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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Alignment and safety techniques must stay ahead of progress in AI model capabilities.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities.

  @sama on Xx.com

Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.

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  Specialized robots will invent techniques in their domain that humans never thought of or could not do.

  Their words

  Basketball robots are likely to invent new basketball moves that humans didn't think of doing, or couldn't do easily.

  Robot Basketballkk.org

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

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  Adversaries already have AI training techniques, data, and the will to attack, and will not be slowed by embedded evaluators.

  Their words

  Our adversaries have the training techniques, the data, and the will to attack. And they won’t be slowed down with “embedded evaluators.” They’ll likely have embedded accelerators!

  @rauchg on Xx.com

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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  Using open models is the approach offering the biggest AI cost savings, followed by smart model routing.

  Their words

  To answer the question posed in the header of this report, it’s apparent that using open models is indeed the approach offering the biggest savings, followed by smart model routing. Spending controls and context optimization also bear down on costs, but they don’t come close to the first two techniques in results.

  The Pulse: tech companies move to open AI modelsblog.pragmaticengineer.com

Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

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  The methods and techniques a writer uses to compose a work shape the finished work as much as a painter's or musician's technical choices shape theirs.

  Their words

  The methods we choose to use to compose the work determine the final work as much as any decision by a painter or musician.

  countercraft.substack.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

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  Modern amygdalectomy techniques are as far removed from historical lobotomies as a smartphone is from an electrical telegraph.

  Their words

  modern amygdalectomy is as different from lobotomy as your smartphone is different from an electrical telegraph

  Absurd Adventure And Amygdalectomy Advocacyastralcodexten.com

Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.

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  Multi-Paradigm Design for C++

  Their words

  Multi-Paradigm Design for C++ by James O. Coplien. Twenty years after reading this, the core techniques are still with me. These are commonality analysis, where the purpose is to identify families of systems, and variability analysis, which focuses on capturing the domain parameters that vary. In essence: the foundation of great software design.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

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

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  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

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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  When agents do the building, the scarce skill is taste: choosing which problem is worth the time at all.

  Their words

  Yeah, I mean I think it's really having incredibly good taste in what you ask your agents to work on, right? That is the the crux of you know from my background uh a research problem. You know, a researcher can have all the tools and all the techniques, but often most of the battle is what problem are you gonna spend your time on?

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

Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.

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  Practices marketed as transformative, such as therapy, meditation, and psychedelics, often produce little real progress despite years of use.

  psychedelicsPsychotherapy

  Their words

  There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us-therapy, meditation, psychedelics-, but that branding doesn't mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems.

  How not to forget what mattershenrikkarlsson.xyz

Investigative journalist on policing, forensics and criminal justice; wrote Rise of the Warrior Cop and writes The Watch.

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  Non-coercive interrogation still produces confessions, and more reliable ones, so coercion is not the price of solving crimes.

  Europe

  Their words

  Canada and much of Europe have adopted different interrogation techniques — such as the PEACE method — which emphasize collecting reliable information over coercion. These approaches still garner confessions; they’re just more reliable.

  radleybalko.substack.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  You’re Not Listening

  Their words

  Being a great listener when people speak. Deep insights about understanding, connection, helping people express themselves, overcoming assumptions, the ethics of gossip, and more. Specific techniques for the support response, encouraging elaboration, and keeping it balanced. You can’t be ethical without being a good listener. When people say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “…

  sive.rs

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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  Continuous Discovery Habits

  Their words

  Teresa Torres is the best in the business at helping teams build products and services that their customers want. Here she shares her techniques for transforming your process into one of continuous discovery and learning.

  bringthedonuts.com

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  The Lean Product Playbook

  Their words

  , with lots of tactical advice and techniques for putting lean methodologies into practice.

  bringthedonuts.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Anthropic now uses mechanistic interpretability techniques to audit new models for deception and scheming before releasing them.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  Even more recently, we’ve begun to use mechanistic interpretability techniques to improve our safeguards and to conduct “audits” of new models before we release them, looking for evidence of deception, scheming, power-seeking, or a propensity to behave differently when being evaluated.

  The Adolescence of Technology (January 2026)darioamodei.com

Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

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  The Butchering Art

  Their words

  Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic techniques in surgery, had a fascinating life that I didn’t know anything about until I read this book.

  scientificdiscovery.dev

American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rachel Cusk's prose imitates the surface techniques of W.G. Sebald without adopting his underlying artistic aims.

  Their words

  I believe that Cusk's own style apes the externalities of W.G. Sebald's style without carrying over his internals.

  writing with your eyeballsblgtylr.substack.com

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

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  We have almost no automated techniques for making a system transfer what it learns, and none of the few we have are used in modern deep learning.

  Their words

  We don't have any methods that are good at that. What we have are people um try different things and they they settle on something that that uh a representation that that transfers well or they generalize as well. But we have no we don't have any automated techniques to promote. we have very few automated techniques to promote transfer and they're not none of them are used in in modern deep learning.

  youtube.com

Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind; worked on interpretability at Anthropic under Chris Olah before that, and teaches the field to newcomers.

