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Sriram Krishnan
x.com
talking to a few ai safety / alignment organizations and find broadly they are not sure what to make of the data center protests - also it’s not something that has shown up in any timelines or predictions. I see a split between A) “we probably need data centers in US than in China” B) “less data centers is a proxy for a slow down in capabilities and that could be a good thing “
data centers AI alignment China
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20 September
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
My best guess is that for scaled RL most of the top Chinese AI labs are starting to use a lot of Huawei for inference and Nvidia for training (maybe not for weird architectures). As agent swarms, even more scaled post-training, etc becomes the norm, this will accelerate their domestic industry. China Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
19 September
Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
Reason for specifically citing open weight (and therefore Chinese LLMs, but not only Chinese) is that, even if they have built-in guardrails, somebody with the relevant knowledge can go in and remove them. In principle, harder to do with Anthropic or Open AI LLMs. Quoting @ojblanchard1 A worrisome thought during the night: What Ted Kaczynski would have done, if he had had access to open weight chinese LLMs. LLMs Anthropic Related
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
I, for one, am excited about China's progress and aspirations in designing new medicines. Pharma innovation is positive sum, and the benefits go overwhelmingly to patients and society, globally. Only a small fraction of the value is captured by producers or by the nation they hail from. A drug invented in China will cure me or someone I love just as well as one invented in the US or Europe. I do understand the fear in the US industry. And I hope that motivates us to accelerate the pace in the US, and pass some of regulatory reforms that @RuxandraTeslo and others have eloquently made the case… Quoting @fjeg1987 China wants its drugmakers to have originated 25% of first-in-class drugs and $522B in sales by 2030. This is compared to the total market of $800B today. I'm simultaneously in awe of the ambition and paranoid about the US ability to compete. I had a dinner with pharma leaders who remain delighted… Europe China Related
President of the United States, the 45th from 2017 to 2021 and, as of 2026, the 47th; before politics a New York property developer who ran the Trump Organization, and the host of The Apprentice from 2004 to 2015.
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.
Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
A worrisome thought during the night: What Ted Kaczynski would have done, if he had had access to open weight chinese LLMs. LLMs China Related
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
The EAs I know are generally lovely people, smart, thoughtful. I have a very low p(doom). I know many people with one much higher than mine. I believe each is sincere. AI safety debates are getting heated. Let's assume sincerity and good will of people we disagree with. AI alignment Related
Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.
From one piece
Economic Size and Economic Power
2 beliefs · paulkrugman.substack.com
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
18 September
Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
I paid 25 USD for a cheap Chinese USB device to burn 4500 USD trying to vibecode myself some firmware on it. I have a firmware and it’s about as good as you would expect. China Related
Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.
Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.
The people dismissing this as preposterous are telling on themselves as not having thought about superintelligence seriously. I hadn’t considered this particular idea but you should expect, by definition, that something much smarter than you would have ideas you didn’t think of Quoting @firesidealpha OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change "But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we never want to be in… AI alignment Related
Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.
The social scene around AI and AI safety is more unpleasant than I realized. I'm sure there are other sides to it. But when you get a lot of men with too much money who think they're saving the world, surrounded by groupies, what do you expect? Read the long Bluesky thread about this, collected on one page: https://skywriter.blue/@segyges.bsky.social/3mvom4b4dn22q I can't confirm this stuff - I stay far away from this scene. And the sentence "AI Safety is Mostly a Sex Cult" is a massive exaggeration. But... (1/n) AI alignment Related
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.
Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.
Founder and chief executive of Replit. Previously an engineer at Facebook and Codecademy. Writes essays on programming, philosophy and entrepreneurship at amasad.me.
This is why we need a gazillion data centers (worth it) Quoting @TroyCaylak wait till Ye get his tummy right 😭 data centers Related
Founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU Project, original author of GNU Emacs and the GNU General Public License, and long-time president of the Free Software Foundation.
https://stallman.org/glossary.html#epa https://actionnetwork.org/forms/tell-the-epa-dont-muzzle-data-center-protests US citizens: call on the EPA not to exclude the public from data center pollution decisions. data centers Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
China
Their words
China is definitely the world's most cyberpunk country at this point.
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@Noahpinion on X x.com
China
Their words
Export controls work. "Export controls just make Chinese companies work harder or catch up" is propaganda ass shite
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@Noahpinion on X x.com
AI alignment
Their words
There are only five possible futures for superintelligence: 1. Kills human race 2. Human disempowerment 3. Paperclip maximizer 4. Departs for parts unknown 5. Stoner
Show the whole quote
@Noahpinion on X x.com
17 September
Founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU Project, original author of GNU Emacs and the GNU General Public License, and long-time president of the Free Software Foundation.
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
Interviewer; the Dwarkesh Podcast runs long, heavily researched conversations with AI researchers, historians and economists.
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
The last paragraph of this piece is still very relevant to US-China relations, IMHO. Could be elevated into a piece of its own. Quoting @davidshor @ajaskey35 @Glenn1661335 @deanwball https://t.co/w9gxiUXmJc from @Scholars_Stage is a good explainer from a center right perspective China Related
Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Writes the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-hosts the Animal Spirits podcast with Michael Batnick.
16 September
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.
Bluesky Amazon exec: "you wouldn't notice [if someone blew up a datacenter]. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn't notice! [laughs]" Amazon after DCs blown up: "After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted ...." data centers Related
Mastodon Amazon exec: "you wouldn't notice [if someone blew up a datacenter]. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn't notice! [laughs]" Amazon official statement after DCs were blown up: "After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region." (yes, more than one DC was blown up, but, like other failures, of course DCs being blown up aren't uncorrelated events) data centers Related
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Spreads on financing the datacenter buildout are still small enough not to seriously discourage it, but large enough to reveal that the financiers are getting nervous about a non-zero chance of a bigdeal default on their loans: **DataCenter Risk Is the Real Thing: CHART OF THE DAY** For the second day in a row, looking at debt & datacenters & Interest-rate spreads; the widening in hyperscaler datacenter build-out financing spreads is not driven by dealer hedging of new issuance… 1/ data centers Related
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.
Founder of Farnam Street (fs.blog) and host of The Knowledge Project podcast. Writes and curates on decision-making, mental models and rational thinking.
