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Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Claims that AI will be a net benefit for the climate lack strong supporting evidence.

  Their words

  we explore and contest all these claims, which we contend are not supported by strong evidence.

  NVIDIA’S AI Climate hoax – reportketanjoshi.co

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

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  Most surveys find that the median AI researcher forecasts about a 5% chance of extinction or similar doom from AI, while the mean is around 15-20%.

  Their words

  most surveys find that the median AI researcher forecasts about a 5% chance of extinction or similar "doom" from AI, while the mean probability is much higher -- around 15-20% -- due to a smallish group who give very high probabilities of doom.

  @Noahpinion on Xx.com

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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  Employees at frontier AI labs, particularly Anthropic, are out of touch in ways that distort their forecasts and accounts of AI events.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  Many frontier lab employees, especially at Anthropic, are out of touch and this will impact their forecasting and/or descriptions of current AI events.

  interconnects.ai

Prime Minister of Canada since March 2025; formerly governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Canada Strong Pass

  Their words

  Last chance to use the Canada Strong Pass this summer. Get out and explore Canada this long weekend — our national parks, museums, galleries, and more — for less.

  x.com

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

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  Japan's loss of innovation is mostly a finance story: companies can no longer get the cheap plentiful bank loans they had in the 70s and 80s.

  Their words

  In the 70s and 80s, Japanese companies could get cheap plentiful bank loans to develop new products and explore new markets. Today, they can't. Innovation is downstream of finance.

  @Noahpinion on Xx.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  House of Suns

  Their words

  One of the best sci-fi and deep space opera books for me. If you love space and scientifically ~accurate fiction — do explore Alastair Reynolds’ worlds.

  rakhim.org

Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

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  There is no real impediment to models running their own research loop and improving themselves at a far more rapid rate.

  Their words

  Um but I think there's no uh you know real impediment to making that be a much more automated loop where the model itself decides it's going to explore or maybe with a nudge from some people uh at the various highest level like oh why don't you try some new ideas around model architectures that incorporate this and then it will go run lots of experiments uh see which ones work and then those will get incorporated at a much more rapid rate

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.

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  Drug companies pile onto the same few already-validated targets, so far less of biology gets explored than could be.

  Their words

  In biomedicine we have a problem called target herding: most companies chase the same biological targets because they are de-risked, which means we explore far less of the biological space than we could.

  Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com

Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

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  Writing AI expectations into each rung of a career ladder is futile when the technology changes by the month; one AI-fluency expectation across every role and level is what works.

  Their words

  So, the most useful thing is not to make it level specific or role specific, but to encourage everyone towards the expectation on AI fluency, which doesn't mean use it as a tech for the sake of tech. It's tech where it's useful, to have good judgment about that, and to have the mindset to be open-minded to explore and try new things.

  youtube.com

Investment researcher and engineer who runs Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, writing on macroeconomics, currency systems and equity analysis.

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  A large generation of small business owners is aging and looking for liquidity or diversification as they plan succession.

  America

  Their words

  Privately held businesses in the United States are collectively worth trillions of dollars, and demographically speaking, they have an aging set of owners who are seeking liquidity or diversification as they explore how to pass on what they've built.

  lynalden.com

Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.

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  AI is an important technology but is not yet a platform, because nothing has been opened up for other apps, experiences and developers to be built on.

  Their words

  there there's a one question we got to back up and really explore which is is AI a new platform and I would argue that it is not yet a new platform. It is an important technology.

  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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  Individual economists' forecasts about AI and the labour market are close to worthless, and aggregated forecasts from prediction markets should replace them.

  AI and jobseconomists

  Their words

  rather than thinking about individual forecasts like what me and Phil are going to do, rather looking at kind of like basically generating prediction markets, where you get aggregate forecasts, where you get like kind of wisdom of the crowd effects. And kind of the reason that I think this is because we have been famously terrible at forecasting.

  youtube.com

Software architect and futurist; founded ClariNet, chaired the EFF, and has written about robocars for two decades.

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  Robotaxis reached London within days of a date predicted for them thirteen years earlier, while most other public forecasts of that date were badly wrong.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  13 years ago, at the Wired 2013 event in London, I was asked when robotaxis would arrive there and as a joke, gave an answer of June 22, 2026 that turned out to be impossibly spot on.

  ideas.4brad.com

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

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  Most of the tech tree will never be explored by anyone at all, which is exactly why the choice of which direction to explore matters so much.

  Their words

  Um, there's just too many interesting ways of combining things. There's too many sort of deep ideas waiting to be uh, discovered and when it you know, not only we, but but nobody ever is going to to discover most of them. So, choices about how to make how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit.

  youtube.com

Programmer and designer who writes at tonsky.me; author of Fira Code, DataScript and AnyBar.

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  Local-first software will not become the dominant architecture, and that is an acceptable outcome.

