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) but…
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…
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 has emerged as a fundamental concept across multiple computational domains, representing systems' capacity for continuous novelty generation, unbounded complexity growth, and non-convergent…
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 hashtagAI systems, particularly hashtagLLMs, are at…
Recent studies of AI in medicine, particularly in imagery and diagnostic reasoning, have surfaced an alarming trend if we are to believe in AI as a way to augment human abilities: an expert aided by AI is not…
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…
Jeremy Levin, my biggest issue with ACH has always been how flippantly the "CH" part of it has been treated compared to the quasi-monopolistic focus on the "A": where do the competing hypotheses come from, how…
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…
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…
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…
I always struggle a bit with I'm asked about the "hallucination problem" in LLMs. Because, in some sense, hallucination is all LLMs do. They are dream machines. We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts…
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,…
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…
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 10s, where he regaled us with how he had actually worked and became friends with McCulloch and…
That's the title of a fantastic blog post by Anu A. (link in the comments). The snapshot from jack friks is from the post and I included it because I can relate soooooo much. Another nugget comes from a link…
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…
Dario Amodei's article "Machines of Loving Grace", with a title inspired by Richard Brautigan's 167 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 hashtagserendipity 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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