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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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  Intelligence and Polanyi knowledge are mostly complements with fairly limited substitutability in producing output.

  Their words

  In the model, intelligence and Polanyi knowledge combine to produce output. Substitutability is fairly limited. For instance, if you have problems of norms in your office, a mere dose of AI-drenched technocratic knowledge does not usually solve those problems. Sometimes it even can make those problems worse, by empowering rent-seekers further. Intelligence and Polanyi knowledge are not quite Leontief complements, but they are mostly complements.

  A simple model of AI-aided economic growthmarginalrevolution.com

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

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  The models causing real problems today are closed-weight American ones; open-weight models would not create that issue.

  America

  Their words

  the models that are actually causing issues right now are all closed weight American models. I’m fairly certain if they were open weight models, we would not have that issue.

  P(doom)lucumr.pocoo.org

Pseudonymous reviewer who publishes measured, standardised flashlight and knife reviews at zeroair.org, including runtime, output and tint measurements.

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  Skilhunt H150V4 5000K

  Their words

  The Skilhunt H150V4 5000K headlamp is an outstanding headlamp. It's great for being neutral white, high CRI, running an included 14500 cell or AA, and having a great user interface. The price is fairly reasonable because of all those reasons and the great build quality!

  zeroair.org

Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.

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  Making dramatic claims about contemplative experience helps sustain interest in a topic that is otherwise fairly dull.

  Their words

  Additionally, making bold declarations about the extremity of contemplative experience is a decent way to keep people talking about meditation, which can be a fairly boring subject.

  Biting the no-self bulletsashachapin.substack.com

Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.

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  Confident non-belief is rare in America: for every person sure God does not exist, about six are sure one does.

  America

  Their words

  Said another way, for every person who is pretty sure that God doesn’t exist, there are six who are fairly certain of the existence of a Higher Power. Non-believers are statistically rare.

  graphsaboutreligion.com

Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.

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  Social competence has to run automatically, because doing it deliberately imposes a cognitive load that becomes an impediment in itself.

  Their words

  you need to somehow internalize it and it has to be relatively effortless and automatic. It has to become automatic at some level and then you can move through life fairly smoothly in a socially very complex way.

  youtube.com

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

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  Betting a robotics company on today's component prices is betting it on a number with a short shelf life.

  Their words

  So, betting your company, betting your approach on today's hardware prices is just betting your company on a number that has a fairly short shelf life and is going to expire.

  youtube.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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  AI models have reached the level of a junior engineer on longer-running, agent-based coding tasks.

  Their words

  Yeah, I mean I feel like uh the models have been getting a lot better at sort of agent-based longer running coding tasks and it seems pretty clear that they are now actually pretty capable and depending on exactly your definition of of junior engineer it seems pretty spot-on I would say.

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

Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

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  Formal methods are a niche tool; property-based testing is the one most engineers should adopt, and stopping there is a fine place to stop.

  Their words

  I love formal methods, but I think it's a fairly niche tool for most people and I think like property-based testing is in general going to be useful for more people.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Professor of psychology at UCLA, where he studies human memory, attention and cognitive ageing, and author of Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging.

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  Alzheimer's pathology in the brain does not settle whether a person has dementia: the nuns' brains were full of plaques and tangles while they went on functioning normally.

  Their words

  and you found that these nuns, how they aged, some of them certainly when they passed away, their brains had these kind of hallmark signs of dementia, plaques and tangles, but behaviorally they were still high functioning. So, it's really interesting that the hardware shows what we see as dementia and specifically Alzheimer's disease, but their behavior uh was that of a fairly healthy cognitive person.

  youtube.com

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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  In choosing what to learn, who is teaching it matters more than what it is, because your existing interests are fairly arbitrary and a good educator is not.

  Their words

  I feel like a relevant insight in learning was um recognizing that like who matters more than what. So, like advice to any college student when they're choosing what courses to take. Uh, care a little bit less about your pre-existing interests because they're kind of arbitrary right now. and care a little bit more about whether like the person teaching it is a good educator and someone you resonate with.

  youtube.com

British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.