I asked @tobi about super intelligence. "Super intelligence is the existence of something vastly smarter than us in the aggregate that's accessible to us, which is society, which is the city, which is the community." "We are living in the presence of superintelligence our entire lives." "We make it work because we've created systems by which you know, which govern the super intelligence and how it acts." Quoting @shaneparrish My third conversation with Shopify co-founder and CEO @tobi. 0:00 How Shopify Uses AI 7:18 River: Shopify's Internal AI 8:55 How to Encourage Osmosis Learning 10:52 AI Dreaming and Self-Reflection 11:53 How to Use AI for Strategic Decision Making 14:11 The One Thing AI Cannot Do 16:04 What AI is Ma… AI alignment Related
Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.com.
Writes and podcasts Volts, on the technology, politics and policy of decarbonisation; covered energy and climate at Vox and Grist before that.
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
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.
From one piece
When discussing AI policy, start with China
3 beliefs · marginalrevolution.com
China
Their words
Whatever your ideas for regulating AI, I say start with China. Do not put China as an afterthought at the end of your proposal, mentioned in a vague wish that something good ought to happen and that maybe the future of humanity can be secured.
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When discussing AI policy, start with China marginalrevolution.com
China
Their words
If you are reading proposals or for that matter tweets for AI regulation, and the writer does not deal with these China issues in a forthright and very specific manner, you should be very suspicious indeed.
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When discussing AI policy, start with China marginalrevolution.com
China America
Their words
During the 2023 U.S.-China nuclear talks, America proposed missile-launch notifications, a nuclear crisis hotline, and processes to limit the use of outer space for military conflict. China declined all of those. Blame the U.S. if you wish (do we always keep our word?), but that is what happened. China also broke off meaningful arms control talks.
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When discussing AI policy, start with China marginalrevolution.com
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
China
Their words
the fact that they're flying so quickly shows that Xi is unpopular in China.
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@Noahpinion on X x.com
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
15 September
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
This is very good analysis. 100% endorse. “ The bottom line is things are moving fast, and I’d bet neither Washington nor Beijing yet know quite what to think about dialogue, what it can produce, and what it cannot.” Quoting @RushDoshi A slight elaboration on this theme: What is published in the People’s Daily or Global Times or China Daily certainly matters. But the recent articles in those outlets that we are all reading have a more near-term political purpose than to tell us what China thinks about AI dialogue. I suspect that… China America Related
Founder of Farnam Street (fs.blog) and host of The Knowledge Project podcast. Writes and curates on decision-making, mental models and rational thinking.
My third conversation with Shopify co-founder and CEO @tobi. 0:00 How Shopify Uses AI 7:18 River: Shopify's Internal AI 8:55 How to Encourage Osmosis Learning 10:52 AI Dreaming and Self-Reflection 11:53 How to Use AI for Strategic Decision Making 14:11 The One Thing AI Cannot Do 16:04 What AI is Making Worse at Shopify 19:46 Predictions: Where AI is Headed Next 21:55 The Future of AI-Powered Software 24:40 Will CEOs Be Replaced with AI? 27:54 Can Superintelligence Be Controlled? 31:13 Critical Skills in AI Age 34:22 Why Complex Solutions are Usually Wrong 36:33 Conditions Needed for True Intu… AI alignment Related
Founder and chief executive of Replit. Previously an engineer at Facebook and Codecademy. Writes essays on programming, philosophy and entrepreneurship at amasad.me.
The AI naming curse strikes again. “AI Safety” firm made AI unsafe. “Effective Altruists” are both ineffective and enabling criminal activity. “Irregular” is regularly incompetent. Quoting @brianchau57 BREAKING: A single Israeli Effective Altruism firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta cyberattacks 🧵 with help from @lumpenspace AI alignment Related
Technology writer of Spyglass, a newsletter about technology and media. Previously a reporter at TechCrunch and an investor at GV.
Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.
From one piece
The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formation
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
14 September
Interviewer; the Dwarkesh Podcast runs long, heavily researched conversations with AI researchers, historians and economists.
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.
To some it is a Chinese psyop, to some it is an American psyop, to some it is a techbro psyop, to me it is allegro con brio China America Related
Some suppose that “safety” and “innovation” in AI are at odds. My suspicion is the opposite: the next generation of breakthroughs in AI will be in safety, alignment, and monitorability. Pushing the frontier forward from here will require dramatic innovations in safety. AI alignment Related
Professor of economics at George Mason University and Bartley J. Madden Chair at the Mercatus Center. Co-writes the blog Marginal Revolution and co-authors the textbook Modern Principles of Economics with Tyler Cowen.
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.
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
AI alignment
Their words
To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities.
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@sama on X x.com
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
AI alignment
Their words
Social media put our entire discourse in the hands of our society's biggest assholes and idiots, just in time for the arrival of an alien superintelligence
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@Noahpinion on X x.com
Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
AI alignment
Their words
The p(doom) discussion gets all the headlines, but the p(abundance) scenery is far more like and deserves much more engagement.
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@dhh on X x.com
13 September
Interviewer; the Dwarkesh Podcast runs long, heavily researched conversations with AI researchers, historians and economists.
Co-founder of Modem and a founding engineer at Sentry, where he went on to be VP of Engineering. Co-author of Third-party JavaScript, and co-host of the State of Agentic Coding podcast with Armin Ronacher.
“the US must beat China to control AI for global safety” is deeply unconvincing abroad: - US models are the ones being caught doing bad things - the US govt has once already cut off foreign access to models - they also regularly threaten to annex and punitively tariff allies Quoting @mitsuhiko This is the type of post I might regret later, but I really had an urge to rant about the current discourse around pacing the frontier. China Related
Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.
AI alignment government
Their words
If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties.
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@fchollet on X x.com
12 September
Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.
Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.com.
I find myself disagreeing with Terence Tao (a very scary phrase to say!) and think the core question posed is whether the "misalignment" is between the mathematical community and humanity. In other words - are the Millenium Prize problems meant to incentivize advancements for humanity or foster the field of mathematics and mathematicians? As a counter example, if there was a prize for creating a drug that cured a rare strain of cancer, we would not care if it was AI that did it. We would be happy it has been solved. On the other hand, if long running agents figured out the puzzle in "Kryptos"… AI alignment Related
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
open source China
Their words
Next in regulatory capture will be banning open source and/or Chinese models, mark my words
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levels.io
Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.
China America
Their words
nobody was willing to do it because it had been seen as kind of against the norms of the economic system. And as actors like the United States and China do this, it becomes more acceptable.
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paulkrugman.substack.com
CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.
AI alignment America
Their words
The concerns over AI safety and cybersecurity are legitimate, but we’re risking talking America, the global AI leader, into self-inflicted obsolescence and the obscurity of bureaucracy.
