We asked Jack Whitaker to break down his latest blog post. "GPT 4.5 did well but people were underwhelmed due to benchmarks." "What people don't realize is that these are log linear laws. Doubling compute doesn't double benchmark scores." Here's the full analysis, in his own

INVESTIGATION: Uncovering Chinese Academic Espionage at Stanford. After interviewing multiple anonymous Stanford faculty, students, and China experts, the Review can confirm that the CCP is orchestrating a widespread intelligence-gathering campaign at Stanford. 1/8

Beach mode

There is a funny leftist critique of tech that it's all reprehensible trans-humanist succession planning, except the one field that is outwardly doing trans-humanist succession planning, which is fake because the tech occasionally makes mistakes

VR (broadly construed) feels fairly underrated in AI futures, probably because it's cringe. But when the robots are rolling off the assembly lines, how many people are already in ~experience machines?

The SF Bay Bridge successfully implemented congestion pricing in 2010, but it was suspended indefinitely "due to COVID"

When I was 18, I took a year off before college and traveled across Eurasia by land. Spent dozens of long days on rickety trains and busses with no internet but thousands of canonical blog posts saved on Pocket. Glorious times, RIP

Does the existence of the generator-verifier gap lower or raise the status of the Critic?

Some forecasters dismiss predictions of soaring AI power use as hype, arguing that efficiency gains are coming fast and will tamp down rising power demand. They’re half right. Energy efficiency is improving rapidly—but that’s exactly why demand will grow, writes Mark P. Mills.

Always take the side of the Waymos

🚨It’s time for a new issue of Works in Progress 🚨 Read Issue 19 to find out: - What we can do to eliminate lead in the developing world - How Japan successfully densified its cities - The best way to build good railway networks, cheaply And much more! worksinprogress.co

New in Washington Post: During Covid, scientists at CDC selected policies that promoted “social justice” even when CDC data showed this would cause more deaths.

Twin Peaks is insane because it appears to be one of the most legitimately powerful memes with the potential to gigafry your feed but it's exclusively posted by literal turbo normies who unironically want to like "meet small town diner waitress" and basically get oneshotted by it

At one point the llm cope was just a stupid but tolerable part of the discourse. But now I fear the Experts who supply llm cope to the market are actively harming the world, singing a lullaby to those who would rather not notice the tectonic plates shifting beneath their feet.

DeepSeek’s Progress Stalled by U.S. Export Controls DeepSeek's next AI model is coming, but China doesn't have enough chips to run It. Read more from Qianer Liu and Juro Osawa 👇 theinformation.com/articles/deeps…

TRADE ALERT: Thrive Capital has signed veteran @TBPN intern @JackgWhitaker to a three-month contract.

There’s an interesting story of intangibles and antitrust to be told here (thanks to Nick Whitaker 🇺🇸 for spotting!)

The Manhattan Institute works to improve the quality of life in America's great cities by fostering competition, entrepreneurship, and fiscal responsibility.