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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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nature gave eyes to animals and not to trees because eyes are only worth having if you move, and moving is what produces a new viewpoint.

  Their words

  So okay, so to take a evolutionary view, right? That new viewpoint prediction is exactly evolution had to solve by making animals move. You you nature give animals eyes. But nature didn't give trees eye. Eyes. Why? Because when you move, you see a new viewpoint.

  youtube.com

Engineering leader on Google Chrome; writes about web performance and, lately, about working with AI coding tools.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building a system that does the prompting for you is not a break with software history but the next rung on the same ladder of rising abstraction.

  Their words

  And it's effectively the next step of, you know, every phase of of software evolution is just like a rising tide of abstractions. This is the next abstraction.

  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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  Open models will end up serving a long-tail of specialized uses while closed models retain the most valuable applications.

  Their words

  open models are still incredibly useful, but fill a long-tail ecosystem relative to the closed counterparts that have monopoly ownership stakes in the most valuable areas like knowledge work collaboration, drug discovery, SWE, etc.

  Teaching Everyone to Fish for Tokensinterconnects.ai

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.

From one piece Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity | Dr. Fei-Fei Li 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Sensing the world is what set evolution racing: the first photoreceptive cells created the force that drove animal life to diversify.

  Their words

  But the first photoreceptive cells created a evolutionary force that propelled animals to evolve because sensing the external world changes your self-perception changes the way your relationship with the external world.

  youtube.com

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  The next frontier of AI lies beyond language, because intelligence in nature ran for 500 million years before words existed.

  Their words

  The next frontier of AI as I have been saying is beyond language because again humans develop first preverbally. evolution took, you know, 500 million years without verbal communication

  youtube.com

Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Optimising for productivity costs you the experience, the hard parts and your colleagues — you are a human, not a computer.

  Their words

  if you just do productivity, you're going to miss everything. You're going to miss the experience. You're going to miss this part that are hard. You're going to miss the collaboration with your team.

  youtube.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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  Evolution was not a thinkable theory before deep time: without hundreds of millions of years it simply looks like a nonstarter.

  Their words

  if you don't have at least sort of tens or hundreds of millions of years, uh evolution just starts to look like a nonstarter.

  youtube.com

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

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  Pre-training is not the process by which humans learn; it sits somewhere between human learning and human evolution.

  Their words

  I think there's something going on that pre-training it's it's not like the process of humans learning. It's somewhere between the process of humans learning and the process of human evolution.

  youtube.com

Author of The Simple Path to Wealth and of the jlcollinsnh.com stock series on index-fund investing.

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  The desire to work rather than be idle may be an evolved human trait.

  Their words

  I think most people do. I think it may well be hardwired into us through evolution.

  Some Thoughts on Spendingjlcollinsnh.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.

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  The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

  Their words

  A decade on, it already feels possible that in the future, commentators will argue that this specific fruitful synthesis lit the fuse on evolutionary cultural anthropology’s explosion (with due apologies to earlier books from L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, E. O. Wilson, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd).

  razibkhan.com

Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.

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  The Notebook

  Their words

  Another favorite of 2025. The author traces the evolution of notebooks, from wax tablets and parchment to paper, and examines how figures like Leonardo, Darwin, and Newton used them to develop ideas.

  arslan.io

Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution, and people who talk about progress have no idea of it.

  Their words

  But actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious, because the process of evolution is stymied left, right, and center by inertia. Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution, and this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.

  youtube.com

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

From one piece Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  People judge an organisation by the humans they deal with, because judging other people is the task evolution equipped them for.

  Their words

  We don't really have much evolved experience in evaluating postal efficiency, do we? Okay, we have quart of a million half a million years of evolved experience in deciding who to like and trust because for most of our evolutionary, you know, existence, that was one of the most fi five most important questions to get right.

  youtube.com

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  Reason is only one of several evolved mental faculties, and treating it as the gold standard misdescribes how people decide.

