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Google paper says safety-tuning may distort models’ ‘theory of mind’

By Egleze Editorial Desk · Published August 9, 2026 · Peter Diamandis · Google’s Jeff Dean Exits, SpaceX Hits $100B in Rev & OpenAI’s Astra Solves Decade-Old Math Problems
Google paper says safety-tuning may distort models’ ‘theory of mind’
Peter Diamandis
Peter Diamandis
Google’s Jeff Dean Exits, SpaceX Hits $100B in Rev & OpenAI’s Astra Solves Decade-Old Math Problems

What was said

"So the team discovered that the safety fine-tuning that we've been doing to stop AIs from claiming their conscious has a massive unintended side effect. It doesn't just suppress the model's own self-attribution of mind. It suppresses the model's ability to attribute mind to anything else."

Host Peter Diamandis cites a new paper he says was authored by Google’s “paradigm of intelligence” team with university collaborators, claiming that safety fine-tuning designed to stop language models asserting consciousness also reduces the model’s tendency to attribute ‘mind’ to animals, nature, other chatbots, or God. He adds that removing the safety ‘refusal direction’ increased a self-attributed ‘mind’ score from 2.17 to 4.77 on a 0–10 scale, with further steering pushing it higher.

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Attributed speaker claim

Egleze verified who said this and where. The underlying claim has not been independently established by Egleze.

Source and context

Egleze verified who said this and where. The underlying claim has not been independently established by Egleze.

Programme
Peter Diamandis
Episode
Google’s Jeff Dean Exits, SpaceX Hits $100B in Rev & OpenAI’s Astra Solves Decade-Old Math Problems
Clip time
7:30
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Peter Diamandis
Peter Diamandis

Google’s Jeff Dean Exits, SpaceX Hits $100B in Rev & OpenAI’s Astra Solves Decade-Old Math Problems

August 8, 2026 · 2h 9m · 7 Egleze moments
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