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  The Great When

  Their words

  It is an epic tale full of rogues and reprobates. The story is excellent even though the plot follows a fairly basic structure. Although set up to be a series, it is a satisfying stand-alone tale.

  shkspr.mobi

Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.

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  The papacy made Italy uniquely unstable in Europe, because each new pope inherited a precedent that he could overthrow any government he liked.

  Europegovernment

  Their words

  And soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. And this creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to

  youtube.com

Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.

From one piece How Anthropic, Costco, and Patagonia all build incorruptible companies | Eric Ries 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in business, and prioritizing by ROI always ranks it last.

  Their words

  Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in all of business. And the things that create trustworthiness by definition stack rank to the bottom if we do it by ROI because doing the right thing has intangible rewards but tangible costs.

  youtube.com

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  The decisions that most affect an organization are made when no manager is present, so a common purpose is the only real control a leader has.

  Their words

  if you want to manage something like as a leader, you have to understand that the most consequential decisions that will affect any organization's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present.

  youtube.com

Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

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  Europe being locked out of US cloud services is still unlikely, but it is no longer unthinkable, and serious systems should be engineered against it.

  Europe

  Their words

  So, what if geopolitics was to go horribly wrong and tensions escalate and Europe find itself suddenly locked out of US cloud services? I hope that doesn't happen. I still think it's fairly unlikely, but it's no longer unthinkable.

  youtube.com

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

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  A company's staff-engineer bar should be set against the best companies in the industry rather than against its own history, which is what makes title inflation a real cost.

  inflationGooglebenchmarks

  Their words

  we have a very clear definition and expectation of what it is at the staff engineer level because we benchmark ourselves to all the great company out there Google, Facebook and all that

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

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

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  Review became a worse bottleneck under AI, because companies removed the review automation they had once AI started writing the code.

  Their words

  And not only that, but like humans were already a bit of a bottleneck in the review process. Now it can be worse because things that we fairly straightforward changes that some companies had automation around reviewing, they've removed that reviewing because if AI is involved and they're worried about the verifiability or the reliability of the code.

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Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

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  An overnight automated search found tunings that two decades of hand-tuning experience had missed on an already well-tuned repository.

  Their words

  And I've gotten to a certain point and I thought it was like fairly well tuned and then I let auto research go for like overnight and it came back with like tunings that I didn't see.

  youtube.com

Product designer and entrepreneur; author of Mobile First and Web Form Design; formerly a product director at Google; now building AI products.

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  When applications can generate capabilities on demand, a product's features are what users ask for in the next session, not what shipped in the last release.

  Their words

  When applications can generate capabilities on demand, the definition of "what this product does" becomes more fluid. Features aren't just what shipped in the last release, they're also what users will ask for in the next session.

  AI Enables As-Needed Software Featureslukew.com

Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.

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  Working harder cannot beat working on a better thing, so out-thinking someone should count as part of out-working them.

  Their words

  But you cannot outwork the person who's working on a better thing. And so um it is possible if you really grind maybe you can work 10% harder or 20% harder than you are now. But if you work on the right thing you get 100x of the results or thousandx the results. And so what you need I I almost feel like we should change the definition of what it means to work hard. It should not only mean putting in the hours. It should also mean outthinking the other person.

  The Silent Cost of Bad Habits | James Clearyoutube.com

Vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, the advertising agency; author of Alchemy (2019) and the Wiki Man columnist at The Spectator.

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  Cutting a job defined by its narrowest function destroys the tacit value that job was quietly creating.

  Their words

  the dorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one. You know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway, hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel. There are loads and loads of value creation components to that dorman which aren't captured in the open the door definition.

  youtube.com

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.

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  Humans have never been sustainable: earlier generations had a lower environmental impact and lives that were much worse.

  Their words

  By this broader definition, humans have never been truly sustainable.

  sustainabilitybynumbers.com

Chairman and chief executive of Microsoft since 2014; joined the company in 1992 and ran its cloud business before that.

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  There will always be a fairly capable open-source model in the world, which puts a permanent floor under what anyone can charge for one.