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  Sparse autoencoders are a useful interpretability tool but are often used wastefully when a simpler, more obvious method would work as well or better

  Their words

  I'm more agnostic about the best techniques, things like sparse autoencoders are a useful tool, but easy to waste effort using when a simpler method is sufficient or better - start by doing the obvious thing!

  MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29)neelnanda.io

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

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  Faced with a problem none of your techniques fit, try anything, the stupider the better, because the way it fails is the clue.

  Their words

  So the next step then is to try anything no matter how stupid and in fact almost the stupider, the better, which technically is almost guaranteed to fail, but the way it fails is going to be instructive.

  youtube.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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  RLHF is not a tax on capability: preference tuning also raises maths and code scores, which is why the labs keep reaching for it.

  Their words

  And the important thing to say is that no matter how you want the model to behave, these RLHF and preference-tuning techniques also improve performance. So, on things like math evals and code evals, there is something innate to these, what is called contrastive loss functions.

  youtube.com

Alignment researcher at Anthropic; co-led OpenAI's superalignment team until 2024, and writes Musings on the Alignment Problem.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We cannot know how much safety a control measure buys until we understand elicitation, so control adds a margin of unknown size.

  Their words

  However, without having a good handle on elicitation, we cannot be confident that our control techniques are effective.

  Should we control AI instead of aligning it?aligned.substack.com

Medicinal chemist; has written In the Pipeline, the drug-discovery blog, since 2002, and the “Things I Won’t Work With” posts about chemicals that try to kill you.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A compound's AI origin story is not by itself a reason to expect it to do better in the clinic.

  Their words

  For now, I am not convinced that issuing press releases about your compounds that talk about their discovery through AI techniques is sufficient to expect greater things from them.

  AI Drugs So Farweb.archive.org

CEO of Redwood Research, where he works on AI control: making sure a powerful model cannot cause a catastrophe even if it is misaligned and trying to.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Control is a fundamentally limited approach that stops working on sufficiently powerful models, so alignment is still needed in the end.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  AI control (with only black-box techniques) seems like a fundamentally limited approach.

  redwoodresearch.substack.com

Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.

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  High-quality data collection depends more on careful human execution than on machine learning techniques alone.

  Their words

  Lots of ML techniques in the post can help with data quality, but fundamentally human data collection involves attention to details and careful execution.

  Thinking about High-Quality Human Datalilianweng.github.io

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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  As models get better at following instructions, techniques like finetuning and constrained sampling for structured outputs will become less necessary

  Their words

  I suspect that in the future, it'll be easier to get models to output exactly what we need with minimal prompting, and these techniques will become less important.

  huyenchip.com

Founder of Amazon in 1994 and of the space company Blue Origin in 2000.

From one piece Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin | Lex Fridman Podcast #405 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Human brains are doing something fundamentally different from today's AI, and the evidence is that they run on roughly twenty watts.

  Their words

  We do know that humans are doing something different from these models, in part because we're so power efficient. The human brain does remarkable things and it does it on about 20 watts of power. And the AI techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power to do equivalent tasks.

  youtube.com

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  Building a factory that turns out rockets at rate is at least as hard as designing the rocket in the first place.

  Their words

  So you need to have all of your manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance tests and everything operating at rate. And rate manufacturing is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle in the first place

  youtube.com

Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.

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  Template Metaprogramming with C++

  Their words

  I spent the last few weeks reading Template Metaprogramming with C++ by Marius Băncilă. It is currently 50$ on Amazon. Though, technically, the book is about advanced 'template' techniques, it is much more broad and practical. It is one of the 'good programming books'. If you are an experienced C++ programmer, you should give it a peek

  lemire.me

Pseudonymous writer; posts careful, funny investigations of everyday questions — air quality, seed oils, arguing, chess — usually by reading the studies.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Practising gratitude is a scientifically well-supported way to make yourself happier.

  Their words, before

  That hokey unfashionable techniques like practicing gratitude turn out to have strong scientific evidence behind them

  Their words now

  I was wrong about gratitude. I thought it was a guaranteed way to become happier

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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  Scientists use the same knowledge shields as everyone else, explaining away inconvenient data to hold on to their story.

  Their words

  But the researchers who have investigated this find that scientists do the same thing. They have something that's called knowledge shields, the way all of us do, that that a a a variety of techniques for explaining away inconvenient data and anomalies. But what we're effectively doing is we're holding on to our story.

  youtube.com

Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.

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  Conference programmes and the tech press over-represent complex architectures, so teams copy techniques their scale does not need.

  Their words

  Despite the unreasonable effectiveness of simple architectures, most press goes to complex architectures.

  In defense of simple architecturesdanluu.com

Release engineering manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. Keeps a public log at tylercipriani.com of every book he reads, with a rating and notes.

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  Moonwalking with Einstein

  Their words

  The book Moonwalking with Einstein explores humans' relationship to memory, our ideas of knowledge, and how that's shifted over time. But it begins with an exploration of competitive memorization and the techniques used by memory champions.

  tylercipriani.com