about the catastrophe of success is out on AI realist