Posts

2026

What Would It Mean If You Could Cheat? Everything else

On computation, quantum mechanics, the structure of difficulty, and what a universe that allowed shortcuts would have to look like

The Michael Scott Paper Company of AI AI

I just have to wait out you

Bitter-Lessoning neat latent structures through self-study AI

Claude's Constitution

San Francisco Everything else

Ithaka, California

Rationalism Everything else

It will drive you mad (and it's boring)

Books I read (am reading) in 2026 Everything else

I'm going to be better this year now I'm not a founder
2025

Anna Karenina and the arbitrary party Everything else

From San Francisco

Your MLEs are brilliant, but you're giving them the wrong job AI

A letter to the C-suite

The bitter lesson of LLM evals AI

Scaling care beats scaling compute

Five hinge questions that decide whether AGI is five years away or twenty AI

For people who care about falsifiable stakes rather than vibes

Born on third base Everything else

The Case for Inheriting Nothing and Building Everything

One-dimensional vs multi-dimensional features in interpretability AI

How to stop conflating with 768 dimensions

LLMs are really good at k-order thinking (where k is even) AI

You still need to tell a language model you want to cure cancer before it can help you cure cancer.

Information bounds in quantum gravity Everything else

How information theory links quantum mechanics and general relativity

Books I read (am reading) in 2025 Everything else

A dynamic list
2024

The nihilism of NeurIPS AI

Some thoughts on our future in AI research

Can quantised autoencoders find and interpret circuits in language models? AI

Using VQ-VAEs and categorical decision trees to do automatic circuit identification in LLMs.

Learning compressed representations and GPT-5 speculation AI

Why language models probably get too much from the abstraction we give them for free
2023

How I'd build the future of news AI

Notes from Rake

What is the future of Rake? AI

Something I sent to Kirks when we were building