Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  GPT-5 was an ordinary incremental advance, and the gap between what was promised for it and what shipped is the story of the field.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  People had grown to expect miracles, but GPT-5 is just the latest incremental advance.

  garymarcus.substack.com

Writer and researcher, founder of New Science; writes essays on science funding, sleep research, productivity and ambition at guzey.com.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Work on large language models is not progress toward artificial general intelligence, because the models do not understand what they read.

  AGILLMsOpenAI

  Their words, before

  This means that working on neural networks is NOT getting us closer to AGI, except indirectly.

  Their words now

  It’s become very difficult for me to maintain the belief in the stupidity of ChatGPT when every time I laugh at it, it ends up ridiculing me 6 months later.

Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Gemini

  Their words

  So, for most people, just stick with Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT

  oneusefulthing.org

• Usesrcmnd.app

  OpenAI o3

  Their words

  I use o3, Claude 4 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro for any serious work that I do.

  oneusefulthing.org

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Veo 3

  Their words

  Generally, ChatGPT is stronger. On video creation, however, Gemini’s Veo 3 is very impressive, and you get several free uses a day

  oneusefulthing.org

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  ChatGPT exploded because of its obvious chat interface, not its technology, which had launched earlier in a different wrapper that few noticed.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  The technology powering ChatGPT had already launched prior to November 30th, 2022. It was just wrapped in a different interface. Very few people paid attention. Why did ChatGPT explode in popularity? Because of its obvious chat interface, which everyone intuitively already knew how to use it.

  lg.substack.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Claude 3.7 Sonnet

  Their words

  As a Python and JavaScript programmer my favorite models right now are Claude 3.7 Sonnet with thinking turned on, OpenAI’s o3-mini-high and GPT-4o with Code Interpreter (for Python).

  simonwillison.net

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

From one piece DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Superhuman persuasion will arrive before superhuman intelligence, which means whoever builds a model can embed their ideals in it long before anyone reaches AGI.

  AGIOpenAI

  Their words

  There's this very good quote from Sam Altman who... He can be a hyperbeast sometimes, but one of the things he said, and I think I agree, is that superhuman persuasion will happen before superhuman intelligence, right? And if that's the case, then these things before we get this AGI ASI stuff, we can embed superhuman persuasion towards our ideal or whatever the ideal of the model maker is, right?

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  OpenAI's 2022 bet on GPT-4 was a larger gamble than any training run since: all of its compute, for months, on an architecture nobody at Google believed in.

  OpenAIGoogle

  Their words

  I think it's even more impressive what OpenAI did in 2022. At the time, no one believed in mixture of experts models at Google who had all the researchers. OpenAI had such little compute and they devoted all of their compute for many months, all of it, 100% for many months to GPT-4 with a brand-new architecture with no belief that, "Hey, let me spend a couple of hundred million dollars, which is all of the money I have on this model." That is truly YOLO.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most of the price gap between o1 and R1 is margin rather than efficiency: OpenAI's inference gross margins are north of 75% because nobody else could serve the capability.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  OpenAI has a fantastic margin. When they're doing inference, their gross margins are north of 75%. So that's a four to five X factor right there of the cost difference, is that OpenAI is just making crazy amounts of money because they're the only one with the capability.

  youtube.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  OpenAI's claim that DeepSeek trained on its outputs is narrative management: other startups bootstrapped exactly that way and were never banned for it.

  OpenAIstartups

  Their words

  I think that they're trying to shift the narrative. They're trying to protect themselves. We saw this years ago when ByteDance was actually banned from some OpenAI APIs for training on outputs. There's other AI startups that most people, if you're in the AI culture, were like they just told us they trained on OpenAI outputs and they never got banned.

  youtube.com

Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Ollama

  Their words

  First and foremost, I use this to talk to local models hosted by Ollama, but secondarily I also use it to interface with other remote services like OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek.

  lucumr.pocoo.org

• Usesrcmnd.app

  ChatGPT Plus

  Their words

  Like probably most AI users, I use ChatGPT, particularly on my phone. I pay for the Plus subscription because I use it enough to get a lot of value out of it.

  lucumr.pocoo.org

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  The memorize-fetch-apply paradigm behind LLMs can reach arbitrary skill given training data, but it cannot adapt to novelty or acquire new skills on the fly.

  LLMsOpenAI

  Their words, before

  This "memorize, fetch, apply" paradigm can achieve arbitrary levels of skills at arbitrary tasks given appropriate training data, but it cannot adapt to novelty or pick up new skills on the fly (which is to say that there is no fluid intelligence at play here.)

  Their words now

  OpenAI's new o3 model represents a significant leap forward in AI's ability to adapt to novel tasks. This is not merely incremental improvement, but a genuine breakthrough, marking a qualitative shift in AI capabilities compared to the prior limitations of LLMs.

