Working alongside AI. Below, everything that touches this field, including pieces that live mostly in neighboring territory.
In a recent substack post ( the always insightful Rishad Tobaccowala presents "10 thoughts about AI, Humans and Work in 10 minutes". They are all worth pondering (although I would not invoke Suleyman in # 3)…
What sounded like a (half-)joke by Joanna Maciejewska ( a little less than two years ago feels a bit more urgent today. Obviously, it resonated then with a lot of people, generating 3.3M views on X and…
A useful preprint (Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce; by Stanford University's Yijia Shao, Humishka Zope , Yucheng Jiang, Jiaxin Pei, David…
There is this concept of AI-driven cognitive atrophy going around. It may happen, there is ample evidence that our ability to perform some tasks degrades when we stop performing them. But the key here is to…
Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel, Player Piano, feels terrifyingly prescient: a dystopian society where machines and computers have replaced most human workers, leaving only engineers and managers with meaningful…
Yesterday, I wrote about reverse centaurs, a Cory Doctorow-meets-Vonnegut Player Piano concept ( Today, there is a site for it. At least the "meatspace layer for ai" is not concealing its devious business…
On Its Head You Can Only Manage What You Can’t Measure Inside the box thinking Why Optimization Is Often Sub-Optimal Simplicity Is Overrated Right-Brain Analytics The New LBO: Left-Brain Outsourcing The Return…
Open-endedness is the capacity of a system to keep generating novelty, complexity, and diversity without ever settling into a fixed endpoint. Biological evolution is the reference case: four billion years of…
TL;DR: leaderboard rankings are unreliable This picture is worth a t̶h̶o̶u̶s̶a̶n̶d̶ billion words . Based on an preprint on the ArXiv server (The Leaderboard Illusion) by a team led by Shivalika Singh, Marzieh…
As a 30-year groupie of evolutionary computation, I am particularly sensitive to this trend: evolutionary AI is on the rise. The latest case in point, of course is @google deepmind’s AlphaEvolve, which uses…
That's the title of a short IEEE Spectrum piece ( and a case in point as a second follow-up to Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf's post on how mediocre current AI systems, particularly LLMs, are at asking…
When people talk about “Human-in-the-Loop” (HITL), what they are really talking about is “Human-in-the-Current-Loop”. I am the human in the current loop when I use Claude Code or Codex and it is a f***g…
A great take on genAI hallucinations by Colin F. "Hallucinations", however we define the concept, are a core property (and perhaps the core value proposition) of LLMs and genAI systems. My view: Trying to root…
This article that just came out in Neuron (paywall but free preprint here: but has already attracted a lot of attention, including a piece New York Times ( I went through the New York Times comments and found…
I am saying this with great embarrassment, I don't think I had fully internalized until today that big AI compute deals are announced... in MW or GW (GW being the new MW). It has probably been 6 months but it…
I was hit hard by learning about Danny Kahneman's very deliberate decision to end his life by assisted suicide in Switzerland last year (Danny's former collaborator on the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and…
Wow, I find myself agreeing with Stephen Wolfram much more than I expected! It is also possible, as I am almost certain he would argue, that I fully misunderstood his points. But I think he nails it on many…
Raffi Krikorian this is great! Gen AI can "generate" (an infinite amount of) novel things riffing on a theme, but I am sure that humans were involved in curating what was carved into stone. That's augmented…
Many have seen this chart of the "number of questions asked on stack overflow" over time and concluded, rightly, that ChatGPT precipitated its demise. The story is more complicated, and some it is explained in…
There is something happening in all kinds of business contexts, but most prevalent in the expensive content business, aka consulting: a lot of mediocre content (AI slop) is being generated by AI tools,…
Anna Marie Wagner and Christina Agapakis thank you for this! When I read Ted Chiang's article last September I thought it was really weak and disappointing as an argument for why AI can't make art (although I…
That's an observation from "Artificial intelligence tools expand scientists’ impact but contract science’s focus," an article by 郝千越, Fengli Xu, Yong LI and James Evans that has been circulating as a preprint…
3 days ago Mike Krieger resigned from Figma's board "the same day that The Information reported that Anthropic’s next model, Opus 4.7, will include design tools that could compete with Figma’s primary…
I really, really enjoy Jeremy Howard 's thoughts... usually. A few weeks ago, he came up with a thread on X (as older people, formerly known as Twitter ) ( that can be summarized by one the posts: "Absolutely…
I just received Blaise Aguera y Arcas's wonderful little treasure, 'What is Life?", a play on Erwin Schrödinger's opus of the same title, published as the first tome of the Antikythera series as part of…
Thank you for that Charles H. Martin, PhD. I am lucky to have collaborated with Jack Cowan at Bios Group in the 1990s, where he regaled us with how he had actually worked and became friends with McCulloch and…
Dario Amodei's article "Machines of Loving Grace", with a title inspired by Richard Brautigan's 1967 poem, is a great read. Introducing himself as a "perceived pessimist" is a little bit of a strawman... but I…
Thank you Kes Sampanthar for your read on this paper. All the assumptions made by Daron, all the things he neglects, suggest a linear approximation whereby he applies a very short term gradient (most gains…
The conviction that serendipity can be, if not systematized, at least harnessed for augmented scientific discovery, has fueled my (obviously nonlinear) professional trajectory. As we saw with Fleming's…
One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.
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