Timothy B. Lee

Washington, D.C.

Reporting on AI and the future of the economy. Computer science masters degree from Princeton. @arstechnica alum. Subscribe to my AI newsletter!

Articles

Three great articles on the modest pace of AI progress

2 weeks 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.
There may only be two people who can stop OpenAI's for-profit pivot

2 weeks 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.
Where frontier language models are today

4 weeks 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.
Hardware is hard

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

One of my goals for last week’s trip to Los Angeles for the Ride AI summit was to take as many Waymo rides as possible. Unfortunately, Waymo has not yet gotten permission to operate at LAX airport. So after my flight landed, I had to take a shuttle to the economy parking lot, walk to the edge of the lot, and hail a Waymo from there.
After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers

1 month ago | technewstube.com | Timothy B. Lee

Tech News Tube is a real time news feed of the latest technology news headlines.Follow all of the top tech sites in one place, on the web or your mobile device.
After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers

1 month ago | arstechnica.com | Timothy B. Lee

Waymo has been in dozens of crashes. Most were not Waymo's fault. The first ever fatal crash involving a fully driverless vehicle occurred in San Francisco on January 19. The driverless vehicle belonged to Waymo, but the crash was not Waymo’s fault. Here’s what happened: A Waymo with no driver or passengers stopped for a red light. Another car stopped behind the Waymo.
Human drivers keep crashing into Waymos that aren’t even moving

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

I’ve been thinking a lot about autonomous vehicles as I prepare for next Wednesday’s Ride AI Summit in Los Angeles. I’ll be moderating two panels. One features three companies—Waabi, Bot.auto, and Torc—that are working to automate long-haul trucking. The other features Nuro and Wayve, two of the leading companies developing next-generation driver asssistance systems for customer-owned cars.
Amazon's self-driving unit just hit a major setback

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

The Ride AI conference is coming up on April 2—barely two weeks away. If you’re involved in the autonomous vehicle industry—as an executive, engineer, investor, or otherwise—I’d love to see you in Los Angeles. Click here to get more details and purchase a ticket. In the closing weeks of the Biden Administration, federal regulators wrote a report that was bad news for Zoox, Amazon’s self-driving venture. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the report last week.
Nobody knows what to do about AGI

2 months ago | understandingai.org | Timothy B. Lee

Recently my former boss Ezra Klein interviewed Ben Buchanan, a senior advisor on AI policy in the Biden White House. Buchanan believes that transformative AI is likely to arrive before the end of the decade. And he’s been trying to convince journalists, policymakers, and anyone who will listen, to take this possibility more seriously.
OpenAI just released GPT-5-it just didn’t call it that

2 months ago | understandingai.org | Timothy B. Lee

When OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023, it was dramatically more capable than previous models. Its success bolstered the concept of “scaling laws”: the idea that dramatically increasing the size of a model—and the amount of computing power used to train it—will yield a much more capable model.

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Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

9 May 25

RT @dylanmatt: Very cool that @SpeakerPelosi came out in favor of compensating kidney donors for our labor by cosponsoring the End Kidney D…

Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

8 May 25

Anthropic has pulled down its page touting Windsurf's use of Claude after OpenAI acquired Windsurf (and will presumably have it stop using Claude). https://t.co/Gbe6OPt3Rn

Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

8 May 25

👀 https://t.co/au7so0apWz