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Scaling the 2019-2023 recipe — same architecture, bigger model, more data — is not enough; further progress depends on new architectural ideas.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  o3's improvement over the GPT series proves that architecture is everything. You couldn't throw more compute at GPT-4 and get these results. Simply scaling up the things we were doing from 2019 to 2023 -- take the same architecture, train a bigger version on more data -- is not enough.

  OpenAI o3 Breakthrough High Score on ARC-AGI-Pubarcprize.org

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  ChatGPT

  Their words

  1 founder who's also developer, designer, marketing (use ChatGPT to help with those)

  levels.io

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Google had the data, the technology and the engineers to ship ChatGPT in 2019, and bureaucracy alone is why it did not.

  OpenAIGoogle

  Their words

  They could have shipped ChatGPT for example, I heard, in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything. They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they didn’t do it.

  youtube.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  ChatGPT Code Interpreter

  Their words

  ChatGPT Code Interpreter has been one of my favourite AI tools for over a year.

  simonwillison.net

Neuroscientist at UC Davis; studies memory and wrote Why We Remember.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We have not replicated human intelligence until a machine makes the same characteristic mistakes people do — making different mistakes is not the same as being intelligent.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I don’t think we’ve replicated human intelligence, unless I know that the simulator is making exactly the same kinds of mistakes that people do, because people make characteristic mistakes. They have characteristic biases, they have characteristic heuristics that we use, and those have yet to see evidence that ChatGPT will do that.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No company should be making the decisions about AGI, and no one person should have super-voting control of one; governments have to put rules of the road in place.

  AGIOpenAI

  Their words

  I continue to not want super-voting control over OpenAI. I never have. Never have had it, never wanted it. Even after all this craziness, I still don’t want it. I continue to think that no company should be making these decisions, and that we really need governments to put rules of the road in place.

  youtube.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI will enable one-person companies to reach very high valuations.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  Several people have speculated that we'll see many very valuable one-person companies (see Sam Altman's interview and Reddit discussion). I think they might be right.

  huyenchip.com

Theoretical computer scientist, Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center. Writes the blog Shtetl-Optimized.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Because a few specialists already devote themselves to superintelligent AI, the rest of us have correspondingly less reason to spend our own effort on it.

  AI alignmentOpenAI

  Their words, before

  precisely because smart people do devote brain-cycles to these possibilities, the rest of us have correspondingly less need to.

  Their words now

  I accepted what’s turned into a two-year position at OpenAI, thinking about what theoretical computer science can do for AI safety.

Research scientist at Meta in Berlin working on multilingual models and evaluation; led the multilingual team at Cohere and was a research scientist at Google DeepMind before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Models fine-tuned to imitate another model's outputs copy its style without acquiring its factual accuracy.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  Models that are instruction-tuned on ChatGPT-generated data mimic ChatGPT's style (and may thus fool human raters!) but not its factuality

  An Overview of Instruction Tuning Dataruder.io

Co-founder and CEO of Every. Writes the Chain of Thought column about working with AI tools and hosts the podcast AI & I.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  ChatGPT Custom Instructions

  Their words

  Using Custom Instructions properly can completely transform your experience with ChatGPT.

  every.to

Musician and writer; answers readers' questions weekly at The Red Hand Files, and fronts Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Mechanising the imagination commodifies the human spirit, because it makes a person's own part in making things look valueless.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary.

  theredhandfiles.com

Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Half the population in rich countries is not articulate enough in writing to use prompt-driven AI well.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  For sure, half the population is insufficiently articulate in writing to use ChatGPT well.

  jakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Today's chat-based AI tools have deep-rooted usability problems and are not the interfaces we will be using in a few years; prompt engineering is a symptom, not a career.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I doubt that the current set of generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, Bard, etc., are representative of the UIs we’ll be using in a few years because they have deep-rooted usability problems.

  AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Yearsjakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Designer, product manager, YouTuber and developer who has written about technology at Birchtree since 2010. He makes the Quick Reviews and Quick Notes apps and the A Better Computer YouTube channel.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Petey

  Their words

  The app costs a few dollars up front and then has an optional subscription for unlimited requests, but I would recommend going directly to OpenAI’s developer dashboard, creating your own account, and copy/pasting your own API key into Petey.

  thesweetsetup.com

Economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Writes Bet On It.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An AI can already earn an A on a university economics midterm, years earlier than informed forecasters expected.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  To my surprise and no small dismay, GPT-4 got an A. It earned 73/100, which would have been the fourth-highest score on the test.

  GPT Retakes My Midterm and Gets an Abetonit.ai

Musician and writer; answers readers' questions weekly at The Red Hand Files, and fronts Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  What a generative model makes is a replication of art rather than art, because it can only imitate or average the choices human makers have already made.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song.

  theredhandfiles.com