The answer that seems to be emerging from several different lines of research is that a) they always had fairly low fertility and b) they didn't really go extinct as such, they just intermixed with Homo Sapiens Sapiens and because the later had much higher fertility, Neanderthal genes got diluted down to the present ~2% in the Eurasian population.
Sounds plausible indeed. Anyways, neanderthals operating a large scale fat production 125 thousand years ago could be a good plot for another hollywood movie scenario. Any takers?
If it's 2% now after 2000-3000 generations, it must have stabilized because any number <.995 is basically zero when raised to the 2000th power. The neanderthal genes would have to be 1-10^-5 as fit as a the sapiens genes, which is basically noise.
> Has the climate collapsed? There are still glaciers in Glacier Nation Park. The Maldives remain islands, not seamounts.
Just to really quickly call out these tired old straw-men... all of these "predicted disasters" are far further along today than they were predicted to be by this date by, for example, the IPCC in 1990[0]. Deniers keep acting as if it scientists have been "crying wolf" for decades when the truth is that the 99% of the scientists doing real work on anthropogenic global warming have always been extremely conservative and reality has outpaced their predictions all along.
"When we systemically administered our nanoagent in mice bearing human breast cancer cells, it efficiently accumulated in tumors, robustly generated reactive oxygen species and completely eradicated the cancer without adverse effects ..."
So it kills human cancer and doesn't harm the mouse in the process.
Xenografted human tumors in mice != human cancer. The support structure of the tumor (tumor microenvironment) differs between model mice and humans, cells derived from human cancer that can be cultivated in a lab and xenografted differ from typical human cancer cells, and xenografting requires immunodeficient mice, just to name a few factors that affect treatment response.
Mice models of cancer are useful, but you should never be too surprised when something that works in mice doesn't work in the clinic, xenografting or no. Cancer is complicated.
ELIZA absolutely did not ever pass anything resembling a real Turing test. A real Turing test is adversarial, the interrogator knows the testees are trying to fool him.
Landauer and Bellman, absolutely put ELIZA to an adversarial Turing test, and called it such, in 1999. [0]
But... Over in 2025, ELIZA was once again, put to the Turing test in adversarial conditions. [1] And still had people think it was a real person, over 27% of the time. Over a quarter of the testees, thought the thing was a human.
The "ELIZA Effect" wasn't coined because everyone understands that an AI isn't conscious.
Unfortunately I'm not sure the Turing test posited a minimal level of intelligence for the human testers. As we have found with LLMs, humans are rather easy to fool.
Now if you have multiple teams each doing this and then have all those agents talk to each other and then report back to your team, you get "AI Hyperchat"[0], which may actually be a really good idea that has the potential to seriously improve intra-organizational communications (disruptively so). See also [1] for a VentureBeat article about the idea.
Improbable, the OP is a long-time maintainer of a significant piece of open source software and this whole thing unfolded in public view step by step from the initial PR until this post. If it had been faked there would be smells you could detect with the clarity of hindsight going back over the history and there aren't.
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