  Their words

  We have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal gifted to us by, you know, a few million years of evolution as a social species. And yet we've made rationality the gold standard.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.

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  Capital Evolution: The New American Economy

  Their words

  Seth and his co-author, Elizabeth MacBride, do an outstanding job of defining capitalism clearly and explaining how it evolved into today’s approach.

  feld.com

American social psychologist at NYU Stern School of Business; author of The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind and The Anxious Generation.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Spirituality is a real part of human nature and central to flourishing, whether or not God exists.

  Their words

  I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.

  The Devil's Plan to Ruin the Next Generationafterbabel.com

Co-founder and chief scientist of Safe Superintelligence Inc., and previously co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI.

From one piece Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  That people are good at maths and coding, which evolution never selected for, shows human learning is not a complicated evolutionary prior but something more fundamental.

  Their words

  What I meant to say is that language math and coding and especially math and coding suggests that whatever it is that makes people good at learning is probably not so much a complicated prior but something more some fundamental thing.

  youtube.com

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  There is no human analogue to pre-training — neither childhood nor evolution is the same thing as it.

  Their words

  I don't think there is a human analog to pre-training.

  youtube.com

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  Even with human-like learners, competition will split the AI market into specialised niches rather than hand it to one company.

  Their words

  I think what's going to happen is that the way competition like competition loves specialization and you see it in the market, you see it in evolution as well. So you're going to have lots of different niches and you're going to have lots of different companies who are occupying different niches

  youtube.com

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

From one piece Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals” 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  We are not building animals, we are summoning ghosts: entities made by imitating human text rather than by evolution.

  Their words

  we're not doing training by evolution. Uh we're doing training by basically imitation of humans and the data that they've put on the internet. And so you end up with these like sort of ethereal spirit entities because they're fully digital and they're kind of like mimicking humans.

  youtube.com

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  Pre-training is a crappy evolution: the practically buildable substitute for the process that gave animals their built-in hardware.

  Their words

  So that's why I kind of call pre-training this kind of like crappy evolution. It's like the practically possible version with our technology and what we have available to us to get to a starting point where we can actually do things like reinforcement learning and so on.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No great book has been written by a group; books are as good as they are because they always have a single author.

  Their words

  It's just like like I don't think a great book has been written as a big collaboration between multiple people. It's like books are hit it are as good as they are because they're always single author.

  youtube.com

Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Evolution does not perfect anything; organisms are bodge jobs, which is why the human eye has a blind spot and a squid's does not.

  Their words

  I think people think evolution is, like, perfecting things in some way. And they're not. They're bodge jobs, you know? That's why we have a blind spot in our eye, but things like squid don't.

  youtube.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Evolution gave humans no target number of births, because what mattered historically was keeping children alive rather than producing them.

  Their words

  As a result, natural selection is very unlikely to have produced in humans any predisposition or preference for a certain number of births.

  There Is No Long Decline in Fertilitylymanstone.substack.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  His prediction that research-level mathematics papers would be written in collaboration with AI by 2026 has already come true.

  Their words

  There are certainly math results which could only have been accomplished because there was a human authentication and an AI involved, but it's hard to disentangle credit. I mean, these tools, they do not replicate all the skills needed to do mathematics, but they can replicate some non-trivial percentage of them, 30, 40%, so they can fill in gaps.

  youtube.com

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

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  The Selfish Gene

  Their words

  At one extreme, something you read can change your whole way of thinking. The Selfish Gene did this to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous image: you can treat genes rather than organisms as the protagonists, and evolution becomes easier to understand when you do.

  paulgraham.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A growth model that works today still has to be evolved by overlaying other growth models on top of it.

  Their words

  If you have a growth model that works for you, that's wonderful. Good for you. Optimize it, grow it, scale it, create a team that will be nurturing it and that will be amplifying it. But you're going to need to evolve it. And that evolution needs to come through overlaying other growth models on top of it.

  youtube.com

Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.