  Their words

  Local-first is not going to win, but that's okay We'll explore the complexities of traditional stack (db-server-frontend), develop a theory of software evolution: which systems succeed and why.

  tonsky.me

Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.

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  AI prototyping ends the era of product managers asking designers to draw an idea, which frees designers for deeper work and lets anyone join the first conversation.

  Their words

  PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they need to go into and it allows anyone to kind of add to that first conversation of where should we go and look further and wider and broader at the option space.

  youtube.com

China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.

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  When assessing an economy's trajectory, current performance signals are more useful than forecasts of potential GDP growth.

  Their words

  But for a variety of reasons I think it makes more sense to stay agnostic about forecasts of potential GDP growth, and focus more on the signals the current performance of the economy is sending.

  Who believes in China’s output gap?andrewbatson.com

Co-founder and CEO of 37signals, makers of Basecamp and HEY; co-author of Rework, Remote and It Does Not Have to Be Crazy at Work.

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  Making something brand new gives you room to explore new design approaches; the gravity of an existing system bends you back towards conforming.

  energy

  Their words

  The gravity of existing decisions in current systems requires so much energy to reach escape velocity that you tend to conform rather than explore. Essentially you're bent back to where you started, rather than arcing out towards a new horizon.

  Why new when?world.hey.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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  Planning is fundamentally a search problem: explore paths, predict outcomes, and pick the best one.

  Their words

  Planning, at its core, is a search problem. You search among different paths towards the goal, predict the outcome (reward) of each path, and pick the path with the most promising outcome.

  Agentshuyenchip.com

Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.

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  Electric cars will not reach 30% of US sales by 2027; the forecasts that looked pessimistic in 2018 were still too optimistic.

  Their words

  Q3 2024 had the rate 8.9% so there is no way it can reach 30% in 2027. I was way too optimistic at a time when EV enthusiasts thought I was horribly pessimistic.

  Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01rodneybrooks.com

Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.

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  Coordinated debanking is overstated; what is poorly understood is how independent banks end up making correlated decisions.

  Their words

  We will explore some coordination mechanisms, which are overstated, and some correlation mechanisms, which are poorly understood.

  Debanking (and Debunking?)bitsaboutmoney.com

Energy and decarbonisation analyst; publishes an annual chart deck on the state of the transition, and was chief content officer at BloombergNEF.

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  Official forecasts consistently underestimate the pace of real-world change, with reality outperforming conservative predictions.

  Their words

  Until we develop better ways to bridge this gap - aligning what analysts understand with what is formally forecast - we'll continue to see the same pattern: reality consistently outperforming conservative predictions.

  AI data and Theories of Changenathanielbullard.com

Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI answer engine; previously a research scientist at OpenAI and a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

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  Curiosity is the thing AI has not cracked: a model can research a question thoroughly, but it cannot decide which question is worth asking.

  Their words

  What makes humans special though, is our curiosity. Even if AI’s cracked this, it’s us still asking them to go explore something. And one thing that I feel like AI’s haven’t cracked yet, is being naturally curious and coming up with interesting questions to understand the world and going and digging deeper about them.

  youtube.com

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

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  Underestimating near-term AI progress is itself a danger, which is why researchers should register their forecasts in public.

  Their words

  Massively underestimating near-future progress could be very risky.

  Language models surprised usplanned-obsolescence.org

Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The air-taxi industry's forecasts are not backed by flying hardware: there are no videos of prototypes doing what the hype says will be routine within three years.

  Their words

  I see lots of hype about eVTOLs being on the verge of being big, but I can’t find any videos of prototypes doing what the hype says will be common place by 2025.

  Where Are The Crewed eVTOL Videos?rodneybrooks.com

Research psychologist, instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making; developed the recognition-primed decision model, the PreMortem method and the ShadowBox training method, and wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't.

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  A run of correct forecasts is not evidence of expertise, because among many forecasters some are right by chance.

  Their words

  I may have I may be an investor. I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. People say, "Wow, he really knows what he's talking about." But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And some of them are going to get it right by chance. And people assume it's because they know what they're what they're doing, and in fact they're just the lucky ones.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Argues at length for building things, mostly in short form.

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  Learning from failure accumulates as psychic scar tissue that narrows what a person is willing to consider as they get older.

  Their words

  as you age, you just naturally build up all of this all of this sort of psychic scar tissue and you have all these cautionary lessons in your in your head all the time. And you just you and and therefore as a consequence, right? Your your aperture of what you're willing to explore as you get older just shrinks.

  youtube.com

Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.

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  After four more doublings of installed solar capacity, solar electricity will cost about 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.

  solarenergy

  Their words, before

  And beyond that, by the time solar scale has doubled 4 more times, to the equivalent of 16% of today’s electricity demand (and somewhat less of future demand), we should see solar at 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas, and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.

  Their words now

  Both of those forecasts were wrong. Solar has plunged in price faster than anyone – including me – predicted.