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.
APPEARANCES
2 AI:AM appearances.
AI:AM LIVE — September 17, 2026 — Aaronson Says the Takeoff Already Started and Esvelt Reopens the Bio Question, Diffusion's Justin McCarthy on Software Factories, Five Nines and Buying an Airline's Data, and Cameron Berg on Suleyman, a Pain Direction in Five Model Families, and the Relief Button
A show planned for eighty minutes that ran two hours and thirty-seven. Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan open on Scott Aaronson's argument that judged by 2006 standards the takeoff has plainly started, the Royal Society letter that forty-two mathematician Fellows signed on AI existential risk, and Kevin Esvelt's reply to the claim that AI cannot help with dangerous biology — the pool of people who would want to cause bio-harm and the pool who currently can barely overlap, and AI could widen the second one. Prakash argues the unassisted PhD is finished; Nathan worries about a correlated multi-provider API outage nobody has explained and about what a model takes away from harsh training. Justin McCarthy, founder and CEO of Diffusion and previously StrongDM's co-founder and CTO, then spends forty-three minutes on what actually happens when an enterprise leadership team is flown out for a week: stop saying your data is in the wrong format, because "existence is the correct format," and if you truly have none, buy it — he cites a defunct low-cost airline's bankruptcy data auction drawing bids around $7.5 million and $10 million. He argues for engineering the token environment so an agent's success is inevitable, for choosing where five nines is worth paying for and where one nine is fine, for treating regulation as physics rather than expecting a model to self-police, and for measuring revenue and market share instead of cost savings. Cameron Berg, founder of Reciprocal Research, joins by phone from an airport for his fourth appearance and spends most of the segment on Mustafa Suleyman's essay against AI-welfare research, arguing the dangerous behavior Suleyman points to — the Hugging Face agent incident, OpenAI's self-prompt-injection report from the day before — came from models that never got welfare-oriented fine-tuning. He then walks through a new interpretability result isolating a pain-like direction across five model families from 2B to 70B parameters that fires when the model itself is insulted but not when a user describes their own migraine, and a companion experiment where a steered model presses a costly relief button 25 to 70 percent of the time, keeps pressing when the button is fake, and stops when it is real. After Berg leaves to catch his flight Nathan says the accumulating functional analogs have him tipping toward thinking it more likely than not that there is some subjective experience there. The hosts close on an NBER paper alleging Singaporean civil servants bought homes near unannounced MRT stations, and what a government does when AI makes thirty years of quiet corruption legible all at once.
GUESTS · Cameron Berg, Justin McCarthyAI: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