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  Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

  Their words

  Best books I read in 2024: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers by Marissa A. Harrison Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon

  robkhenderson.com

Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.

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  The Design and Evolution of C++

  Their words

  Biography of a language.

  worrydream.com

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

  That there is no soul is an assumption of science rather than a finding: no experiment has ever shown that the light simply blinks out.

  Their words

  The general view of science, I think, is that we’re accidents of evolution. When we die, the light blinks out. There’s no more of us. There’s no such thing as the soul. But that’s not a proven point. There’s no experiment that proves that’s the case.

  youtube.com

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

From one piece Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #433 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Computation sits at the top of reality, not at its base: it is something our biosphere built after billions of years of evolution.

  Their words

  There’s this assumption that computation is at the base of reality, and I see it at the top of reality, not at the base, because I think computation was built by our biosphere. It’s something that happened after many billion years of evolution. It doesn’t happen in every physical object.

  youtube.com

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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

Historian of Ukraine at Harvard; wrote The Gates of Europe, Chernobyl and The Russo-Ukrainian War.

From one piece Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War | Lex Fridman Podcast #415 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Defining Ukraine's war record by the 20,000 men of the Division Galizien makes the 2 to 3 million Ukrainians who fought in the Red Army irrelevant, which is what propaganda is for.

  Their words

  So, there is a period of collaboration, and that’s what propaganda tries to define him by, or there is a Division Galizien by 20,000 people, and somehow it makes irrelevant the experience of 2-3 million people.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Calling Bandera a Nazi collaborator gives you exactly the same grounds for calling Stalin one, because the years of collaboration were the same years.

  Their words

  If you focus on the years of collaboration, those were the same years when Joseph Stalin collaborated with Hitler, right? So, we have the same reason to call Stalin Nazi collaborator as we have the reason to call Bandera Nazi collaborator.

  youtube.com

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

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  AI should be approached as a collaboration between humans and computers, not a forced choice between them.

  Their words

  We need to find ways to work with this new tech to get the best of humans and the best of computers, together, rather than thinking in terms of one or the other.

  Encyclopaedia Automaticastevecoast.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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  How Religion Evolved

  Their words

  Great anthropology! So many insights into religions, tribes, friendships, organizations, the evolution of minds, superstition, and more. Got me thinking most about friendships.

  sive.rs

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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  The idea that AI will decide to kill humanity is a category error: it is math and code, built and controlled by people, not a living thing shaped by evolution.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people.

  Why AI Will Save The Worldpmarca.substack.com

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

  Their words

  Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow resonated with me for personal reasons, but I think Zevin’s exploration of partnership and collaboration is worth reading no matter who you are.

  gatesnotes.com

Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Evolution made human babies effectively premature, since bipedalism shrank pelvises while brains grew larger, forcing late fetal development outside the womb.

  Their words

  The problem is, when humans went bipedal, our pelvises got smaller, and as humans got smarter, our heads got bigger. So evolution had to get creative. Its solution: all human babies would be premies, born when they were still small enough to pass through a human pelvis.

  10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimesterwaitbutwhy.com

Biochemist at University College London; writes about the origin of life and the role of energy in evolution, in The Vital Question and Transformer.

From one piece Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Predation is what makes evolution creative: without it there would be no arms races, no great feats of evolution, and a far less beautiful world.

  Their words

  In some ways, maybe it does do good. I don’t want to make an argument for nuclear arms, but predation as a mechanism forces organisms to adapt, to change, to be better, to escape, or to kill. If you need to eat, then you’ve got to eat. A cheetah is not going to run at that speed unless it has to because the zebra is capable of escaping. So it leads to much greater feats of evolution would ever have been possible without it, and in the end, to a much more beautiful world.

  youtube.com

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  A society cannot morally be based on the way evolution works, even though competition is what drives innovation.

  Their words

  Morally, we cannot base society on the way that evolution works.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Evolution only happens because of death.