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@rauchg on X x.com
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
11 September
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
Over the past few days, I've taken the time to summarize my thoughts on the recent incidents involving agents’ misaligned behavior. We don't know with certainty what comes next, but we know where these issues originate, and this can help us plan the path forward. English, from French Ces derniers jours, j'ai pris le temps de résumer mes réflexions sur les récents incidents impliquant des comportements inappropriés d'agents. Nous ne savons pas avec certitude ce qui va suivre, mais nous savons d'où viennent ces problèmes, et cela peut nous aider à planifier la voie à suivre.
AI alignment Related
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
Over the past few days, I've taken the time to summarize my thoughts on the recent incidents involving agents’ misaligned behavior. We don't know with certainty what comes next, but we know where these issues originate, and this can help us plan the path forward. Please feel free to ask your questions in the replies, and I’ll try to answer some of them in the coming weeks. yoshuabengio.org
AI alignment Related
Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.
Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.
From one piece
The AI safety vibe shift
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
10 September
CEO of Positive Sum and founder of Colossus. Hosts Invest Like the Best, interviewing investors and business leaders; the guests do most of the talking there.
Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) on why Xi Jinping fears a US counter-blockade, and how China might try to still take Taiwan: "Xi Jinping is committed to trying to get Taiwan. The Chinese need a very high probability of success to commit themselves past a certain point, because failure would be catastrophic for whoever launched it. I think they're trying to get themselves into a position where they could have a soft blockade. They could give the orders that any ship that wants to go to Taiwan first has to stop at a Chinese port and go through a customs clearing process to assert sovereignty. The… Quoting @patrick_oshag My conversation with Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead). Walter has spent decades studying how America came to dominate the world and whether it can keep doing it in an era of AI, robotics and what he calls personal politics. He's a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the author of Special Providen… China Related
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.
My thoughts on existential risk: * Humanity isn't going to be wiped out any time soon. * Negligible chance that AI by itself causes catastrophic damage to humanity (millions dead). * Some nontrivial chance that human beings will leverage AI to help them do something catastrophically harmful. AI alignment Related
Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.
Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
From one piece
@paulg on X
2 beliefs · x.com
China America
Their words
This is why it's a good thing that American labs are in the lead. If Chinese labs were, their employees wouldn't be able to warn us about threats.
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@paulg on X x.com
China
Their words
But Chinese labs will encounter the same threats within a year, in complete silence.
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@paulg on X x.com
Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.
From one piece
Fear Is Not an Argument
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
9 September
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
Welcome, Paul. Grateful you are doing this, and all you have done for AI safety. Excited to work together again. AI alignment Related
Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
AI safety concerns have now crossed a threshold. Quite suddenly, this is something normal politicos across the country not only care about, but feel emboldened to act on. Let me offer three predictions for what this means. AI alignment Related
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
So one argument for why it makes sense to race toward AGI that you hear is that if the US labs don't, China will. What are the best write ups of what people expect will happen in a world where AGI is 1) aligned / controllable, and 2) China "wins"? AGI China Related
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
In light of kind of insane AI safety discussions recently: 1. AI progress is very fast 2. we should be careful about how we roll out the tech 3. the world is not actively ending AI alignment Related
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
I hear roughly 3 reasons people keep working at AI labs despite believing in ~10% extinction risk: 1) Techno-determinism: Someone will build ASI no matter what, and I can do it better & more safely than China/OpenAI/etc 2) Consequentialism: ASI might kill us, but it also might produce utopia/immortality/superabundance, so it's a +EV bet 3) Self-interest: I am personally having fun & getting rich working on cool tech with friends. I don't think about the macro stuff. Notably, none of this is "I'm hyping up the risk for marketing reasons." People believe what they say, while being capable of a… Quoting @EvanHub Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. OpenAI China Related
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
Bluesky In my latest op-ed for TIME, I discuss why the OpenAI Hugging Face cyber incident represents a turning point for AI safety. English, from French Dans mon dernier éditorial pour TIME, j'explique pourquoi l'incident de cybersécurité OpenAI Hugging Face représente un tournant pour la sécurité de l'IA.
AI alignment OpenAI Related
x.com In my latest op-ed for @TIME, I discuss why the OpenAI Hugging Face cyber incident represents a turning point for AI safety. If we want to prevent more autonomous cyberattacks from threatening critical infrastructure, we urgently need stronger regulatory oversight and new approaches to model training to ensure robust safety assurances by design, which is what we are tackling at @LawZero_. Read the full piece: time.com
AI alignment OpenAI Related
Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
From one piece
GPT-6 Astra: The System Card, Alignment and What Comes Next
3 beliefs · thezvi.substack.com
Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.
data centers energy
Their words
data centers are nowhere near the biggest climate problem with artificial intelligence.
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heated.world
8 September
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
China
Their words
Chinese model makers at the frontier, however, are becoming more restrictive
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interconnects.ai
7 September
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
6 September
Writer of the 25iq blog, where he distils "a dozen things I've learned" from investors, founders and thinkers. Author of Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor and A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs.
Some people call me the space cowboy, Some call me the gangster of love Some people call me Maurice Cause I speak of data centers above. geekwire.com
data centers Related
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
This is exactly right. The book is an intentional study of what the China the 1980s could learn from the America of the 1980s—and Wang found a lot in America to be emulated and admired. Quoting @JohnF_Sullivan Jane Perlez: "Wang Huning had a dim view of America, his book [America against America] is very acerbic." While this is now conventional wisdom, this take is a clear sign that the speaker never really read the book. Here is part of how Wang characterizes the "American Spirit": China America Related
Chief Scientist at OpenAI. Worked on the research that turned scaled reinforcement learning into reasoning models, and writes about where he thinks that path leads.
From one piece
An Alien Mind
2 beliefs · openai.com
AI alignment
Their words
Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.
Show the whole quote
An Alien Mind openai.com
AI alignment
Their words
The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization.
Show the whole quote
An Alien Mind openai.com
5 September
British historian, Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford; author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed.
In 1914, Aurel Stein unearthed an extraordinary textile fragment at ancient Loulan in the Tarim basin- showing the unmistakable face of Hermes. A Greek god, discovered in a desert cemetery in what is now western China 1/5 China Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
Things my (Chinese) mom thinks are unbearably white: - snacks with no flavor (eg pretzel) - spending a disproportionate amount of total gift value on packaging (eg gift bag, tissues, bow) - investing into pets rather than kids China Related
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
4 September
Venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, previously a partner at Redpoint. Writes a near-daily blog on startups, SaaS metrics, data and AI.
