AmplifyReach

Marcus Critiques Dawkins' Claim Claude Is Conscious

Gary Marcus published an essay on Substack (2026-05-02) criticizing Richard Dawkins' recent argument that the LLM "Claude" might be conscious. Marcus contends Dawkins relies on personal incredulity and output-level behavior rather than considering underlying mechanisms; he argues Claude and similar large language models are sophisticated mimics that do not provide evidence of internal subjective states. The piece references past episodes (e.g., Blake Lemoine and LaMDA), invokes thinkers such as Daniel Dennett, and points readers to Anil Seth’s TED talk arguing that AI is unlikely to become conscious. Marcus warns against conflating linguistic competence or apparent engagement with genuine consciousness and urges scrutiny of training and mechanism rather than surface outputs.

Taboola launches DeeperDive AI answer engine

Taboola has rolled out an AI answer engine called DeeperDive for publishers, a chat-style toolbar that generates short AI answers and surfaces relevant archive articles alongside ads. Launched in September 2025, Taboola says it has onboarded “dozens” of publishers; USA Today Co. deployed DeeperDive sitewide and reports more than 25 million questions asked (about 1 million per week). DeeperDive is free for publishers, shares ad revenue with them, and displays suggested prompts based on a user’s browsing history across Taboola’s publisher network. Taboola positions DeeperDive as part of a broader pivot toward AI products — including a recently announced Realize+ agentic layer for its performance marketing platform — while maintaining its core content-recommendation business.

Creators Discuss Pi and Self-Modifying AI Agents

The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast published an episode (2026-04-29) featuring Mario Zechner (creator of Pi) and Armin Ronacher (creator of Flask). They discuss Pi — a minimalist, self-modifying AI coding agent that underpins OpenClaw — and practical experiences using AI agents to generate and maintain code. Topics include why Pi was built (stability after unpredictable behavior in Claude Code), the value of specialized agent harnesses, risks such as automation bias and decreased code quality, agent-driven tech debt, the importance of human engineering judgment, and the limits of agentic workflows and over-automation. The newsletter lists nine principal takeaways from the conversation, links to the episode transcript and audio/video players, and provides references to related projects and tools mentioned during the discussion.