China’s AI Involution
AI has made me pay more attention to a Chinese term that has been circulating for years: involution (内卷). The basic idea is hyper-competition in which everyone has to work harder and improve constantly just to keep up,...
Editor of Gradient Flow; former chief data scientist and program chair of major AI conferences.
AI has made me pay more attention to a Chinese term that has been circulating for years: involution (内卷). The basic idea is hyper-competition in which everyone has to work harder and improve constantly just to keep up,...
In a recent article, I wrote about companies turning their own data, workflows, and production feedback into specialized intelligence they increasingly control. The deeper idea was compounding. What matters is not...
Subscribe • Previous Issues Your Model Is Not Your Moat In a recent article, I wrote about companies turning their own data, workflows, and production feedback into specialized intelligence they increasingly control....
A recent article, “Why the AI Boom Is Hitting a Reset Wall,” makes an argument I think is more useful than the usual debate over whether AI is a bubble. The question is not whether AI demand is real. It is whether the...
Table of Contents AI Is Changing Work Faster Than Employment The Entry-Level Squeeze Watch Hiring, Not Just Layoffs Automation and Augmentation Are Different Productivity Does Not Automatically Mean Fewer Jobs The...
In recent conversations with crews building agents, I keep hearing the same lessons. Teams with very different products are arriving independently at almost the same architectural choices. That convergence feels...
Subscribe • Previous Issues Nine Practical Rules for Agents Doing Real Work In recent conversations with crews building agents, I keep hearing the same lessons. Teams with very different products are arriving...
For years, most of the AI memory conversation has been about bandwidth: can memory feed GPUs fast enough? Frontier inference is adding a second problem. Model weights, KV caches, and expert weights are getting large...
Within my own network, I was early in flagging the growing local opposition to AI data centers. Since then, it has moved fast, from scattered zoning fights to outright moratoriums and statewide political battles, with...
The most revealing AI failures right now are not stories about models becoming too capable. They are stories about everything around the model. One system received more access than its test environment could contain....
Subscribe • Previous Issues The biggest AI risks sit outside the model The most revealing AI failures right now are not stories about models becoming too capable. They are stories about everything around the model. One...
With all the recent headlines about AI systems solving research math problems, I decided it was time to update a piece I wrote on this topic a while back. Outside of coding and programming, research mathematics may be...
A while back I wrote about how startups are using reinforcement learning to make agents more reliable. A deeper problem behind that whole trend keeps resurfacing: a model can improve during training, but the moment...
Subscribe • Previous Issues Continual Learning Is Arriving in Pieces A while back I wrote about how startups are using reinforcement learning to make agents more reliable. A deeper problem behind that whole trend keeps...
AI is no longer being judged only as software. Once the buildout arrives as a massive industrial facility, new transmission lines, continuous power demand, and possible pressure on utility rates, the argument changes....
I keep seeing scientific discovery framed as a sufficiently ambitious prediction or data-compression problem. A recent position paper by Tom Zahavy challenges that view by separating reasoning into three capabilities....
Evals are part of every serious conversation about putting AI into production. Teams define benchmarks, set thresholds, and increasingly run red teams to see how the system holds up against someone actively trying to...
Subscribe • Previous Issues Passing Your Evals Doesn’t Mean You’re Safe Evals are part of every serious conversation about putting AI into production. Teams define benchmarks, set thresholds, and...
I have written separately about the shaky economics behind the data center boom and the growing pressure on the frontier labs. This post connects the two. Microsoft reported $24.1 billion of revenue from its OpenAI...
Table of Contents What AMD Actually Sells Now The Software Story, Which Is the Whole Story The Open-Standards Bet Who’s Buying, and How the Money Actually Moves Where This Could Still Come Apart What It Means If...