It’s natural to think of cynicism compared to optimism, like we do with other opposites: dark and light, sorrow and joy, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Denver Broncos. (Monday night was rough for us Broncos fans.) Anyway, I mention opposites-thinking because it implies that the cost of

My home state, Utah, is packed with law-breakers, scofflaws. They do it with impunity, on a daily basis. To make matters worse, law enforcement is complicit. It’s illegal to drive faster than the speed limit. Utah takes this very seriously; the penalty is not trivial. Anywhere from just

I was talking to my mother-in-law this week about how she downloaded ChatGPT to her phone two weeks ago. It’s her first experience with an LLM. We talked about all the ways she’s started using it, but also the common things that people misunderstand about how

I'd looked forward to spending more time with Anthropic's Fable model today, but alas the government had other plans. As usual, Zvi has the most thoughtful, thorough commentary on things. I am however taking the position that the implementation method chosen by the government, with no warning, was

Language itself is why LLMs are a big deal

I don't see our choice as "AI or no AI" any more than past generations could halt the spread of the printing press — that widely decried threat to scholarship. Children born today will never know a world without AI. The majority of U.S. teens already use AI chatbots, and

What if software doesn't have to be take-it-or-leave-it?

I’ve seen enough takes on the Anthropic/DoD conflict since it all went down last week, and I’m surprised at how often this important principle is being left out of the conversation: There are many fr...

Politically, academics are much more liberal than the average person. But Paul Bloom makes the excellent point that, in areas related to their work, academics are actually deeply conservative. Asking a prof about AI is like asking a taxi driver to weigh in on Uber. I think I have good

From an economist, about his extensive experiments with AI-driven academic research. I don’t have much of a research background, but his experiences seem right where expected. My point is that the experiment — can we do research at high speed without much human input — was a failure. And it wasn’

This is an incredible moment of courage that happened in 2023. I’d never heard about it until this article. Nathan saved dozens of lives. Nathan started to think of himself as being in the right place at the right time. His instinct was to get this man and his

Since my focus has been learning landscape photography, I've never really done any street shooting. Thanks to a kind invitation, I had a chance to head downtown and try my hand at it. (Thanks Daren, Jason, and Justin!) A bit of a grey day, and I need to get more

This is the year I made landscape photography an official hobby rather than just a thing I enjoyed doing with my iPhone. All of these photos were shot on a Fujifilm X-T5. These aren't in any particular order. It was hard enough just choosing ten! 1. Bryce Canyon This is

Companies laying off workers for AI agents are either misjudging how agents will work or they're just low-ambition companies.

Apropos to my earlier post about the Springer textbook with fake citations, academic journals are seeing a rash of the same thing. What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was...

I don’t think I can adequately stress how bad this is for a publisher as big as Springer to screw up this badly. A new textbook of theirs had extensive hallucinated sources. Based on a tip from a rea...

Why all good learning starts with a question that matters.

The ability to do more doesn’t equate with wise judgment or good character. What we bring to AI matters at least as much as what AI can actually do.

Imagine being remembered both for DNA’s discovery and for being an intolerant, intolerable person.

Plenty of industries are getting stalked by AI right now. But if AI is the lioness, universities are the already-sickly members of the herd lamely trying to outrun her.

For a few months I posted clippings from my morning reading. Passages that struck me or that I believed or that excited my imagination. I asked AI to combine them all and come up with a coherent philo...

A new charity is tackling homelessness with a simple approach. Does it work?

Blurring The Lines Between Official Censorship And Individual Criticism Built The Intellectual Foundation For Trump's Assault On Free Expression