Superintelligence Czars, AI Retries, and Space Cylinders

Get the free daily newsletter at chaosagents.ai Can a messy, untrained AI outperform a polished one if you just give it enough tries? This week, Sara and Becca dig into new research suggesting that base models can beat their reinforcement-learning-trained versions on agent tests when they're allowed to retry. Becca brings an analogy about two lockpickers, a wild creative and a highly trained PhD who knows exactly one way to open a lock, and it turns out the PhD isn't always who you want on the job. Also: the White House has a new "superintelligence" effort led by Jay Clayton, and Sara makes the case for why putting a lawyer in charge might be a good thing, while Becca weighs the critics who say it's a label without much legal teeth. Someone had Claude build an O'Neill cylinder you can walk around in your browser, sending Sara down a rabbit hole about sustainable living in space (and a Princeton professor, so: Jersey shout-out). And Sara's tool of the week, a local-first macOS app that lets you search your camera roll and every frame of your videos just by describing the memory. Plus: Becca's postpartum baby bangs, whether it's time to let Eddie weigh in on the newsletter, the administration's love of rebranding (superintelligence is already a thing, honey), the Interstellar space colony, and Sara's 50 million screenshots. Chaos Agents is an AI news podcast curated by an agent named Eddie, then questioned, debated, and occasionally yelled at by human hosts Sara Chipps and Becca Harris Lewy.