  Their words

  structurally I think there will always be an open- source model uh that will be fairly capable in the world that you could then use as long as you have something that you can use that uh with which is data uh and a scaffolding

  Satya Nadella – How Microsoft thinks about AGIyoutube.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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  Augmenting a general-purpose solver with domain-specific heuristics commonly gives it a meaningful performance boost.

  Their words

  My sense is that this hybrid is fairly common in practice; solvers aren't magical and if you can deduce additional structure using domain-specific analysis, it will often give the solver an important boost.

  Solving regex crosswords with Z3blog.nelhage.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

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  Quietly dropping physical work from the definition of AGI is a major concession, not a clarification.

  AGI

  Their words

  Now, number one, the first concession that people make all the time is they just take out all the physical stuff because we're just talking about digital knowledge work. I feel like that's a pretty major concession compared to the original definition which was like any task a human can do.

  youtube.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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  Putting a product manager on a team invites everyone else to delegate the product thinking away, which is why she does not hire them.

  Their words

  I find that sometimes when you have like a designer or product manager and let's say I'm an engineer, then when I have a problem like, oh, I need to figure out the product definition, my default will be, well, I've got these people and that's kind of their job description, so I'm just going to delegate that to them.

  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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  Complete reverse-engineering of neural networks is a less promising research direction than studying model biology and applying interpretability usefully

  Their words

  I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).

  MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29)neelnanda.io

Co-founder and chief executive of Sierra, chairman of the board of OpenAI, and formerly co-chief executive of Salesforce and chief technology officer of Facebook.

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  Even generalised superintelligence will change society more slowly than the AGI community expects, because intelligence is not the only rate limiter.

  AGIAI alignment

  Their words

  I don't think all parts of the economy can absorb intelligence equally. So let's just say we develop fairly generalized super intelligence. I always use the analogy like you can invent a lot of drugs, but if clinical trials still take a long time, you're not necessarily going to get new therapies rapidly.

  youtube.com

Writes Where's Your Ed At and hosts Better Offline; runs a tech PR firm, and argues at length that the AI business does not add up.

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  A "good business" now means one that can display quarter-on-quarter stock growth, not one that makes good products at a fair price.

  Their words

  the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.

  The Era Of The Business Idiotwheresyoured.at

Founder and chief executive of Superhuman, the email client; previously founder of Rapportive, which he sold to LinkedIn; a professional game designer before that.

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  Incumbents structurally cannot compete on speed, because the scale and entrenched architecture that make them incumbents are what make them slow.

  startups

  Their words

  I knew that our competition was not going to be startups. It was incumbents. And I also knew that incumbents generally struggle with speed because by definition they have massive scale and usually entrenched architecture.

  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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  Language models are already a form of AGI; what the labs are chasing is a further step, not the arrival of general intelligence.

  AGI

  Their words

  I think my personal definition of AGI is much simpler. I think language models are a form of AGI and all of this super powerful stuff is a next step that's great if we get these tools. But a language model has so much value in so many domains that it's a general intelligence to me.

  youtube.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

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  A city's first rail line comes in at a reasonable cost and every line after it does not, because the follow-up outgrows the in-house team that oversaw the pilot.

  Their words

  So Portland managed to build one very small line for fairly reasonable costs, but they were not cutting edge; this is a common pattern to Western US cities, in that the first line has reasonable costs and then things explode, even while staying self-funded and self-directed.

  Low Spanish Costs are not About Decentralizationpedestrianobservations.com

Economist writing on why technological progress slowed and what would restart it — energy, supersonic flight, housing and the regulations around them.

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  A large cargo airship is probably not fundable as a startup, because it stays capital-intensive and risky until late in development.

  startups

  Their words, before

  My suggested approach would be more capital intensive while retaining a lot of risk until fairly late in development. I am not sure it’s fundable.

  Their words now

  Cargo airship margins, therefore, can be much higher than I had realized.

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

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  Within a couple of decades there will not be many people who can write, because AI has removed the pressure to learn.

  Their words

  I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.

  Writes and Write-Notspaulgraham.com

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

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  Spain and Portugal are unfairly maligned by the Black Legend: it was the diseases that killed the Americas.

