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

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  AI scaling laws require exponentially more compute and resources to produce only linear gains in model intelligence.

  Their words

  all of our scaling laws show that you need exponential compute and resources to make linear improvements in intelligence.

  Why I still haven’t bought into true RSIinterconnects.ai

Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.

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  If AI investment pulled back, the capital and resources involved would shift to other productive uses rather than sit idle.

  Their words

  Resources that are currently dedicated to A.I. would not otherwise sit idle.

  The economy could survive a downtick in A.I.slowboring.com

Lawyer and everyday-carry gear reviewer who publishes scored knife, flashlight and multitool reviews at Everyday Commentary.

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  High-end knife steel upgrades have hit diminishing returns, needing far more resources for gains that aren't noticeable based on specs alone.

  Their words

  We are at a point metallurgically where video games were at the start of the last console generation-upgrades aren't necessarily noticeable based on specs alone. And noticeable improvements require a huge increase in resources.

  Spyderco SpyNano Revieweverydaycommentary.com

Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.

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  Teachers are the most important people in society and the ones the AI industry has most completely forgotten.

  Their words

  They are the most important people in our society. We should be talking to them. We should be uplifting them. We should be supporting them. We should be providing resources to them.

  youtube.com

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

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  Once a field really starts to work, the best people leave the universities, because industry can marshal far larger resources and move much faster.

  Their words

  So when a field really starts to work, industry can just marshall such larger levels of resources and can just move so much faster.

  Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com

Physician and neuroscientist at the University of Washington; researches brain health, metabolism and athletic performance.

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  The relationship between energy intake and brain size is a bell curve: chronic caloric excess leaves you with a smaller brain, just as chronic restriction does.

  energy

  Their words

  And what they found is there's kind of this um bell-shaped curve between energy availability and brain volume. And in general, brain volume, right, the more the better, right, we think. And so if you're chronically calorically restricted, your brain is smaller um because you just don't have the resources to invest in, you know, the structure um and to maintain it. At the other end, you see the same thing. So if you're chronically in a chronic state of chloric excess, you also tend to have a smaller brain on average.

  youtube.com

Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.

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  Learning from input does not mean refusing grammar books; the point is to notice patterns, not to master the rules.

  Their words

  Some people think CI means you reject grammar books. I disagree. I often reference grammar materials and find these explanations useful. However, the focus of my learning is not to “master the rules”. Grammar resources simply help me notice and make sense of patterns in the language.

  blog.thelinguist.com

Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.

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  Government controls both the resources and the legitimacy needed for large-scale change.

  government

  Their words

  Government is where the literal money is (money that could often go much further if we fixed what's wrong with government), but it's also where the impact is. And it's where the legitimacy is.

  Philanthropy’s Willie Sutton Problemeatingpolicy.com

Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.

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  Democratic power ultimately rests on ordinary people controlling resources rulers depend on, like labor and tax revenue

  Their words

  The governed have something the governors need: labor, tax revenue, military service, consumer spending. This dependency is the source of democratic leverage.

  Recentlymacwright.com

Economist at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute; works on what advanced AI would do to growth, saving and the long-run economy.

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  There is an unsatiating reason to want wealth that has nothing to do with greed: a classical utilitarian wants resources in order to create new happy beings.

  Their words

  when I think about why it might be good to have a lot of wealth in the future as a good classical utilitarian, to me, the value is or at least one way you could have a kind of almost unsatiating uh utility function in in having wealth in the future is to create new happy beings, right? They just add to the total welfare of the world.

  youtube.com

Behavioural economist at Chicago Booth, professor of behavioural science and economics and director of AGI economics at Google DeepMind.

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  The biggest gap in economics right now is that almost nobody is thinking about what AI does to middle-income developing countries.

  Their words

  I think the biggest lack of resources that we have allocated in the economic profession is thinking about middle-income developing countries in the in the age of AI.

  youtube.com

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

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  Every cognitive ingredient for farming and for states was already in place tens of thousands of years before either appeared, so what humanity was waiting on was not biology.

