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Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Debating whether Astra is AGI no longer feels silly, though it is not AGI and that label should not be used prematurely.

  AGI

  Their words

  This is the first time a debate over whether a model ‘was AGI’ felt non-silly. I do not think it is AGI, and I would warn against the dangers of using that label prematurely, but I would not laugh at you for disagreeing.

  GPT-6-Astra Can Do Ambitious Thingsthezvi.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Current AI techniques are four to six orders of magnitude away from optimal in data efficiency and test-time compute efficiency.

  Their words

  I believe current techniques are 4-6 orders of magnitude away from optimality in terms of data efficiency and test-time compute efficiency. But far future AI will be near-optimal.

  @fchollet on Xx.com

Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The external tools people use to reason, remember and calculate — including chatting with an LLM — are genuine extensions of the human mind, not just aids to it.

  LLMs

  Their words

  the external tools that we use to help us reason, remember, associate, calculate-from counting on our fingers to chatting with an advanced LLM-should be properly understood as extensions of our own cognitive process.

  Notebooks And The Extended Mindadjacentpossible.substack.com

Investing columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.

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  Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches

  Their words

  His sketches are often little more than scribbled boxes, circles, and arrows, but many will make you smile, some will make you laugh, and all will make you think.

  jasonzweig.com

Professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M; writes The Climate Brink with Zeke Hausfather.

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  Climate models are underestimating how intense heatwaves become at a given level of global warming.

  Their words

  the temperatures seen in France show that climate models continue to underpredict the magnitude of heatwaves for a particular level of global warming.

  theclimatebrink.com

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  If AI permanently drives down demand for labour, long-term income support for a significant fraction of the workforce will likely become necessary.

  Their words

  If AI-driven labor displacement ends up being large in magnitude and permanently drives down the demand for labor, it will likely be necessary to go beyond mere incentive programs to long-term income support for a significant fraction of the labor force.

  Policy on the AI Exponential (June 2026)darioamodei.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You can bet your entire business on Nvidia shipping a better architecture every single year and your token cost falling by an order of magnitude — no ASIC team can promise that.

  Their words

  Pick your ASIC team where you can say I can bet the farm of I can bet my entire business that you will be here for me every single year. Your cost, your token cost will decrease by an order of magnitude every single year. I can count on it like I can count on the clock.

  Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?youtube.com

Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

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  Nothing in a fifty-year career has hit the industry with the magnitude of AI; it is a whole size difference from anything before it.

  Their words

  Well, nothing has hit with the magnitude of AI. That's I mean, this is a a whole size difference from anything that we've faced before.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The cost of a token is falling by an order of magnitude every year, even as the price of the computers that make them goes up.

  Their words

  You know, our computer price is going up, but our token generation effectiveness is going up so much faster that token cost is coming down. It's just coming down an order of magnitude every year.

  youtube.com

Researcher on developer productivity; co-wrote Accelerate and the DORA research, and created the SPACE framework.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Humans max out at three or four hours of really hard deep work a day, so the eight hours of intense work executives ask for is not available.

  Their words

  And humans max out at about like 3 to 4 hours a day. Like really really hard deep work, right? Um which always makes me laugh when executives are like, "We need 8 hours of intense work."

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  What an accelerator needs from memory is bandwidth per unit of chip edge, and on that measure ordinary DRAM is an order of magnitude behind HBM.

  Their words

  and even if you take a generous interpretation of 128 * 8 gig transfers, you're at 128 gigabytes a second for the same shoreline versus 2 and a half terabytes a second. There's a there's an order of magnitude difference in bandwidth per edge area.

  youtube.com

Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Selling a saving caps what you can charge; selling more of what the buyer already values raises that cap by an order of magnitude.

  Their words

  It's just that it caps this price and this value that is they perceive that you do. Whereas if you deliver more of the value that they already value, it's I don't want to say uncapped completely, but like the cap is maybe an order of magnitude higher than saving.

  youtube.com

Founder and CEO of SaaStr, the B2B software community and events business, and a SaaS investor who previously co-founded EchoSign and sold it to Adobe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI is raising what a single sales rep is expected to produce by an order of magnitude.

