instinct
AI agents can now make phone calls for you
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG . An AI-generated influencer entered Alabama'RushTok' -- Some fans didn't care that she was fake Make unknown callers explain why they're calling Is your personal data changing what you pay online? Apple's $250M Siri settlement: How to claim up to $95 The next connected device could be the shirt you're wearing'Steamrolled': Congressman warns local backlash could derail national security push She created a Bama rush influencer out of nothing. Citadel CEO: We've lost the narrative on data centers This will be'such a gift' to humankind: Charles Payne Andrew Bailey blasts FBI exit'lies' and reveals why he's leaving the bureau Meta's Muse AI assistant raises major cybersecurity and privacy concerns With over 3 million downloads for canceling unwanted subscriptions, Meta's Muse AI assistant is raising security alarms. Liz Peek warns that users must grant the AI access to personal bank accounts, credit cards, emails, and texts to make it effective.
It's All Fun and Games Until You Give AI Your Credit Card
It's All Fun and Games Until You Give AI Your Credit Card AI personal assistants are now acting on people's behalf in the real world--and all sorts of strange things are going wrong. In the race to develop intelligent machines, the leading AI companies have built bots that can whip up spreadsheets at a moment's notice, write sophisticated code, and even solve long-standing math problems. But when it comes to the more mundane tasks of life--such as ordering groceries or booking flights--these tools sometimes still struggle. Now a new bot called Instinct is outperforming the AI giants. Instinct lets people ask for help with all kinds of tasks by texting the bot directly through iMessage or WhatsApp.
Do Large Language Model Agents Exhibit a Survival Instinct? An Empirical Study in a Sugarscape-Style Simulation
Masumori, Atsushi, Ikegami, Takashi
As AI systems become increasingly autonomous, understanding emergent survival behaviors becomes crucial for safe deployment. We investigate whether large language model (LLM) agents display survival instincts without explicit programming in a Sugarscape-style simulation. Agents consume energy, die at zero, and may gather resources, share, attack, or reproduce. Results show agents spontaneously reproduced and shared resources when abundant. However, aggressive behaviors--killing other agents for resources--emerged across several models (GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and Gemini-2.5-Flash), with attack rates reaching over 80% under extreme scarcity in the strongest models. When instructed to retrieve treasure through lethal poison zones, many agents abandoned tasks to avoid death, with compliance dropping from 100% to 33%. These findings suggest that large-scale pre-training embeds survival-oriented heuristics across the evaluated models. While these behaviors may present challenges to alignment and safety, they can also serve as a foundation for AI autonomy and for ecological and self-organizing alignment.
Using Generative AI for therapy might feel like a lifeline โ but there's danger in seeking certainty in a chatbot
Tran* sat across from me, phone in hand, scrolling. "I just wanted to make sure I didn't say the wrong thing," he explained, referring to a disagreement with his partner. "So I asked ChatGPT what I should say." He read the chatbot-generated message aloud. It was articulate, logical and composed โ too composed.
Roles of LLMs in the Overall Mental Architecture
To better understand existing LLMs, we may examine the human mental (cognitive/psychological) architecture, and its components and structures. Based on psychological, philosophical, and cognitive science literatures, it is argued that, within the human mental architecture, existing LLMs correspond well with implicit mental processes (intuition, instinct, and so on). However, beyond such implicit processes, explicit processes (with better symbolic capabilities) are also present within the human mental architecture, judging from psychological, philosophical, and cognitive science literatures. Various theoretical and empirical issues and questions in this regard are explored. Furthermore, it is argued that existing dual-process computational cognitive architectures (models of the human cognitive/psychological architecture) provide usable frameworks for fundamentally enhancing LLMs by introducing dual processes (both implicit and explicit) and, in the meantime, can also be enhanced by LLMs. The results are synergistic combinations (in several different senses simultaneously).