  Their words

  So, the cognitive resources for doing this must have all been in place, but it's a very long fuse.

  youtube.com

Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

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  VMs are the wrong cloud abstraction because they bundle CPU and memory into fixed-size units.

  Their words

  VMs are the wrong shape because they are tied to CPU/memory resources.

  I am building a cloudcrawshaw.io

Writer and technology executive; blogs at anildash.com, was CEO of Glitch, and helped build Movable Type and ThinkUp.

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  The web is being flooded with coherent, generic, generated text that buries the writing worth reading.

  Their words

  As publishers see the danger from AI bots expand, they retreat to putting more and more content behind either password protection or payment walls or both, leaving the only publicly-accessible content to be AI-generated slop; open resources like research work, scientific analysis, and fair use of content all suffer as a result of people responding to the bad actors, since legitimate uses of open content are no longer possible.

  Endgame for the Open Webanildash.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

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  The best teachers, unlimited resources and every evidence-based intervention still fail on a student who does not want to learn.

  Their words

  You can staff a school with the best teachers on earth, give them unlimited resources, and wrap the place in every evidence-based intervention imaginable, and it still won’t work if students are resistant, disengaged, or actively hostile to the enterprise.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

Co-founder and CEO of Until, a reversible-cryopreservation company, and previously the founder of the Longevity Fund.

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  Organs are among the most precious resources there are, and the system still moves them by putting a surgeon on a chartered jet at the last minute.

  Their words

  And it's crazy because like they're the they're like one of the most precious resources we know of. And yet like people regularly charter private jets, you know, like like you're putting a surgeon on a private jet to go pick up an organ, get it back to the patient in time.

  youtube.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

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  Work Rules!

  Their words

  Laszlo and his team at Google reinvented the role of human resources. This book is a terrific overview of what makes Google Google, from culture, to hiring, to making decisions.

  bringthedonuts.com

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  The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

  Their words

  One of the most common requests I receive is for resources to become a better storyteller. In this book, award-winning novelist Will Storr looks at how the brain responds to stories, and how to captivate your audience and connect with their emotions.

  bringthedonuts.com

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

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  Managing agents is the same job as managing people: fix the outcome, work out what your resources are good at, and design the process.

  Their words

  management is just about in my mind having an outcome. So you want to get something done. That's the thing. You have a northstar. You have a vision and you're just trying to figure out how to use the resources that you have to get that thing done.

  youtube.com

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

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  AMD's hardware is in many ways better than NVIDIA's and it does not matter, because the software gulf is too large and AMD has never resourced closing it.

  Their words

  And they're decent, their hardware is better in many ways than in NVIDIA's. The problem is their software is really bad and I think they're getting better, right? They're getting better, faster, but the gulf is so large and they don't spend enough resources on it or haven't historically, right?

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

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  Neither running everything through the founder nor pushing decisions down is the better way to run a company; each only works if it fits that company’s own resources and values.

  Their words

  Either can work. Both have tradeoffs and implications. If you try to import either philosophy wholesale, it will break in unexpected ways; if you try to mix and match, it will probably be an unfettered nightmare.

  “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmakingcharity.wtf

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

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  System Design Interview - An insider's guide

  Their words

  I've so far not seen good book resources to prepare for the systems design / architecture interview. This book from Alex Xu is the most promising one as of yet.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.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."

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  Growing older tends to expand rather than shrink the number of achievable dreams and options.

  Their words

  As I grow older, I have more dreams. I now know many things that I didn't know before, and I have access to more resources than I ever did.

  Measuring personal growthhuyenchip.com

Co-founder and CTO of Linear; previously an engineer at Uber.

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  To compete with limited resources, scope down who you are building for as much as possible and solve the problems of specific people.

  Their words

  To be able to do this with limited resources, you must scope down your audience (and thus your ambitions) as much as possible to make competing easier, and aim to solve the problems of specific people.

  linear.app

Co-founder and CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management. He wrote The Reformed Broker for over a decade, now publishes the Downtown Josh Brown newsletter, and co-hosts The Compound and Friends.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Investopedia

  Their words

  A few years back, my friend Caleb Silver became the editor-in-chief of one of the best resources in all of finance - Investopedia.com.

  downtownjoshbrown.com

Journalist and author writing on politics, liberalism and ideas; a contributor to Quillette and co-author of a book on Christopher Hitchens.