  Their words

  With AI, he's trying he's targeting 3 to five million in revenue per rep. 3 to 5 million. Honestly, if this was three or four years ago for a similar company, it would be 3 to 500K. That's an order of magnitude more efficiency.

  youtube.com

Long-time Debian developer and free-software maintainer (remctl, INN, pam-krb5) who has published book reviews on his personal site since the 1990s.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Iris Kelly Doesn't Date

  Their words

  My favorite books I read this year were Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls sapphic romance trilogy: Delilah Green Doesn't Care, Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, and Iris Kelly Doesn't Date. These are not perfect books, but they made me laugh, made me cry, and were impossible to put down.

  eyrie.org

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  Delilah Green Doesn't Care

  Their words

  My favorite books I read this year were Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls sapphic romance trilogy: Delilah Green Doesn't Care, Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, and Iris Kelly Doesn't Date. These are not perfect books, but they made me laugh, made me cry, and were impossible to put down.

  eyrie.org

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  Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail

  Their words

  My favorite books I read this year were Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls sapphic romance trilogy: Delilah Green Doesn't Care, Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, and Iris Kelly Doesn't Date. These are not perfect books, but they made me laugh, made me cry, and were impossible to put down.

  eyrie.org

American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  A Fish Called Wanda

  Their words

  I have thought a number of films have been riotously funny, but only A Fish Called Wanda made me laugh so hard that I was in very real danger of pissing myself right there in the movie theater.

  whatever.scalzi.com

American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  This is Spinal Tap

  Their words

  This is Spinal Tap offers a lot of joy. It is one of the funniest movies ever made, a movie that can make you laugh until you cry, and also, make you laugh even if you have been crying.

  whatever.scalzi.com

Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

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  Lovevery

  Their words

  Lovevery Kits are just the ultimate. We have this play gym (as does everybody?!) which works with the Montessori toys they make. They have kits for different age groups from newborn through 51 months (I cannot even begin to calculate how old that is) and they have taught me so much about baby development!

  mariandrew.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.

Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.

From one piece Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Unreal Engine's deepest limitation is that game simulation still runs on a single core, because single-threaded programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-threaded.

  Their words

  The biggest limitation that's built up over time is the single-threaded nature of game simulation in Unreal Engine. We run a single-threaded simulation. If you have a 16 core CPU, we're using one core for game simulation and running with the complicated game logic because single-threaded programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-threaded programming.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Computer graphics is not the application of the laws of physics but the search for ever better approximations of them, because the exact laws are totally intractable.

  Their words

  You can't calculate every photon in the scene. You need really detailed approximations, and that's the field of computer graphics. It's about increasingly effective approximations of the laws of physics, which are just totally intractable.

  youtube.com

Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A slower project aimed at the right goal beats a faster one aimed at the wrong goal.

  Their words

  "Direction is more important than magnitude"-it's usually better to have a lower-velocity project that works on the right things, than a higher-velocity one that's pointed at the wrong goal.

  How I've run major projectsbenkuhn.net

Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Calling the lost civilisation advanced means only that it could calculate longitude, not that it built machines.

  Their words

  And when I say that, as I have said on a number of occasions, that it had technology equivalent to ours in the 18th century, I’m referring specifically to the ability to calculate longitude. I’m not saying that they were building steam engines. I don’t see any evidence for that.

  youtube.com

Writes about the biotech industry, drug development and forecasting — “I write to learn, mostly about biotech.”

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Pharmaceutical R&D productivity has fallen for decades: far more money spent per drug, with no matching improvement in the odds a candidate reaches the market.

  Their words

  The cost to discover and develop a drug today is orders of magnitude higher than in the 1950s. Despite this, the probability that a drug entering clinical trials will eventually reach the market has hardly improved in the intervening years.

  atelfo.github.io

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An acre of solar panels powering electric cars carries you orders of magnitude further than an acre of crops grown for fuel.

  solar

  Their words

  You can drive about 150 times as far from a solar-powered electric car compared to using corn bioethanol.

  hannahritchie.substack.com

Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An acre of solar panels powering electric cars carries you orders of magnitude further than an acre of crops grown for fuel.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  an acre of solar panels generates as much energy as 100 acres of corn grown for ethanol.

  A Climate Killer Disguised as a Climate Solutionmichaelgrunwald.substack.com

Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A self-driving car should be roughly ten times safer than a human driver before it is deployed, to leave engineering margin for what nobody can predict.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  Taken together, there is an argument to be made that AVs should be safer than human drivers by about a factor of 10 (being a nice round order of magnitude number) to leave engineering margin for the above considerations.

  safeautonomy.blogspot.com