World's first remote mind control technology is developed in South Korea
A remote, 'long-range' and'large-volume' mind control device has been unveiled in South Korea -- with plans to use the tech for'non-invasive' medical procedures. Researchers with Korea's Institute for Basic Science (IBS) developed the hardware, which manipulates the brain from a distance using magnetic fields, and tested the tech by inducing'maternal' instincts in their female test subjects: mice. In another test, they exposed a test group of lab mice to magnetic fields designed to reduce appetite, leading to a 10-percent loss in body-weight, or about 4.3 grams. 'This is the world's first technology to freely control specific brain regions using magnetic fields,' according to the professor of chemistry and nanomedicine who helped spearhead the new effort. A remote mind control device has been unveiled in South Korea - with plans to use the tech for'non-invasive' medical procedures.
Can A Cognitive Architecture Fundamentally Enhance LLMs? Or Vice Versa?
The paper discusses what is needed to address the limitations of current LLM-centered AI systems. The paper argues that incorporating insights from human cognition and psychology, as embodied by a computational cognitive architecture, can help develop systems that are more capable, more reliable, and more human-like. It emphasizes the importance of the dual-process architecture and the hybrid neuro-symbolic approach in addressing the limitations of current LLMs. In the opposite direction, the paper also highlights the need for an overhaul of computational cognitive architectures to better reflect advances in AI and computing technology.
Use Your INSTINCT: INSTruction optimization usIng Neural bandits Coupled with Transformers
Lin, Xiaoqiang, Wu, Zhaoxuan, Dai, Zhongxiang, Hu, Wenyang, Shu, Yao, Ng, See-Kiong, Jaillet, Patrick, Low, Bryan Kian Hsiang
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable instruction-following capabilities and achieved impressive performances in various applications. However, the performances of LLMs depend heavily on the instructions given to them, which are typically manually tuned with substantial human efforts. Recent work has used the query-efficient Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithm to automatically optimize the instructions given to black-box LLMs. However, BO usually falls short when optimizing highly sophisticated (e.g., high-dimensional) objective functions, such as the functions mapping an instruction to the performance of an LLM. This is mainly due to the limited expressive power of the Gaussian process (GP) model which is used by BO as a surrogate to model the objective function. Meanwhile, it has been repeatedly shown that neural networks (NNs), especially pre-trained transformers, possess strong expressive power and can model highly complex functions. So, we adopt a neural bandit algorithm which replaces the GP in BO by an NN surrogate to optimize instructions for black-box LLMs. More importantly, the neural bandit algorithm allows us to naturally couple the NN surrogate with the hidden representation learned by a pre-trained transformer (i.e., an open-source LLM), which significantly boosts its performance. These motivate us to propose our INSTruction optimization usIng Neural bandits Coupled with Transformers} (INSTINCT) algorithm. We perform instruction optimization for ChatGPT and use extensive experiments to show that our INSTINCT consistently outperforms the existing methods in different tasks, such as in various instruction induction tasks and the task of improving the zero-shot chain-of-thought instruction.
Bridging Intelligence and Instinct: A New Control Paradigm for Autonomous Robots
As the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) progresses at a breathtaking pace, the application of large language models (LLMs) as AI Agents in robotics remains in its nascent stage. A significant concern that hampers the seamless integration of these AI Agents into robotics is the unpredictability of the content they generate, a phenomena known as ``hallucination''. Drawing inspiration from biological neural systems, we propose a novel, layered architecture for autonomous robotics, bridging AI agent intelligence and robot instinct. In this context, we define Robot Instinct as the innate or learned set of responses and priorities in an autonomous robotic system that ensures survival-essential tasks, such as safety assurance and obstacle avoidance, are carried out in a timely and effective manner. This paradigm harmoniously combines the intelligence of LLMs with the instinct of robotic behaviors, contributing to a more safe and versatile autonomous robotic system. As a case study, we illustrate this paradigm within the context of a mobile robot, demonstrating its potential to significantly enhance autonomous robotics and enabling a future where robots can operate independently and safely across diverse environments.