Timothy B. Lee

1 week ago | understandingai.org | Timothy B. Lee

An underrated AI story over the last year has been Anthropic’s success in the market for coding tools. “We believe coding is extremely important,” said Anthropic engineer Sholto Douglas in an interview last week. “We care a lot about coding. We care a lot about measuring progress on coding. We think it’s the most important leading indicator of model capabilities.”This focus has paid off. The company’s models have excelled at software engineering since last June’s release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

1 week ago | understandingai.org | Timothy B. Lee

A lot of models have come out in recent months:In February, xAI released Grok 3 and OpenAI released GPT-4.5.In March, Google released Gemini 2.5 Pro. In April, OpenAI released o3 and GPT-4.1, Meta released Llama 4, and Google released Gemini 2.5 Flash. Last week, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.

1 month ago | understandingai.org | Timothy B. Lee

Last month, a team of prominent AI researchers and Internet writers published AI 2027, a website predicting that AI will dramatically change the world within the next three years. As long-timereadersmightexpect, I did not find these predictions convincing. But rather than writing a full analysis of the AI 2027 scenario, I thought I’d highlight three …Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to Understanding AI to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

1 month ago | understandingai.org | Timothy B. Lee

In September 2022, a few months before the release of ChatGPT, podcaster Guy Raz asked Sam Altman why OpenAI had been founded as a non-profit organization.

1 month ago | understandingai.org | Timothy B. Lee

Each time a frontier lab released a major new model in 2024, I put it through its paces and wroteabouttheexperience. But in the new year I have not kept up with this practice. This is partly because companies have released so many new models. But it’s also because benchmarking is getting more difficult.