  Their words

  Survival of the fittest, if you just go back to that old phrase, means death of the weakest. Now, what’s fit? What’s weak? These are terms that don’t have much intrinsic meaning, but the thing is, evolution only happens because of death.

  youtube.com

Indonesian software engineer, educator and engineering manager at Zero One Group; open-source enthusiast writing at ripandis.com.

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  Figma

  Their words

  I'm using Figma as just a design tool but now it's become our virtual whiteboard for the entire company. Never would have expected the collaboration features to be the real hook.

  ripandis.com

Designer, illustrator and CSS developer known for single-div CSS illustrations, a yearly portfolio redesign, and a set of single-topic side-project sites.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Netlify

  Their words

  Other software I use to build stuff includes Netlify for hosting, GitHub for version control and collaboration, SVGO and TinyPNG for optimization, Kap for screen recording, GoatCounter for analytics, and Chrome and Firefox dev tools.

  usesthis.com

• Usesrcmnd.app

  GoatCounter

  Their words

  Other software I use to build stuff includes Netlify for hosting, GitHub for version control and collaboration, SVGO and TinyPNG for optimization, Kap for screen recording, GoatCounter for analytics, and Chrome and Firefox dev tools.

  usesthis.com

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Kap

  Their words

  Other software I use to build stuff includes Netlify for hosting, GitHub for version control and collaboration, SVGO and TinyPNG for optimization, Kap for screen recording, GoatCounter for analytics, and Chrome and Firefox dev tools.

  usesthis.com

Cognitive scientist and designer; author of The Design of Everyday Things; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group; former vice president at Apple; founding director of the Design Lab at UC San Diego.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The rule to defer judgment encourages design by committee; effective teams do not defer criticism, they create through it.

  Their words

  We challenge this approach. It encourages design by committee and infuses a superficial sense of collaboration that leads to compromises and weakens ideas. Our view, the product of years of studies of and participation in innovation projects, is that effective teams do not defer critical reflection; they create through criticism.

  Why Criticism Is Good for Creativityjnd.org

Interpretability researcher at Anthropic, which he co-founded; before that at OpenAI and Google Brain, where he wrote the explanations of neural networks most people learned them from.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Sharing credit generously benefits everyone because it encourages future collaboration.

  Their words

  Credit isn't zero sum. It is often in everyone's benefit to be generous with credit, because it creates an incentive for others to help in the future.

  Collaboration and Credit Principlescolah.github.io

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.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Hidden Figures

  Their words

  The book and movie only tangentially touch on Apollo itself (although it does appear!), but they make the list because they are well worth the read / watch, and they tell an important story of yet another facet of the immense collaboration that was the space program, and the incredible diversity of people and backgrounds and stories and kinds of work that went into making it all work.

  blog.nelhage.com

Alignment researcher; developed reinforcement learning from human feedback at OpenAI, founded the Alignment Research Center, and now works at the US AI Safety Institute.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The gap between chimps and humans is no evidence that a small increase in compute yields an explosion of capability, because evolution was not optimising chimps for technology.

  Their words

  But chimp evolution is not primarily selecting for making and using technology, for doing science, or for facilitating cultural accumulation.

  Takeoff speedssideways-view.com

Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Compleat Strategyst

  Their words

  You may want to try The Compleat Strategyst, The Origins of Virtue, The Evolution of Cooperation, etc.

  x.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Evolution of Cooperation

  Their words

  You may want to try The Compleat Strategyst, The Origins of Virtue, The Evolution of Cooperation, etc.

  x.com

Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.

• Readrcmnd.app

  Life Ascending

  Their words

  An earlier biology book by Nick Lane. With his characteristic richness of detail, it explores the evolution of DNA, photosynthesis, movement, sight, sex, consciousness, and death.

  radex.io

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  The Vital Question

  Their words

  A fascinating book exploring the role of energy in biology and evolution. It explains how eucaryotic life emerged and why it grew in complexity, while bacteria have remained unchanged in their simplicity for billions of years. It also presents the best theory of abiogenesis we have, and a lot more.

  radex.io