2026 AI Agents Created Knowledge Gap on Work Impact
A real issue with the current state of our knowledge on the work implications of AI is that there was a genuine discontinuity in AI ability with the rise of practical agentic systems in 2026. We were starting to get a picture of the impact of chatbots, no real data on agents.
AI Inference FLOPs Replace Tokens as Currency
Instead of the gold standard, we can imagine an inference standard of exchange, the FLOP. (As opposed to tokens, this accounts for AI ability) With some AI help, I figure $1 buys roughly 10^17 managed-LLM inference FLOPs. So that $4 coffee would...
Persistent Gender Gap in AI Use Remains Unaddressed
Wish there was information about where this data came from, but this is a very significant change. Since AI use comes from experience, the persistent gender gap in AI use across every study of AI was something that a lot...
AI's Cycle: Hype, Minor Wins, Questionable Breakthroughs
This is becoming a pattern in AI that makes talking about capabilities challenging. First, there are overstated claims (like the flubbed Erdos problems last year), then minor wins (AI helps with discovery) then breakthroughs. The first stage feels like (&...
Scientists Identify Vowel‑Like Elements in Whale Communication
Humans are making progress on decoding the language of whales. They seem to have something that functions roughly like vowels.
Compute Limits Trap AI: Stalling Growth Now and Later
Compute constraints are a double bind: On the inference side you need to either (a) raise prices, (b) ration use, and/or (c) serve worse models. This hurts current growth On the training side, you can't train the next gen of models to...
AI Model Names Mislead: Claude 3
Given the messy naming scheme used by all the AI companies, I caused a chart to be made showing the gain in GPQA per 0.1 version in model names (estimated, since model names skip version numbers). There has never been...
Model Version Numbers Don’t Reflect Actual Ability Gains
Version numbers are not a very useful way to understand model ability gains at this stage. Unfortunately that means that if you aren’t following closely, you would expect that 5.4 is a small gain over 5, or 4.6 a small...
AI Excels at Strengths, Still Stumbles on Long Fiction
AI keeps getting better but the last time the shape of the jagged frontier changed radically was o1 & the Reasoner A good mental model of the coming months is that models get very good at the things they are already...
US Labs Lead Frontier AI Race by Months
And this is a very generous definition of notable. If we are talking frontier models, only the US and China that are even in the race. And that obscures the fact that the Big Three US labs really do seem to...
Most Future Data Centers Will Shift to Rural Areas
Interesting: "Currently, 38% of Americans live within 5 miles of at least one operational data center... Living near a data center doesn’t have much of an effect on public opinion about the facilities." From now on, it looks like most DCs will be rural....
AI Upgrades Trigger Sudden Leaps by Clearing Bottlenecks
Soon, at each gradual improvement level of AI, you will start to see large discrete jumps in ability in economically important areas, because the previous AI ability level in some aspect of the job bottlenecked progress. When bottlenecks are released,...
Seeing AI as a Single Issue Invites Flawed Policies
The trend of treating all of AI as One Big Thing that always includes data centers & job changes & education changes & power & accelerating science & misinformation & national security & corporate control & healthcare is going to...
Compute Bubble Forecast Proved Wildly Inaccurate
Six months ago, there was a lot of focus on the idea that the there would be a massive glut of unused computing power which would could a recession as AI use plateaued. The "compute bubble" belief was absolutely everywhere. The...
Seedance 2.0 Recreates Ancient Neanderthal‑Human Mech Clash
Impressed that Seedance 2.0 can pull of "a mech battle between Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens" so well. (This is exactly what happened, historically) https://t.co/isz8yANi3k
