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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.

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  Anthropic prices its Claude subscription plans as loss leaders relative to its own API rates.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  The subscription tiers are still enormous loss leaders: $20/month for your first $200/month of tokens at API rates for the "Pro" tier, and $100 or $200/month for your first $1500 or $3000/month of tokens at the "Max 5x" or "Max 20x" tiers.

  braddelong.substack.com

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  Highly transformative institutions are often indistinguishable from ineffectual talking shops at the moment they are created.

  Their words

  This means that highly transformative institutions will often look identical to ineffectual talking shops and indeed be identical to ineffectual talking shops.

  Canada is cosying up to Europeprogrammablemutter.com

Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.

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  AI safety worriers and AI optimists both believe AI will be a hugely transformative economic success, unlike the AI-bubble skeptics.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  From an investment viewpoint, the opposite of the safetyist view is "it's all a bubble," not "A.I. is going to be really good."

  The economy could survive a downtick in A.I.slowboring.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

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  A powerful new technology that benefits only part of society is inherently politically destabilizing.

  Their words

  It's highly destabilizing to have such a transformative, productive tool only bring half of society along.

  When will average people feel AI’s impact?interconnects.ai

Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.

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  Battery storage is becoming the defining transformative energy technology of the second half of the 2020s, as solar and wind were of the first half.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  Batteries are the transformative technology for the second half of this decade, as sun and wind were for the first half

  Fun with numbersbillmckibben.substack.com

Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.

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  Higher-priced AI subscription tiers mainly buy more hours of agent usage rather than a smarter underlying model

  Their words

  The more expensive plans are mostly buying you more hours of AI labor, not smarter AI.

  oneusefulthing.org

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

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  The confusion about who does what is a storming phase every transformative technology causes, and AI is in the middle of it.

  Their words

  I think anytime a new technology comes along, especially one that's as transformative as GenAI, you go through a storming phase before you go through the forming phase of things. And I think we are in the middle of that right now.

  youtube.com

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

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

  psychedelicsPsychotherapy

  Their words

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

  How not to forget what mattershenrikkarlsson.xyz

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

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  People disagreeing about AI capability are speaking past each other, because they are using models of very different tiers on very different kinds of task.

  Their words

  TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other.

  @karpathy on Xx.com

Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

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  Software businesses that merely transform incoming data and pass it back out are highly vulnerable to being replaced by agentic AI.

  Their words

  If you run a software business that is purely transformative - that takes incoming data, does something to it, and turns the data back out - that will be a problem.

  Data Is the Only Moatthebootstrappedfounder.com

Co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management; author of the Oaktree memos.

From one piece Is It a Bubble? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Transformative technologies reliably attract more investment and infrastructure than they need, and that excess is what speeds their adoption.

  Their words

  There’s a consistent history of transformational technologies generating excessive enthusiasm and investment, resulting in more infrastructure than is needed and asset prices that prove to have been too high. The excesses accelerate the adoption of the technology in a way that wouldn’t occur in their absence.

  Is It a Bubble?oaktreecapital.com

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  If AI enthusiasm does not produce a bubble on the historical pattern, it will be the first transformative technology that did not.

  Their words

  If that enthusiasm doesn’t produce a bubble conforming to the historical pattern, that will be a first.

  Is It a Bubble?oaktreecapital.com

Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.

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  Anyone who thinks large language models are a direct route to transformative AGI is kidding themselves.

  AGILLMs

  Their words

  But anybody who thinks LLMs are a direct route to the sort AGI that could fundamentally transform society for the good is kidding themselves.

  A knockout blow for LLMs?garymarcus.substack.com

Director of strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology; an OpenAI board member until November 2023, and writes Rising Tide.

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  Dismissing human-level AI as science fiction is now unserious, because even the sceptical experts put it within a decade or two.

  AGIAI alignment

  Their words

  Dismissing discussion of AGI, human-level AI, transformative AI, superintelligence, etc. as “science fiction” should be seen as a sign of total unseriousness.

  helentoner.substack.com

Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.

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  The return of inflation is what made Donald Trump's second presidency possible, and therefore what makes everything that presidency changes possible.

  inflationimmigrationgovernment

  Their words

  And so my argument is, that has now opened the door to the presidency of Donald Trump, which is potentially a deeply transformative moment that will change the size and shape of government, that may change our foreign policy profoundly, that may change our immigration policy, that may change the demographics of our country, all of that, and my thesis is that that's all been made possible by inflation.

  youtube.com

Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Transformative Experience

  Their words

  This is a fascinating book on a fascinating topic—how we choose (and how we should choose) whether or not to make radical life changes, such as becoming a parent.

  smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  What Looks Like Bravery

  Their words

  She tells the story of those difficult, transformative learnings in What Looks Like Bravery

  themarginalian.org

Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

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  Society's response to AI is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid transformative progress that many experts expect, with safety research lagging and governance lacking mechanisms for misuse, recklessness and autonomy.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Society's response, despite promising first steps, is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid, transformative progress that is expected by many experts. AI safety research is lagging. Present governance initiatives lack the mechanisms and institutions to prevent misuse and recklessness, and barely address autonomous systems.

  arxiv.org

Urban planner, co-author with Charles Marohn of Escaping the Housing Trap, and policy director at the Parking Reform Network. Wrote for Strong Towns from 2015, mostly about how housing markets actually set prices.

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  Most affordable homes are not demolished, they are repriced: units move between price tiers without anything physical changing, and that dwarfs new construction.

  Their words

  These shifts in price without any physical change to the housing stock are by far the biggest part of the affordability story. They dwarf the impact of actual new construction.

  There's No Such Thing as Affordable Housingstrongtowns.org