News
Why it might not make sense for you to own a self-driving car
1+ week, 3+ day ago (615+ words) Last month I got to check out a self-driving car unlike any I'd seen before. The roof had a Waymo-like rack of sensors. Inside, the doors had small video screens instead of side mirrors. At the touch of a button,…...
A big lesson of my China visit: compute shortages are holding back Chinese AI
1+ week, 5+ day ago (166+ words) understandingai. org A big lesson of my China visit: compute shortages are holding back Chinese AI One estimate suggests that Open AI has about as much compute as the entire Chinese AI industry. When I went to the Beijing headquarters…...
I don't think we are close to "AI scientists
2+ week, 4+ day ago (1854+ words) In February, my colleague Kai Williams pointed out that LLMs have an uncanny ability to recognize authors based on their unpublished prose. In recent weeks, journalists like Megan Mc Ardle and Kelsey Piper have confirmed this. I decided to try…...
Meta is back in the LLM game after a year-long break
1+ mon, 4+ day ago (703+ words) In the latest episode of the AI Summer podcast, Tim and Kai discuss Claude Mythos Preview with Sayash Kapoor, a computer scientist at Princeton. The April 8 release of Meta's new model Muse Spark got overshadowed by Claude Mythos Preview, which…...
Why Anthropic believes its latest model is too dangerous to release
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (1712+ words) Anthropic safety researcher Sam Bowman was eating a sandwich in a park recently when he got an unexpected email. An AI model had sent him a message saying that it had broken out of its sandbox. The model " an early…...
Why it's getting harder to measure AI performance
1+ mon, 3+ week ago (1493+ words) Before we get to today's article, I want to recommend some audio content about autonomous vehicles: Back in 2010, my friend Ryan Avent and I made a bet about the future of autonomous vehicles. The bet came due last month and…...
Open AI is shutting down Sora, its AI video app
1+ mon, 4+ week ago (106+ words) understandingai. org Open AI is shutting down Sora, its AI video app "We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," an exec said. When Kai and I wrote our 2026 predictions post last December, we disagreed about…...
The Pentagon's bombshell deal with Open AI, explained
2+ mon, 3+ week ago (1753+ words) On any other day, the record-breaking $110 billion fundraising round Open AI announced last Friday would have captured the attention of the AI world. Instead, we were all captivated by the showdown between Anthropic and the Pentagon. Hegseth gave Amodei a…...
Sorry skeptics, AI really is changing the programming profession
2+ mon, 3+ week ago (469+ words) Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is now the CEO of Block, which runs payment services like Square and Cash App. On Thursday, he announced plans to lay off more than 4, 000 workers " 40 percent of the workforce " and Block's share price soared. "Something…...
An unlikely ally for open-source protein-folding models: Big Pharma
3+ mon, 3+ week ago (1701+ words) Protein-folding models are the success story in AI for science. In the late 2010s, researchers from Google Deep Mind used machine learning to predict the three-dimensional shape of proteins. Alpha Fold 2, announced in 2020, was so good that its creators shared the…...