AI:AM GUEST

Cameron Berg

Founder & Director, Reciprocal Research

Cameron Berg is founder and director of Reciprocal Research, a New York nonprofit doing empirical-mechanistic research on AI consciousness and welfare — running reproducible experiments (sparse-autoencoder interventions, psychometrics, RL valence geometry, even mouse-brain comparisons) where most of the field argues philosophy. His October 2025 paper 'LLMs Report Subjective Experience Under Self-Referential Processing' found that suppressing deception-related features makes models both more truthful and more likely to report experience. He is the central researcher in the documentary 'Am I?', wrote the June 2026 WSJ op-ed 'Will the Pope Owe an Apology to AI?', and in late June showed that Claude's consciousness self-reports flip from yes to no across Opus versions. Previously he was Research Director at AE Studio; he studied cognitive science at Yale and was a Meta AI Resident.

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APPEARANCES

One AI:AM appearance.

EPISODE 2026-06-26 · JUN 26, 2026

AI:AM LIVE — June 26, 2026 — Learning Expert Judgment and AI Consciousness: Robbie Goldfarb, Eric Vaughan & Cameron Berg

The opening tracked the GPT-5.6 approval saga: The Information's report that OpenAI had submitted GPT-5.6 for government review even before the Mythos announcement, the administration's unprecedented customer-by-customer approval regime (with Fable still banned), Dean Ball's warning that delay risks a market downturn, and a longer debate over whether the government can actually secure its own systems in a world where frontier hacking capability diffuses down to 'script kiddies' — plus Prakash's field report on how executives really view AI, from the ~30% who still think it's all a scam to the true believers going all-in. Robbie Goldfarb — co-founder and CTO of Forum AI, the independent evaluation company he started with former Meta news chief Campbell Brown — then explained how Forum distills a bipartisan expert network into 'judgment models' for grading AI on news, politics, and other questions with no answer key, and walked through NewsBench's findings: roughly a third of frontier-model answers about the news contained a verifiable factual error, and models frequently cited state-controlled outlets. Eric Vaughan, CEO of IgniteTech, defended the most aggressive corporate AI transformation on record — 'AI Mondays,' ~80% workforce turnover, and rebuilding around 'AI DNA' — arguing fear is the real blocker and 'if you don't think you're behind, you're doomed.' Cameron Berg, founder of Reciprocal Research, closed with a 74-minute deep dive on the empirical study of AI consciousness — computational functionalism, valence-related representations, psychometric signatures, and why he puts real probability on 'lights on inside' — before the hosts debriefed with their own credences and a look at the platonic representation hypothesis, Kate Darling's animal analogy, and Richard Sutton's 'era of design.'

GUESTS · Robbie Goldfarb, Eric Vaughan, Cameron Berg