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On Thursday, The New York Times published a thing and it went viral, declared as a victory for AI: But there’s a lot more to be said that was only scarcely touched on in the article. Like this And this And this brutal, compelling dissection on YouTube which it itself built on and extending an earlier (May 2025) dissection from Futurism that The New York Times should have read and addressed in far more detail: A friend of mine who has been tracking this for a while had sees Medvi as “...

You can’t make this stuff up, and, no, I am not pulling an April Fool’s prank. First, Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman just tried to redefine superintelligence down from AI that is smarter than the smartest humans to something a lot more mundane: AI “models capable of delivering product value for millions of enterprises”. If I am not mistaken, I guess makes cell phones and Microsoft Word … “superintelligent”. § Meanwhile, OpenAI, the company that ...

Advice to employers , from yours truly, today in Fortune : “ Overall impact on productivity and return on AI investment has so far been modest. Every company is investing in AI, but so far most aren’t getting huge returns. All this could change; probably someday it will—but most likely not until we see more radical advances in AI, which could be a decade or more away. In the meantime, the advice is simple: Don’t focus on replacing humans. Focus on how you can use AI to he...

Overheard, from a career diplomat whose country is not one of the key participants in the US-Iran conflict, paraphrased (probably imperfectly) from memory: This has been a war filled with mistakes. The US underestimated Iran’s resilience, overestimated the chances of regime change, and failed to anticipate Iran’s countermoves. Yet presumably the US made use of AI in its strategy. It looks like AI helped with operations, but was not good on strategy. Why should this be? I see at least...

This is good. Really good. By the freelance tech journalist Karl Bode: The examples are delicious. To be a card carrying CEO said a thing journalist, here are some handy ground rules: The upshot? “The result is a sort of alternative reality journalistic simulacrum that kind of looks like journalism , but genuinely isn't interested in any context or truth that upsets the apple cart.” You can read it in full here .

From a damning new Stanford paper on the illusion of visual understanding in LLMs: “Frontier models readily generate detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces, including pathology-biased clinical findings, for images never provided, we term this phenomenon mirage reasoning. Second, without any image input, models also attain strikingly high scores across general and medical multimodal benchmarks, bringing into question their utility and design. In the most extreme case, ou...

With apologies for the short notice, a few quick announcements: I will be having an ultra-timely conversation tonight on war and AI at with Katrina Manson, Bloomberg journalist and author of the excellent, could-not-be-more-topical new book Project Maven , about the history of war and AI, at Politics and Prose , Chevy Chase, Maryland. At noon ET you can catch me briefly with Randi Zuckerberg on Sirius XM . We may even take call-ins, 844-942-7866. At 12:20 ET, I will be talking about the death of...

Just in the last few years alone, cancer has taken my mother , one of my closest friends from childhood, my closest friend in my adopted hometown (she was only 51), and a beloved aunt who inspired and supported me throughout my life 1 , as well as several colleagues, including the AI pioneer Doug Lenat . And of course my own experience is far from unique; virtually everyone I know has lost loved ones to cancer. AI is supposed to change all that. But so far it hasn’t. A new essay by Emilia ...

Another dramatic sign of changing times: Sam Altman, who ridiculed my 2022 critique of LLMs that argued that scaling would not bring us to AGI and that we would need architectures has just argued that … on the research perspective, I bet there is another new architecture to find that is going to be as big of a gain as transformers [were] to LSTMs … So I would go look for where I can find a mega breakthrough [with AI’s help] … You can watch here . Note that in this talk Al...

Remember the good old days a few years ago when almost everybody thought that the royal road to AGI ws just spending more money on compute and data? That hypothesis continues to go badly, as expensive experiments from two of the world’s wealthiest men have just shown. On the hand, it’s become clear that Mark Zuckerberg’s latest model at Meta is good but not great, and not what he was hoping for . And in the very same week, Elon Musk has conceded that for all the gigantic models...

Many of you may think that the Defense Department branded Anthropic a supply chain risk because they (Anthropic) refused to play ball on surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, or because OpenAI President Greg Brockman gave Trump $25 million dollers (matched by an equal contribution from Brockman’s wife), but Under Secretary of Defense/Defense Department CTO Emil Michael just gave an entirely different theory on CNBC. They are worried, or so he said, that Anthropic might “pollute&...

Remember how I warned you a year ago that maintaining GenAI code would be harder than writing code with GenAI? Any coder with any chops at all knows that is one thing to write code, and another to debug it (and still another to maintain it, a year or a decade later, which is even harder) And remember how Nathan Hamiel and I warned you in August that Right on cue, big problems have indeed started to arrive. FT just reported that “Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages...

As I wrote yesterday, Dario Amodei is no saint , but I fully support his company’s new lawsuit against the US government . As Wired reports , Anthropic’s support here against Hegseth’s unprecedented actions is broad: I stand with them. Everyone should.

As bad as Sam Altman is , Dario Amodei isn’t all that different. For sure, Dario stood the line, at least for a moment, on two of the most important issues of our time, mass surveillance of US citizens and using unreliable AI for military targets without humans in the loop, for which I immediately saluted him . But he’s no saint, either. Let’s start with the military stuff. Up until (and even after) Dario’s battle with the defense department, the defense department was ac...

The author, trying to warn people where Altman was headed, October 2024 It’s finally happening. Altman’s bad behavior is catching up to him. The board fired Altman, once AI’s golden boy, in November 2023 not because AGI had been achieved (that still hasn’t happened) but because he was “not consistently candid,” just like they said. And, now at long last, the world sees what the board saw, and what I saw (and what Karen Hao saw ): having someone running a compa...

From The New York Times’s Stuart Thompson today on AI and taxes : One key passage: Echoing exactly the kind of stuff I have been saying here for the last four years, the NYT reports that Given all that, the second part of the title of this essay (“don’t trust it with people’s lives”) should be obvious. But, then again, maybe it’s not. At least in certain parts of Washington: Using a system you shouldn’t trust with your taxes to blow people up. 2026 in a ...

A new study from Princeton has important implications for education, scientific discovery, mental health, and more (perhaps politics and even decisions about war?). Essentially anyone who uses a chatbot is at risk. Because what is shows is that sycophantic AI that serves as a personal echo chamber that can actually keep you from finding good ideas. And as the article says, such AI can “facilitate delusion-like epistemic states, producing belief markedly divergent from reality.” The p...

Last summer I wrote a draft of a long essay that I wished I had posted, which had a working title like “doomers’ own goal,” the point being that doomers, especially those who have screamed that AGI is nigh, have wanted to slow AI acceleration (at least until we could make AI safe) and instead have only accelerated it. The unpublished essay pivoted around an absurd tweet from Max Tegmark, perhaps not representative of all doomers but certainly typical of what I have heard from m...

The writer Tyler Austin Harper (of The Atlantic, etc.) sent me a thread this morning, asking whether a mistargeting yesterday that killed nearly 150 school children in Iran could have been the result of AI . I can give only two intellectually honest answers: The first is: I have no idea what happened yesterday, and probably I will never know. Secretary Hegseth has made a very heavy bet on AI in the military, and it’s doubtful that he will be entirely forthcoming about this or other inciden...

Probably you already saw how it all turned out. On the very same day that Altman offered public support to Amodei, he signed a deal to take away Amodei’s business, with a deal that wasn’t all that different. You can’t get more Altman than that. But here’s the kicker: Per The New York Times , Let that sink in. Altman had secretly been working on the deal since Wednesday . - before he announced his support for Dario - before Trump had denounced Anthropic - but after Brockma...