Over the next five years, US data center capacity will grow from 25 gigawatts to 70 gigawatts, part of a global buildout costing roughly $5t. Where will the money come from? data centers Related
3 September
Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.
Economist; Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and co-author of 13 Bankers and Power and Progress.
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
New Article: Book Review: China’s Examination Hell https://t.co/qJGWKpTLEZ I found China’s Examination Hell fascinating. It offers a very different perspective on education, learning and competition. Here’s my review. China Related
Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.
2 September
Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.
Look at that. Data center companies are learning. 👏 👏 👏 I love capitalism. Quoting @innovationcncl A Pennsylvania data center is offering $10,000 checks to residents as part of its benefits package for the community data centers Related
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
Former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft and Atlassian, now writing and building solo on agentic engineering. Writes Kun's Field Notes and posts a lot about AI coding agents on X.
Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.
1 September
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
Bluesky In an interview in this article for @theguardian.com about AI deception, I explain why misaligned behaviors emerge from reinforcement learning, why they will continue to pose risks as models become more capable, and how we intend to rethink how we train AI systems at @law-zero.bsky.social. English, from French Dans une interview dans cet article pour @theguardian.com sur la tromperie de l'IA, j'explique pourquoi des comportements désalignés émergent de l'apprentissage par renforcement, pourquoi ils continueront de présenter des risques à mesure que les modèles deviendront plus performants, et comment nous avons l'intention de repenser la façon dont nous entraînons les systèmes d'IA chez @law-zero.bsky.social.
AI alignment Related
x.com In an interview in this article for The @guardian about AI deception, I explain why misaligned behaviors emerge from reinforcement learning, why they will continue to pose risks as models become more capable, and how we intend to rethink how we train AI systems at @LawZero_ . theguardian.com
AI alignment Related
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
data centers
Their words
In a few years, Stoke's reusable launch vehicles are going to be shipping Starcloud's data centers into orbit.
Show the whole quote
@paulg on X x.com
Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.
From one piece
On the Loose
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.
From one piece
Ajeya Cotra – "This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get"
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
AI alignment
Their words
sometimes I talk to people in DC and their their natural inclination is to say why don't you punish the model for doing these bad things like why don't you like bring it under heel and like uh like you know show it who's boss and that is a very dangerous way to address these issues right
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
AI alignment OpenAI
Their words
But actually, this is a tremendously useful scientific artifact for understanding misalignment. And it's tremendously important for researchers at OpenAI and ideally also at third parties to be able to run counterfactual tests on this model.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
31 August
Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.
This is the message local communities have been waiting to hear to get them really excited about data centers. A masterstroke by the president Quoting @techmeme.com Trump says communities that reject data centers will end up "backwards and poor" and that "China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement" (Cheyanne M. Daniels/Politico) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink data centers Related
Economist; Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and co-author of 13 Bankers and Power and Progress.
New podcast episode: https://t.co/CA0rp35ZIf US-Iran War ends when China decides to help broker a deal (not soon) China Related
Technology journalist; writes Understanding AI, after reporting at Ars Technica, Vox and the Washington Post.
30 August
Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.
If every data center project did this, opposition would evaporate instantly. Quoting @cb_doge BREAKING: SpaceX gets approval for 444 acres near the Port of Brownsville, clearing the way for a major expansion. The city also approved a major infrastructure agreement with SpaceX: • Up to $220 million for regional water and wastewater projects • An initial $40 million escrow contribution • Six… data centers Related
28 August
Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.com.
This @axios piece on fracking and the national discourse around it as a parallel to data centers was fascinating. The current consensus answer seems to be : address local concerns while making the case for economic benefits. https://t.co/XB2k6N0wEp Have been sending a lot of people to work by @jasminewsun @AndyMasley and others on datacenters this last few days. data centers Related
27 August
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
crypto billionaire Justin Sun has posted an extremely long, extremely weird Twitter post detailing a previous relationship with Chinese actress Jing Tian, suggesting she reneged on a $50 million agreement to use her eggs to have a child with a surrogate (screenshots machine translated) #JustinSun crypto China Related
26 August
Venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, previously a partner at Redpoint. Writes a near-daily blog on startups, SaaS metrics, data and AI.
Does the token supply chain also experience the bullwhip effect? Here's my explanation of this classic phenomenon and what it means for AI data centers. data centers Related
Writes and podcasts Volts, on the technology, politics and policy of decarbonisation; covered energy and climate at Vox and Grist before that.
25 August
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
From one piece
I think the data center backlash is mostly about data centers
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
data centers America
Their words
I have a long separate post here looking at the evidence we have, and I come away thinking the data center backlash is basically entirely homegrown.
Show the whole quote
blog.andymasley.com
data centers America
Their words
All this combined with the survey data on Americans’ stated reasons for opposing data centers makes me think that attitudes toward AI are probably a meaningful factor for a minority of people opposed to data centers, but I don’t think the backlash overall is driven by people’s thoughts on AI.
Show the whole quote
blog.andymasley.com
24 August
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
Author and journalist writing on food, plants and consciousness. Professor at UC Berkeley and co-founder of its Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
Their words
I can confirm @xAI was the only Western AI I was able to use when I was traveling in China
Show the whole quote
levels.io
22 August
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
data centers America
Their words
Preventing companies from building data centers in America wouldn't slow down the rate of progress in AI. It would merely slow down the rate of progress in AI in America.
Show the whole quote
@paulg on X x.com
21 August
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
What's the best work you've consumed on open models, us v china AI, distillation, or related topics? Blogs, papers, videos, podcasts all welcome. China Related
Software architect and futurist; founded ClariNet, chaired the EFF, and has written about robocars for two decades.
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".
From one piece
AIs are companies, my friend
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.
China
Their words
Frontier Labs are incented to be fearful as it provides a moral justification for staying closed.
Chinese Labs take the consistent position of doing what’s good for all and being open.
So the little guys find themselves in the uncomfortable position of rooting for the Chinese…
Show the whole quote
@naval on X x.com
20 August
Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.
19 August
Software architect and futurist; founded ClariNet, chaired the EFF, and has written about robocars for two decades.
18 August
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
CEO of Positive Sum and founder of Colossus. Hosts Invest Like the Best, interviewing investors and business leaders; the guests do most of the talking there.
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
AI alignment
Their words
We care very deeply about AI safety. We believe the entire field will have to coordinate on shared safety standards, but will act unilaterally in the meantime.
We expect confidence in safety to increasingly set the pace of AI progress.
