Vol. II · No. 259
Established 2025

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Wednesday, September 16, 2026
174 writers in the library
Tech · 1 shelves
Tech

Understanding AI.

Exploring how AI works and how it's changing our world.

Recent essays

30 of 51

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.

Our advertising principles

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.

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.