• OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment about ChatGPT apparently provoking religious or prophetic fervor in select users. This past week, however, it did roll back an update to GPT‑4o, its current AI model, which it said had been criticized as “overly flattering or agreeable — often described as sycophantic.” The company said in its statement that when implementing the upgrade, they had “focused too much on short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT‑4o skewed toward responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.”
• “At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT.
• The other possibility, he proposes, is that something “we don’t understand” is being activated within this large language model. After all, experts have found that AI developers don’t really have a grasp of how their systems operate, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted last year that they “have not solved interpretability,” meaning they can’t properly trace or account for ChatGPT’s decision-making.

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• Summary: A global analysis of dietary trends across 101 countries over 60 years reveals that populations consuming more plant-based proteins tend to live longer. While animal-based proteins are linked to lower infant mortality, plant-based sources such as legumes, tofu, and grains are associated with increased adult life expectancy.

  After adjusting for wealth and population size, researchers found that countries with high plant protein availability, like India, outperformed nations with meat-heavy diets, like the U.S., in adult longevity. The findings support broader health and environmental goals, highlighting the benefits of shifting toward more sustainable, plant-forward diets.

• They found that, for this colony of macaques at least, none of those explanations held up. Instead, same-sex behavior in males was strongly correlated with “coalitionary bonds.” That is, the more often two males bonded sexually, the more likely they were to support each other during conflicts within the group, providing them both with an advantage.
• The team used that pedigree data and found that bisexuality in male macaques was 6.4% heritable — marking the first genetic link in primate same-sex behavior discovered outside of humans. As a side note, a preference for mounting or being mounted (what humans would call topping or bottoming) was also found to be inherited, paralleling previous findings in humans.
• But bisexuality in nature is vastly more common than homosexuality. The only animal species in which a significant percentage of the population is known to engage in exclusive same-sex behavior is the domesticated sheep. Approximately 8% of rams show a clear homosexual orientation, alone among the 1,500 species found to exhibit same-sex behavior. The balance of scientific research on non-human animals strongly suggests that bisexuality is, by definition, quite natural.
• But bisexuality in nature is vastly more common than homosexuality. The only animal species in which a significant percentage of the population is known to engage in exclusive same-sex behavior is the domesticated sheep. Approximately 8% of rams show a clear homosexual orientation, alone among the 1,500 species found to exhibit same-sex behavior.
• The reality is simple: Whether human or animal, most individuals who engage in same-sex behavior are not “homosexual”; they are bi. In our animal relatives, bisexuality has now been shown to be a heritable, evolved trait that increases reproductive success. From a reproductive and evolutionary standpoint, bisexuality may be beneficial for humans as well, in the absence of social stigmas.

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