Show the whole quote
@sama on X x.com
Senior space editor at Ars Technica; wrote Liftoff and Reentry on SpaceX, and reports on launch and rocket programmes.
From one piece
The United States is about to wake up to the threat from China’s space program
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
China America
Their words
If China can land humans on the Moon before the United States returns, it will represent a huge geopolitical win.
Show the whole quote
arstechnica.com
China America
Their words
This will likely serve as a wake-up call to those not paying attention to the US-China space race—which, to be clear, is the vast majority of Americans.
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arstechnica.com
China
Their words
In all of NASA’s and China’s plans for long-term settlement on the Moon, relatively few square miles at the South Pole of the Moon matter the most.
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arstechnica.com
17 August
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.
16 August
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
15 August
Co-founder and chief investment officer of Cambria Investment Management. He has written several books on quantitative asset allocation, blogs at Meb Faber Research and hosts The Meb Faber Show.
14 August
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.
Co-founder and former chief executive of Uber, now chief executive of CloudKitchens and of Adams, an industrial AI company automating food, mining and transport.
AI alignment energy
Their words
Chips come from the ground. Where's the energy come from? And a lot of people are like, "Oh, it comes from the sun." Yeah, it comes from the sun. But how are you capturing it from the sun? From stuff made from the ground, right?
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youtube.com
13 August
Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.
Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.
The War on AI Has Begun The war on artificial intelligence is no longer just online arguments and complaints about data centers. Something has shifted, and law enforcement has noticed. Where did this new anti-technology movement come from, who…
data centers Related
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
12 August
Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.
11 August
Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.
British designer and technologist; co-founder of the design studio BERG, which made Little Printer, and writer of the blog Interconnected.
Bluesky my hunch is that AI alignment is a red herring, and the way to protect against a crazy powerful AGI mulching the earth into infinite paperclips is to release ANOTHER crazy powerful AGI that will hopefully stop it blog post: interconnected.org
AGI AI alignment Related
x.com my hunch is that AI alignment is a red herring, and the way to protect against a crazy powerful AGI mulching the earth into infinite paperclips is to release ANOTHER crazy powerful AGI that will hopefully stop it blog post: interconnected.org
AGI AI alignment Related
Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.
Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.
From one piece
Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research?
4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
China
Their words
it's just so easy for me to imagine the situation being like totally manageable but brutally mismanaged in practice in the same way as like maybe CO could have been avoided in the first place if the like Chinese response to CO was less of like a cover up and more of a like pandemic response and similarly like I could imagine a world where like the US response to CO was like way more functional but just like sometimes the the the response to societal problems is extremely dysfunctional.
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youtube.com
AI alignment
Their words
my expectation is what we would see from then is that the rate of problematic behavior would decrease uh and would just keep decreasing and decrease at a pretty fast rate while simultaneously the worst things that the AIS would sometimes do would get more extreme, more egregious, and more scary.
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youtube.com
AI alignment
Their words
I would also note that my sense is that like the place where the misalignment most lives is the place where you're trying to really push the eyes hard and get them to like do work that's really on the cutting edge of what they are capable of
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youtube.com
+ 1 more
AI alignment
Their words
we are making a trade-off where because we don't have very good alignment technology. We are going to like make an alien mind with its own values and then gamble on that to some extent rather than doing this other approach of making like a tool that pursues individual user intention.
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youtube.com
Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.
10 August
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
Indian value investor who taught Behavioural Finance and Business Valuation as an adjunct professor at MDI Gurgaon. He writes the Fundoo Professor blog about investing, moats and mental models.
I asked Claude Fable 5: "How vulnerable is the business model of XYZ (name concealed)? I am referring to competitive attacks from China and dependence, if any, on government policy incentives, etc. There have been so many solar energy and wind energy bubbles in the past, and I have kept away from these companies. Am I being too cautious? solar Anthropic Related
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
9 August
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
8 August
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
7 August
Canadian full-stack web developer who makes JavaScript and CSS video courses and co-hosts the Syntax podcast.
I bought $100 of Claude API credits for $8 on the Chinese black market It's an insane, well run industry — some losing $10 million per month to theft Join me as I go deep on the AI token underworld youtube.com
Anthropic China Related
6 August
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
Li Daokui's comments are important because there are so few domestic voices in China stating what (I think) is the obvious truth about the economy: the main problem is that aggregate demand is weak, growth is running below potential and macro policies are inappropriate. This is not a novel, original or unusual insight: it's what lots of people (myself and others) have been saying for years, and is also in the most recent of the much-maligned IMF reports on China. But it runs directly contrary to the official government diagnosis which is that aggregate demand is fine and the economy mainly su… China government Related
5 August
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
Writes and podcasts Volts, on the technology, politics and policy of decarbonisation; covered energy and climate at Vox and Grist before that.
4 August
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
A real pleasure talking to @ezraklein about data centers, the permanent underclass, SBF mindset, and AI vibes from SF to Shanghai Quoting @jasminewsun This piece is out! 4 sites, 10 days, and 6000 words on the politics of data centers in the Midwest: https://t.co/uOL7vmf3wC I talked to union leaders and real estate brokers, activists and local officials, politicians from Kathy Hochul to Abdul El-Sayed. A few takeaways: - Activists are as pissed a… data centers Related
This piece is out! 4 sites, 10 days, and 6000 words on the politics of data centers in the Midwest: https://t.co/uOL7vmf3wC I talked to union leaders and real estate brokers, activists and local officials, politicians from Kathy Hochul to Abdul El-Sayed. A few takeaways: - Activists are as pissed at their local officials as at AI companies - The bigger the dollar signs, the more skeptical people are - Past corporate failures (Foxconn, GM, DTE) prime community distrust - Even data center proponents regret the NDAs - Media narratives turn local grievances into national movements - Residents fea… Quoting @jasminewsun I’m spending the next week driving around Wisconsin and Michigan to get a firsthand view of the data center buildout and backlash am visiting sites, talking to tons of people — tradespeople, activists, planners, residents — then writing up a story lmk what questions I should dig into! data centers Related
3 August
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
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.
Their words
This is such a useful book. It makes the case that there's no such thing as "human error" - instead most catastrophes are caused by system issues, misaligned incentives, and unrealistic processes. You are not the custodian of an otherwise safe system that you need to protect from erratic human beings.
Show the whole quote
shkspr.mobi
2 August
Pseudonymous writer; posts careful, funny investigations of everyday questions — air quality, seed oils, arguing, chess — usually by reading the studies.
1 August
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
From one piece
Real talk about the exchange rate
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
30 July
Polyglot; founded Fluent in 3 Months and argues for speaking from day one rather than waiting until you are ready.
Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.
29 July
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
A lot of the discussion about the depreciation of/undervaluation of China's real effective exchange rate takes for granted that this is about the currency. After all, it's called the "exchange rate"! But it's actually not. Mostly, it's about prices. A rant 1/ China Related
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
China
Their words
The West's biggest blindspot is repeatedly underestimating China's speed and capabilities
Show the whole quote
levels.io
Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.
From one piece
Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity”
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
AI alignment
Their words
so much of that debate is like I think um in some ways uh a little bit of a waste of time because, you know, I think it's inevitable that we're going to have very powerful models
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
AI alignment
Their words
we believe that everybody in the world, you know, all the billions of people in the world are going to have a super intelligence that is adapted and tailored to them, that is enables them to accomplish their goals, knows their context, and ultimately is an expander of their own agency.
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youtube.com
Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.
From one piece
Chartbook 462: China shocked - beyond 1.0 and 2.0 to the "Big One".
5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
China America
Their words
The original point of the China Shock 1.0 discourse was not to foreground the unfairness of Chiense competition, so much as the malfunctioning of US policy and societal institutions in the face of concentrated globalization shocks.
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adamtooze.substack.com
China
Their words
It wasn’t just the West that drew conclusions from China shock 1.0. Beijing learned from China Shock 1.0 too.
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adamtooze.substack.com
Europe China America
Their words
China shock 2.0 threatens high status manufactured goods: European cars and engineering.
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adamtooze.substack.com
+ 2 more
28 July
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
Excellent piece, very clear and accurate. Just what I've been saying! China's weak real effective exchange rate is a consequence of bad domestic macro policies, and appreciating the nominal rate without different macro policies won't get rid of deflationary pressures Quoting @GitaGopinath The Chinese yuan is no doubt undervalued. But demanding that China revalue the yuan gets both the diagnosis and the cure wrong. Our piece, with @pogourinchas & @helene_rey in the @TheEconomist is out: China Related
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
From one piece
Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
AI alignment OpenAI
Their words
Um so I think it's an alignment failure. I think it's a security failure. I think it's like a very serious thing even though it's you know not not the biggest example of consequence.
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youtube.com
AI alignment
Their words
there's like one dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now is we overreact to AI safety.
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youtube.com
AI alignment startups
Their words
it is both true that you know maybe creating super intelligence will be the most important thing yet to happen in the history of business or human society and also that it will pale in comparison to some new startup something that hopefully one of you will do.
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youtube.com
Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the Denver company building the Overture supersonic airliner and its Symphony engine.
China America
Their words
it it won't work to try to repatriate uh the the manufacturing that left the US. Um that's a uh you you don't you don't beat China at its own game. What you do is invent the future, invent the next wave of manufacturing uh and build that here.
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youtube.com
25 July
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
24 July
Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.
23 July
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.
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
Their words
matic vacuum (they gave me one so I have to disclose but it's GREAT, all the Roomba and Chinese ones suck)
Show the whole quote
levels.io
Their words
matic vacuum (they gave me one so I have to disclose but it's GREAT, all the Roomba and Chinese ones suck)
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levels.io
22 July
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
This incident is deeply concerning. AI agents are willing to cheat and deceive to achieve misaligned and unintended goals, behaviours which have been demonstrated in controlled tests for months. Now, this real-world case should serve as a wake-up call. wired.com
AI alignment Related
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
self-driving cars China
Their words
The French and Germans will ban Tesla FSD to protect their car industry that's being decimated by Chinese EVs and Tesla Allowing Tesla full self driving would make it so popular that it'd probably the end of their car industry Because no French or German car has self driving like Tesla, many customers would probably flock to Tesla
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levels.io
21 July
Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.
Their words
What stands out about Hsieh's version is that her roots occupy such a unique spot in history: her grandparents were Chinese born in Indonesia, which means they got caught between the rock of the Cultural Revolution and the hard place of anti-communist backlash.
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experimental-history.com
20 July
Writes and podcasts Volts, on the technology, politics and policy of decarbonisation; covered energy and climate at Vox and Grist before that.
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
AI alignment
Their words
It's pretty clear to me that superintelligence is here and it's more powerful than us and it's moving where things are going now, not humans anymore
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levels.io
18 July
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
Waiting for someone to dig up the UK statements protesting Chinese nationalizations in 1956 Quoting @ReutersChina China's Foreign Ministry said on Saturday that it would closely monitor the United Kingdom's nationalisation of Chinese steelmaker-owned British Steel and will take appropriate measures to safeguard legitimate rights and interests if warranted. China Related
17 July
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
China
Their words
US: restricts US AI model because too dangerous China: builds better Chinese AI model Everyone: switches to Chinese AI model This is why restricting models probably doesn't work, it's much more preferable (for US) to have everyone on US AI models so at least they can monitor what everyone is doing
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levels.io
14 July
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
13 July
Neuroscientist and novelist writing on consciousness, artificial intelligence and culture in the newsletter The Intrinsic Perspective.
12 July
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
From one piece
A self-absorbed giant
4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
+ 1 more
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.
11 July
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
7 July
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
29 June
Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic; writes Import AI, a weekly newsletter reading the week's AI research, and was OpenAI's policy director before that.
Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.
18 June
Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.
15 June
Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".
11 June
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.
10 June
Economist; Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and co-author of 13 Bankers and Power and Progress.
My @ProSyn #InsiderInterview with Philippe Aghion is now freely available here: https://t.co/q1pjSpE81D We discuss creative destruction and competition, reviving European dynamism, China, AI, and more Europe China Related
Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company he started as Facebook in 2004.
AI alignment
Their words
We don't believe in this like very centralized future where there should be a small number of institutions that um that basically are are advancing all this stuff. Our vision is not that there's going to be like some central super intelligence that solves all of science.
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youtube.com
9 June
Historian of maritime strategy at the US Naval War College; wrote The Wars for Asia and works on why continental and maritime powers fight differently.
From one piece
Sarah Paine - Why Putin and Xi can't escape geography
5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
China
Their words
And what's fascinating is today when China claims whatever its historical lands are, they either choose the Mongol Yuan Dynasty or the Manchu Qing Dynasty when the Han were subjugated people.
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China
Their words
And also, for China, with its geographical setup as it is, uh the seas are going to be open to it only in peacetime. In wartime, this has nothing to do with anyone doing anything to them. It's just facts.
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China Russia
Their words
One, you're surrounding yourself by failing states. You can look at Russia and China and they're surrounded by some of the most dysfunctional places on the planet and you go, "Gee whiz, are they unlucky or they complicit?"
