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Tech
Understanding AI.
Exploring how AI works and how it's changing our world.
Recent essays
30 of 39OpenAI’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.
Human drivers keep crashing into Waymos
Waymo's biggest mistakes happened when it stopped in the wrong place.
Meta is back in the LLM game after a year-long break
What Muse Spark tells us about Meta’s new AI strategy.
Why Anthropic believes its latest model is too dangerous to release
“The language models we have now are probably the most significant thing to happen in security since we got the Internet.”
Bernie Sanders has a plan to stop the AI industry
But it will be hard to assemble a broad coalition of AI skeptics.
Why it’s getting harder to measure AI performance
The most famous chart in AI might be obsolete soon.
OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its AI video app
"We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," an exec said.
How to think about AI company finances
OpenAI and Anthropic are using the standard tech startup playbook.
It still doesn’t look like there’s an AI bubble
Anthropic's annualized revenue doubled in just two months.
The Pentagon’s bombshell deal with OpenAI, explained
Only Congress can put meaningful limits on government abuse of AI.
Sorry skeptics, AI really is changing the programming profession
But AI agents aren't making programmers obsolete.
The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
Anthropic faces a Friday deadline to allow domestic surveillance and automated killer robots.
Waymo just revealed a crucial statistic for scaling its technology
At any moment, just 70 people oversee Waymo’s 3,000-vehicle fleet.
A volcano scorched hundreds of Roman scrolls — can AI recover their text?
Despite early breakthroughs, it could take years to decode all the scrolls.
The many masks LLMs wear
Why frontier labs struggle to keep their chatbots in character.
The feds are probing Waymo's behavior around school children
It's not clear if Waymo was at fault for striking a child at 6 mph.
An unlikely ally for open-source protein-folding models: Big Pharma
Drug companies are funding open-source AI to avoid depending on Google.
How shifting risk to users makes Claude Code more powerful
People are discovering that Claude Code isn’t just for code.
AI is just starting to change the legal profession
I talked to 10 lawyers about how they're using AI.
17 predictions for AI in 2026
AI will continue improving rapidly, but real-world economic impacts will be modest.
Waymo and Tesla’s self-driving systems are more similar than people think
Everyone is moving toward transformer-based, end-to-end architectures.
The best Chinese open-weight models — and the strongest US rivals
The Understanding AI guide to open-weight models.
Google and Anthropic approach LLMs differently
The very different cultures of OpenAI's two most important rivals.
Help some of the poorest people in Rwanda
If readers give $20,000 to GiveDirectly, my wife and I will give another $10,000.
Six reasons to think there’s an AI bubble — and six reasons not to
A complete playbook for every AI bubble debate.
An AI “tsunami” is coming for Hollywood — here’s how artists are responding
I talked with nine creators about economic pressures and fan backlash.