Newsroom
Latest news from the alignAI doctoral network:

Insights from the AI in Science Summit 2025
On 3-4 November 2025, Doctoral Candidates Katerina Drakos and Eva Paraschou participated in the AI in Science Summit 2025 (AIS25) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The summit served as a premier gathering for scientists, industry leaders, investors and policymakers to discuss how AI is revolutionising scientific discovery and how Europe can spearhead this shift through a responsible, values-driven approach.

How Do LLMs Reason? The Power of Thinking Longer and Test-time Scaling
For years, the industry has focused on making models bigger. This training time scaling (Kaplan et al., 2020) made models highly fluent, similar to a student who memorised the entire textbook. But fluency is not the same as reasoning. Large language models (LLMs) still struggle with complex logic, maths or coding tasks because they respond too quickly, predicting the next word without truly thinking (McCoy et al., 2023).

AI is Reshaping Regulatory Thinking
Trigger Warning/Disclaimer: This blog post mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a crisis, please reach out immediately for help. A hotline in your country can be found on befrienders.org.
AI is reshaping not only our social practices but also the foundations of regulatory thinking. The transformative power of AI has compelled regulators to adopt a regulatory learning process, shifting from static legal doctrine to an adaptive, learning-driven regulatory approach (Hadfield & Clark, 2023). This shift is driven by both the emergent challenges of AI and the motivation to devise laws that enable AI innovation while protecting against its potential risks (Smuha, 2019). As a result, we present some doctrine examples to argue that AI does not merely challenge existing legal rules but disrupts the obsolete assumptions underlying traditional regulations, making regulatory learning a structural necessity rather than a policy choice.

Q&A with Santiago Hurtado
In this interview, we speak with Santiago Hurtado, M.Ed., research assistant and doctoral student at TUM. He discusses what drew him to alignAI, the perspective his institute contributes, and how he supports doctoral candidates while giving them room to pursue their own ideas.

Q&A with PI Nicole Lønfeldt
In this video interview, we speak with Dr. Nicole Nadine Lønfeldt, Senior Researcher at the Capital Region of Denmark. She discusses how the mental health use case within alignAI can lead to practical outcomes, reflects on supervising PhD researchers working across clinical and technical domains and shares a message for those outside academia who are concerned about the future of AI.

LLMs as Tools in the Continuum of Human Cultural Evolution
Human culture is unique in how knowledge is transmitted and preserved, as distinguished from all other non-human cultures. This progress is referred to as the “ratchet effect” (Tomasello et al., 1993): a mechanism that faithfully conserves existing knowledge and skills within exchanges while also contributing new innovations. This dual process ensures the accumulation of cultural knowledge.