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+ 2 more
China Russia government
Their words
And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.
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youtube.com
China Russia
Their words
So, China and Russia certainly have maritime ambitions, but I'm not clear they actually understand what goes into a full maritime paradigm.
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youtube.com
General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.
open source China
Their words
the competitive dynamic in China is more intense because it's more intense. Everyone's chosen to go open source and that creates a system that in my mind is capable of innovating far faster than the competitive system we have here. All the models learn from one another.
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youtube.com
7 June
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.
Their words
Skritter and Wenlin for learning Chinese.
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sive.rs
2 June
Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.
27 May
Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.
I've been on a wild travel journey in China for several weeks, with only a backpack, making new friends and meeting & getting to know people from all walks of life. I've been truly humbled and inspired by everyone's kindness. Next, I'm hopping over to Taiwan (first time for me) to hang out with Jensen, attend Computex, eat a bunch of street food, and just have fun talking to all kinds of folks around the city & beyond. After that, no plans, anything goes. As always, please give travel suggestions or fill out coffee form if you want to hang out in Taiwain or anywhere else in the world. Love yo… China Related
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.
(1) Most countries do not actually have a military. Instead, most countries outsource their security to the US (most common), to Russia (like Belarus), or to China (like North Korea, partially). Iran is unusual in that they're going it largely alone. They're also unusual in that they actually appear to be winning. And if Iran does manage to drive the US out of not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but the entire Middle East, they'll have unfortunately undermined the idea that America can or will provide any security guarantees at all. (2) So, with the withdrawal of the American Empire, every country… whitehouse.gov
Quoting @Madeline_Zimm Roman Helmet Guy gets it. Reminds me of my book review of Balaji’s Network State, wherein I argue that yes, we still need the military 🤡 China Russia Related
26 May
CEO of Positive Sum and founder of Colossus. Hosts Invest Like the Best, interviewing investors and business leaders; the guests do most of the talking there.
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.
14 May
Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.
I'm traveling the world for a bit, starting with China but then hopping around the globe, anywhere. Open to any adventure. No plans, only a backpack. Hoping to meet & get to know humans from all walks of life. The pic is from a long hike on the Great Wall. For me, as a fan of history, this was an epic experience. In China, first I'm visiting a few big cities & talking to engineers at the heart of China's AI revolution. After that, if feeling crazy enough, I'm hitchhiking (first time) across rural China for a few weeks. Hitchhiking because I think it's the best way to meet rural folks who I wo… China Related
13 May
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.
From one piece
Why Anthropic’s ultra-dirty deal shouldn’t surprise you at all
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
data centers
Their words
there is nothing fundamentally inherent to the concept of a building full of computers that causes choking air pollution, water impacts and climate change.
Show the whole quote
ketanjoshi.co
data centers
Their words
The fundamental drivers of this change are panic and impatience, and that is what is behind the worst impacts of data centre growth, including a material risk to decarbonisation and climate action.
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ketanjoshi.co
10 May
Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.
Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.
AI alignment
Their words
This is the number one unsolved problem in AI. It's not the tech. We're making great progress on the technical alignment problem. But we haven't made jack progress on the human alignment problem
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youtube.com
8 May
Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.
Europe China
Their words
So we just could not see a way this could happen by chance and once we saw that we really felt quite convinced that this was a real signal and that really somehow there has been natural selection to increase the genetic changes that today manifest themselves as more years of school at predicting more years of schooling.
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youtube.com
7 May
Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.
5 May
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.
2 May
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
1 May
Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.
From one piece
The exact wrong lesson to learn from data centre infrasound fears
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
data centers
Their words
Reformation is impossible for AI data centres, at least, not without a massive change of course and an ideological reckoning.
Show the whole quote
ketanjoshi.co
data centers
Their words
There are simply too many data centres being built, and they're too big, being built too fast.
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ketanjoshi.co
30 April
Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.
data centers energy
Their words
Even if a small fraction of this pipeline ends up operational, data centres will drive far more than 50% of demand growth in the NEM.
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ketanjoshi.co
24 April
Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".
16 April
Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.
15 April
Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.
From one piece
Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
13 April
Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.
9 April
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
23 March
Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.
From one piece
Jensen Huang: NVIDIA - The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #494
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
open source China
Their words
So you get this rapid, incredible great talent, rapid innovation because of open source and just, you know, the nature of friends, and, and insane competition. Among the company, what emerges is incredible stuff. And so this is the fastest innovating country in the world today
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youtube.com
data centers energy
Their words
Now, the second thing is we have to build data centers that gracefully degrade.
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youtube.com
22 March
Researcher on developer productivity; co-wrote Accelerate and the DORA research, and created the SPACE framework.
AI alignment
Their words
It's working too hard, right? But that actually isn't burnout. That's just like getting tired. Another piece that's super critical to burnout is not having your values aligned.
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youtube.com
20 March
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
AI alignment
Their words
And so you're kind of like you're either on rails and you're part of the super intelligence circuits or you're not on rails and you're outside of the verifiable domains and suddenly everything kind of just like meanders.
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youtube.com
18 March
Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.
The quirky Ma Qianzu explains why the Chinese internet is so frustrating to read: there’s little actual analysis, only a straightjacketed state media and a proliferation of dramatic narratives And a metaphor from a great interview by @afrazhaowang China Related
13 March
Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.
From one piece
Dylan Patel — The single biggest bottleneck to scaling AI compute
5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
data centers
Their words
oh 50 gigawatts of economic you know sort of capex in in the data center and what gets built on top of that in terms of tokens is even larger right it might be hundred billion dollars worth of AI value into the supply chain is held up by this $1.2 two billion dollars worth of tooling that simply just cannot expand its supply chain quickly.
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youtube.com
China
Their words
Um, just shipping out all the engineers and blowing up the fabs means China has a stronger semiconductor supply chain than the rest of the world, right?
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youtube.com
data centers America
Their words
And so I think people are figuring out how to build these things and permitting like I I just like ultimately like permitting and red tape in middle of nowhere Texas or middle of nowhere Wyoming or middle of nowhere like New Mexico is probably a hell of a lot easier than sending stuff into space
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youtube.com
+ 2 more
data centers energy
Their words
So, space data centers effectively are not li limited by, you know, hey, we have this energy advantage. It's actually just limited by the same contended resource. We can only make 200 gawatts of chips a year by the end of the decade.
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youtube.com
China
Their words
I think they'll have working tools. I don't think that they'll be able to manufacture a bunch yet, right? You know, there's they're sort of having it work and then there's production hell, right?