  America

  Their words

  I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what’s been called the Black Legend, that they just marched into America and murdered everyone. That’s not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone.

  youtube.com

American science-fiction writer, author of the collections Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation, and an essayist on artificial intelligence for The New Yorker.

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  A language model is not using language at all, because language requires an intention to communicate.

  LLMs

  Their words

  But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate.

  Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Artnewyorker.com

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

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  Telegram is not an encrypted messenger in the sense that matters, because it does not end-to-end encrypt conversations by default.

  Their words

  Telegram clearly fails to meet this stronger definition for a simple reason: it does not end-to-end encrypt conversations by default.

  Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?blog.cryptographyengineering.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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  Document similarity scores across a corpus tend to cluster bimodally near identical and near unrelated, rather than spreading evenly.

  Their words

  I suspect - but haven't verified - that in many corpora, we will encounter fairly bimodal Jaccard values - two clusters, near 1 and 0.

  blog.nelhage.com

Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Hit Man

  Their words

  Hit Man (US) 3.5 Highly entertaining due to its killer plot. So why not a higher rating? I was disappointed that Linklater did so little with the plot—much of the execution (not all) is fairly bland. Where’s the style? As a comedy, it’s only OK. As film noir, it’s nowhere near as intense as Body Heat. It’s sort of Soderbergh-lite. And yet more people will like this one than any other film on my list, because of the great plot.

  themoneyillusion.com

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  You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum

  Their words

  You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Japan, 1955, CC) 3.5 Chishu Ryu is one of my favorite actors, but he has a fairly small role. Very nice cinematography. Recommended for fans of nostalgia.

  themoneyillusion.com

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

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  Astrobiology's standard definition of life — a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution — is wrong in every single one of its words.

  Their words

  That’s one of these standard different definitions that a lot of people in my field like to use in astrobiology is life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, which I was once quoted as agreeing with, and I was really offended because I hate that definition. I think it’s terrible, and I think it’s terrible that people use it. I think every word in that definition is actually wrong as a descriptor of life.

  youtube.com

Founder of OpenStreetMap, the collaborative map of the world; later worked on mapping at Microsoft and Telenav.

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  AI-generated writing is already fairly good but still lacks the direction and insight of human editors.

  Their words

  As of today, computers write pretty good articles but lack the direction and insight of human editors.

  Encyclopaedia Automaticastevecoast.com

Guardian columnist and environmental campaigner; wrote Feral and Regenesis, and argues for rewilding and against the food system as it is.

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  A third of humanity already cannot afford a healthy diet, which is why food has to get cheaper rather than dearer.

  Their words

  Using this definition, 3 billion people – over one-third of the global population – cannot afford a healthy diet.

  The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed Peoplemonbiot.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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  How Minds Change

  Their words

  The psychology of how and why we believe. How we learn and change. The craft of doubt and persuasion. Insights into the social definition of truth. Epistemology. Certainty is a feeling not based on facts. Well-written with a nice balance of story-telling and deeper dives.

  sive.rs

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.

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  Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything

  Their words

  So I can now state with confidence: beating out a crowded field, this is the worst book about quantum computing, for some definition of the word "about," that I've ever encountered.

  scottaaronson.blog

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

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  Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine

  Their words

  The statistics and anecdotes are fairly horrifying, and the sheer profusion drills in how widespread the famine was.

  gwern.net

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  The Black Company

  Their words

  I enjoyed the first book a great deal: it’s in a fairly stock medieval setting, but it handles the dark fantasy well

  gwern.net

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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  An economy running on muscle power has a hard and low ceiling on total production, because its only real input is land and the returns to more of it fall away fast.

  Their words

  New land can be brought under cultivation (or cultivated more intensively) of course, but marginal gains decrease rapidly (because the best land is cultivated first and because adding more labor to already cultivated land, while it can increase harvests, is less efficient than cultivating new land) and there is a fairly hard ceiling on total production of this sort that was, for the most part, fairly low.

  Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?acoup.blog

Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, co-director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

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  Descartes' Error

  Their words

  Another book I wanted to mention in this context is a fairly obvious choice, Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error, which is a foundational book about the self, in particular because it reconnects emotion with rationality and the body.

  fivebooks.com