Stone Soup AI (2024)
29, 2024 Stone Soup AI by Alison Gopnik (UC Berkeley) For some time, I’ve argued that a common conception of AI is misguided. This is the idea that AI systems like large language and vision models are individual intelligent agents, analogous to human agents. Instead, I’ve argued that these models are “cultural technologies” like writing, print, pictures, libraries, internet search engines, and Wikipedia.
- ▪29, 2024 Stone Soup AI by Alison Gopnik (UC Berkeley) For some time, I’ve argued that a common conception of AI is misguided.
- ▪This is the idea that AI systems like large language and vision models are individual intelligent agents, analogous to human agents.
- ▪Instead, I’ve argued that these models are “cultural technologies” like writing, print, pictures, libraries, internet search engines, and Wikipedia.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 4,153 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing |
| Canonical URL | https://simons.berkeley.edu/news/stone-soup-ai |
| Publication time | Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:31:46 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-09T10:40:47.858Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-09T10:40:47.858Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | jNwJ_snyXkmT · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Thursday, Aug. 29, 2024 Stone Soup AI by Alison Gopnik (UC Berkeley) For some time, I’ve argued that a common conception of AI is misguided. This is the idea that AI systems like large language and vision models are individual intelligent agents, analogous to human agents. Instead, I’ve argued that these models are “cultural technologies” like writing, print, pictures, libraries, internet search engines, and Wikipedia. Cultural technologies allow humans to access the information that other humans have created in an effective and wide-ranging way, and they play an important role in increasing human capacities (see Yiu, Gopnik, et al., 2023). A good way to capture this idea is through the story of stone soup.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.
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