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  Moving money out of global health and into existential risk is a gamble paid for with lives that could have been saved now.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Diverting attention and resources from global health and poverty is an enormous gamble, as it will make many lives poorer, sicker, and shorter in the name of fending off threats that may or may not materialize.

  How Effective Altruism Lost Its Wayquillette.com

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  Intelligent liberal elites can badly mismanage the colonies they govern, in ways that persist for decades or centuries.

  Their words

  A simple understanding of coalitions, political competition, and limited resources will bring you rather quickly to the conclusion that intelligent liberal elites can screw up their colonies pretty badly and in ways that can persist for decades or centuries.

  tylercowen.com

Development economist; argues that letting people move to rich countries does more for the poor than aid, and wrote Let Their People Come.

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  The rich world is spending its scarcest resource, elite talent, on economising the most abundant resource on earth: ordinary labour.

  Their words

  My key argument is that in the current global economy we have some of the scarcest resources on the planet devoting themselves to economizing one of the most abundant resources on the planet.

  Choose Peoplelampforum.org

Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.

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  Employing a maintainer inside a large company breaks down exactly when the project succeeds: the workload grows while its value to the employer stays flat.

  Their words

  As a project gets more popular in the ecosystem, the workload increases but the value of that project for the company stays the same, so resources don’t increase accordingly.

  words.filippo.io

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

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  A heavily centralised state is the most fragile kind: when Rome’s centre failed, its successors were left without the resources or administration to do what it had done.

  Their words

  Precisely because the late Roman system was so top-heavy and centralized, the collapse of central Roman rule mortally wounded it and left the successor states of Rome with much more limited resources and administration to try to achieve their aims.

  acoup.blog

Product leadership coach and writer of the “Ask Gib” newsletter. Former VP of Product at Netflix and Chief Product Officer at Chegg; speaks and runs workshops on product strategy.

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  Lenny’s Newsletter

  Their words

  A weekly Substack product newsletter that pulls together lots of highly relevant resources.

  askgib.substack.com

Founder and president of the Roots of Progress Institute; writes the history and philosophy of progress, after a career as a software engineering manager and founder.

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  Progress is not driven mainly by material resources, so running out of them is not what would stop it.

  Their words

  I don’t think progress is primarily driven by material resources.

  Progress: Fluke or trend?rootsofprogress.org

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

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  Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms: A Unified Approach

  Their words

  This is what I wish I learned from in my freshman year of college. The part of it about linear algebra is one of the best linear algebra resources out there, and remainder shows you how those tools apply to non-linear mathematics.

  3blue1brown.com

Engineering leader and writer; wrote An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer and The Engineering Executive's Primer, and blogs at Irrational Exuberance.

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  Spreading scarce hiring evenly across every team that needs it is indecision dressed as fairness; staff one team to health at a time.

  Their words

  Many folks try to move all teams at the same time, peanut buttering their limited resources, but resist that indecision-framed-as-fairness: no one getting anything is not a fair outcome.

  Staying on the path to high performing teams.lethain.com

Co-founded GiveWell and led Open Philanthropy; writes Cold Takes, on the most important century and how to think about it.

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  A world where altruists followed expected-value estimates would be one where nearly all of them helped distant strangers instead of the people around them, and that world would be worse.

  Their words

  In such a world, it seems that nearly all altruists would put nearly all of their resources toward helping people they knew little about, rather than helping themselves, their families and their communities. I believe that the world would be worse off if people behaved in this way, or at least if they took it to an extreme.

  blog.givewell.org

Game designer; made Spelunky and Aquaria, and wrote the Boss Fight Books volume on Spelunky.

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  Limited time and resources are what force a work to be tight and to feel like it has a purpose.

  Their words

  It’s our limited resources and time that forces us to make tight games that feel like they have a purpose.

  Finishing a Gamemakegames.tumblr.com