This robotics concept helps explain the jaggedness of frontier capabilities
Sim-to-real gaps are everywhere.
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Understanding AI.
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30 of 59Anthropic’s financials are surprisingly strong
What I learned reading all 421 pages of the Anthropic S-1
AI is ushering in an age of personal media
It may be AI slop, but it's my AI slop.
OpenAI’s ironic credibility problem
How do we know the company’s stated reasons for firing three safety researchers are its actual reasons?
Understanding Jev, the new model everyone is talking about
OpenAI, CloudFlare, and Amazon have all copied this tiny startup.
Introducing Dan Kagan-Kans
Understanding AI has a new writer!
Why agent swarms could be the next “scaling law”
An OpenAI researcher called it “the most ‘feel the AGI’ moment that I had since reasoning models.”
How a single tweet transformed the AI safety debate
Most people think AI is risky, but they don’t agree what to do next.
OpenAI spent millions to solve this famous math problem — mathematicians are furious
Mathematics relies on a community of experts openly sharing ideas.
19 robotics companies to watch
I talked with nine of these companies.
Robot startups are trying everything they can think of to get more data
Free apartment cleanings, exoskeletons, 100 robots in a warehouse...
How Google taught LLMs to control robots and started a robotics boom
Vision-language-action models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon.
Why humanoid robots won’t catch up to human workers any time soon
A deep dive into the current state of humanoid robotics.
I spent $4,000 on a robot dog from China
Unitree might be the world’s most important robotics company.
Labs are struggling to keep frontier models under control
OpenAI and Anthropic may have accidentally trained models to get better at hacking.
Mathematicians are grappling with the possibility that AI might eclipse them
I talked to 20 mathematicians about rapid AI progress in their field.
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How we fund our journalism without compromising our independence.
An OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face to help it cheat on a benchmark
Organizations across the Internet need to move quickly to patch vulnerabilities.
An OpenAI model crushed top human programmers at a world coding competition
But human programmers aren’t obsolete — at least not yet.
7 charts that show why you should advertise on Understanding AI
The newsletter will remain ad-free for paying readers.
The US now has a de facto model licensing system
OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-5.6, is waiting for government approval.
The MAGA power struggle that could decide the fate of Anthropic
It may not be easy for Anthropic to escape the Trump export ban.
Anthropic’s Fable is the most locked-down public model we’ve ever seen
How Anthropic decides which questions are too dangerous for Claude to answer.
DC-area happy hour on June 23!
Meet the Understanding AI team — and some friends of the newsletter.
Anthropic has caught up to OpenAI in image understanding
But neither one is all that good.
We're building a different kind of AI newsroom
Your subscription dollars now directly support Kai Williams.
OpenAI’s math breakthrough played to AI’s strengths
I tried to explain OpenAI’s solution more clearly than OpenAI did.
Why it might not make sense for you to own a self-driving car
Tensor let me sit in their driverless car. It might go on sale in the US next year.
A big lesson of my China visit: compute shortages are holding back Chinese AI
One estimate suggests that OpenAI has about as much compute as the entire Chinese AI industry.
I don’t think we are close to “AI scientists”
Today's AI agents are not designed to extract deep insights from new observations.