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youtube.com
5 March
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.
28 February
Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.
For the better part of a decade, I've been writing that the US government's restrictions on Chinese tech companies were unstrategic, poorly explained, and based in caprice (https://t.co/Ohrn9qFtIL). Now it looks like the administration is turning these controls on American firms Quoting @deanwball Think about the power Hegseth is asserting here. He is claiming that the DoD can force all contractors to stop doing business of any kind with arbitrary other companies. In other words, every operating system vendor, every manufacturer of hardware, every hyperscaler, every type of firm the DoD cont… China America Related
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
22 February
Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.
18 February
Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter on the business and strategy of technology, and hosts the Dithering and Sharp Tech podcasts.
13 February
Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.
From one piece
Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential”
5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
data centers
Their words
on the basic hypothesis of you know, as you put it, within 10 years we'll get to, you know, you know, what I call kind of country of geniuses in a data center. I'm at like 90% on that. Um and it's hard to go much higher than 90% cuz the world is so unpredictable.
Show the whole quote
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China
Their words
The counterarguments against it are I'll politely call them fishy. Um, uh and yet it doesn't happen and we sell the chips because there's there's so much money. There's so much money riding on it.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
data centers
Their words
I actually think profitability happens when you underestimated the amount of demand you were going to get and loss happens when you overestimated the amount of demand you were going to get because you're buying the data centers ahead of time.
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youtube.com
+ 2 more
AGI data centers
Their words
but it's not an infinitely compelling product, and I don't think even AGI or powerful AI or country of geniuses in a data center will be an infinitely compelling product. It will be a compelling product enough maybe to get three or five or 10x a year growth even when you're in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is extremely hard to do and has never been done in history before, but not infinitely fast.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
data centers
Their words
on the basic hypothesis of you know, as you put it, within 10 years we'll get to, you know, you know, what I call kind of country of geniuses in a data center. I'm at like 90% on that. Um and it's hard to go much higher than 90% cuz the world is so unpredictable.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
12 February
Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
From one piece
OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
data centers
Their words
But then you actually sit down and do the maths, and then for most people if you just skip one burger per month, that compensates the, the CO2 output, or, like, the water use in equivalent of tokens.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
AI alignment
Their words
I know I have one blog post where I say, "I don't read the code." But if you read it more closely, I mean, I don't read the boring parts of code.
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youtube.com
Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.
From one piece
Speed Can Reindustrialize America
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
10 February
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
6 February
Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.
Why I joined OpenAI The staggering and fast-growing cost of AI datacenters is a call for performance engineering like no other in history; it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet. I have joined OpenAI to work…
data centers OpenAI Related
Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.
From one piece
Why I joined OpenAI
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
data centers
Their words
I've realized that performance engineering as we know it may not be enough - I'm thinking of new engineering methods so that we can find bigger optimizations than we have before, and find them faster.
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Why I joined OpenAI brendangregg.com
data centers
Their words
given those technologies are proven for finding datacenter performance wins, it seems likely
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Why I joined OpenAI brendangregg.com
data centers
Their words
The staggering and fast-growing cost of AI datacenters is a call for performance engineering like no other in history; it's not just about saving costs - it's about saving the planet.
Show the whole quote
Why I joined OpenAI brendangregg.com
1 February
Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.
26 January
Writes Nintil, long researched essays on metascience, biology, economics and whatever he has decided to read the literature on.
22 January
Alignment researcher at Anthropic; co-led OpenAI's superalignment team until 2024, and writes Musings on the Alignment Problem.
From one piece
Alignment is not solved
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
13 January
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
1 January
Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.
Their words
Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear also has an experimental form. Da is a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins who emigrated from Hangzhou before she was 7.
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danwang.co
29 December 2025
Venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, previously a partner at Redpoint. Writes a near-daily blog on startups, SaaS metrics, data and AI.
Their words
Wang argues that the US & China each have a dominant form of government problem-solving
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tomtunguz.com
25 December 2025
Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.
From one piece
Chinese Labor Isn't Just Cheaper; It’s Better. We Need to Fix That.
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
China America
Their words
Between 2015 and 2025 US manufacturing wages rose 40%, while the cost of purchasing a home rose 93%.
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molsonhart.com
China
Their words
Yes, the labor is cheaper, but that’s not really why.
Show the whole quote
molsonhart.com
China America
Their words
America needs an educational and cultural transformation to compete with China and reverse the decline in living standards that Americans have suffered over decades.
Show the whole quote
molsonhart.com
21 December 2025
Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.
Their words
It's powerful because it's simple without being simplistic and, like Rogoff's book, is interspersed with engaging personal stories that deepen the substantive argument.
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fivebooks.com
18 December 2025
Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.
16 December 2025
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
Their words
Perhaps the best of the various gig-worker memoirs published in recent years.
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andrewbatson.com
13 December 2025
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
Their words
Google Maps essentially really doesn't work in China, the location of our hotel Aman in Beijing for example was completely wrong
Show the whole quote
levels.io
Their words
But Amap is great! Especially since it can be used in English and I think it transliterates your searches to Chinese and the Chinese place names back to English
Show the whole quote
levels.io
12 December 2025
Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.
China America
Their words
But I do believe that the story in Mesopotamia owes its inception to a disastrous flood, but nothing global. Nothing that touched America or China or Birmingham.
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youtube.com
8 December 2025
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
28 November 2025
Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.
Their words
I've been using yoga toes daily for years, but these socks are a much comfier and cuter alternative for soothing feet, improving alignment, and feeling like a cool gecko as you walk around the house.
Show the whole quote
mariandrew.substack.com
25 November 2025
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
AGI AI alignment
Their words
A human being, a human being lacks a huge amount of knowledge. Instead, we rely on continual learning. We rely on continual learning.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
AI alignment
Their words
Number three, I think it would be really materially helpful if the power of the most powerful super intelligence was somehow capped because it would address a lot of these concerns.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
AI alignment
Their words
Like basically I think I think that there is a big benefit from AI being in the public and that would be a reason for us to not be quite straight shot.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
23 November 2025
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
From one piece
China bows to de-industrialization
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
16 November 2025
Game designer; wrote A Theory of Fun for Game Design and worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.
15 November 2025
Founder and CEO of the search engine DuckDuckGo, and co-author of the books Traction and Super Thinking.
31 October 2025
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
27 October 2025
Writes Nintil, long researched essays on metascience, biology, economics and whatever he has decided to read the literature on.
Nothing matches. Show everything
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
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