Demand for AI compute has grown 3x a year for the last decade, but according to Intel’s CTO, there are only enough chipmaking tools in the world to roughly double leading-edge production.I wanted to understand...

New episode with military historian Si Sheppard.The conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires might be the most shocking events in human history.Hernan Cortés and some hundreds of Conquistadors landed on a new...

New episode with Noam Brown.We talk about multi-agent, Navier-Stokes, and what the current explosion of maths progress tells us about what happens once you automate AI research.And we also discuss how we will know if...

New episode with John Schulman, Beren Millidge and Charlie O’Neill.I got together with some of the most insightful AI researchers I know who are at the openish companies, because I wanted to hear the details of...

How much of the rapid progress in AI that we’ve seen over the last few years1 has come from data versus model improvements? The answer has big implications for the economics of frontier labs and the pace of future...

Ajeya Cotra is a researcher at METR, where she works on threat modeling for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI. Before that, she led the technical AI safety program at what is now Coefficient Giving.She is one the...

This is a video recording of a post I wrote last week. You can read the original here.

Many thanks especially to Oak Hu, who paired with me for most of the writing, and also to Adam Kaufman and Alex Mallen, who paired with me during research.Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive...

Had a lot of fun chatting again with my twin brother Dylan Patel.We went through lab economics over the next few years - the shift from inference to training as RSI draws near; and how Anthropic and OpenAI are on track...

Had Ryan Greenblatt on to discuss/debate recursive self-improvement.This might be the most important question in the world right now – whether within a year or so of achieving human-level intelligence, you...

I have explained elsewhere why I think continual learning is needed. I don’t think you can have AIs that perform whole jobs as competently as humans if they’re forced to just write Markdown files from...

This is a video recording of a post I wrote last week. If you want to read the original you can check it out here.Thanks to Mercury for sponsoring this video. Mercury’s built-in AI, Command, helps me close my...

I want to experiment with very quick blog post where I time-box writing for 2 hours. I won’t be able to nail down a lot of important sub-questions, but the alternative is just not making any progress on a lot of...

Adam Brown is back!General relativity is said to be the most beautiful idea the human mind has ever produced. Most of us will never get to fully appreciate its elegance by taking the 20-lecture graduate course Adam...

Two months ago, I posted some big questions about AI. We had 600 essays submitted for this contest. Below is a bit of information of the 3 winners, followed by all 3 full essay. Thanks to everyone who participated!...

Always so much fun to chat with Grant.AI has been making much faster progress in math than in other fields. As a result, mathematics is showing us, very concretely, what AI progress in other fields will look like. Even...

Here’s the big research bet the labs are making currently: if we train AIs to accomplish millions of verifiable tasks across thousands of diverse RL environments, then we’ll basically have built AGI. Because...

One definition of intelligence is sample efficiency - that is to say, how much data do you need to see in a given domain in order to operate fluently and competently. It’s not clear that we’ve actually made...

Had Ada Palmer back on – this time to talk about Machiavelli, perhaps the most misunderstood thinker of all time.Machiavelli cut his teeth as a high-level diplomat for Florence, a position from which he got to...

One definition of intelligence is sample efficiency - that is to say, how much data do you need to see in a given domain in order to operate fluently and competently. It’s not clear that we’ve actually made...