The Algorithmic Bridge

Articles

Google Is Winning on Every AI Front

2 weeks ago | thealgorithmicbridge.com | Alberto Romero

Even in my most bullish days for OpenAI, I secretly preferred DeepMind. I felt Demis Hassabis was trustworthy in a way Sam Altman couldn't be—a true scientist, not a businessman. Also, AlphaGo and AlphaZero. To me, they're not historical milestones but nostalgia. ChatGPT is cool, but do you remember move 37? And the AlphaZero-Stockfish 8 chess games? My love and interest for AI grew parallel to DeepMind’s successes. I was rooting, almost like a sports fan, for them.
Even Optimists Say Recent AI Progress Feels Mostly Like Bullshit

2 weeks ago | thealgorithmicbridge.com | Alberto Romero

One overlooked benefit of being optimistic is that the rare times you offer a pessimistic view, people take you more seriously. This is one of those times. A post, originally published on the Zeropath blog by Dean Valentine that he later viralized on LessWrong under the title “Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit,” offers a bleak perspective.
Even God Can’t Skip the Bureaucrats

2 weeks ago | thealgorithmicbridge.com | Alberto Romero

A blog about AI that's actually about peopleA team of five savvy experts (for lack of another way to group them under a label) has published a long and thorough report on what they predict will happen in AI between now (April 2025) and the end of 2027. For reference, it belongs together with “Situational Awareness” and “Machines of Loving Grace.” Similar quality, similar depth, similar angle. The main difference is its extreme concreteness (easily testable in retrospect but harder to get right).
Weekly Top Picks #105

2 weeks ago | thealgorithmicbridge.com | Alberto Romero

Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit: The public reports of AI performance don’t reflect its real-world value/competence. Meta’s Llama 4 launch is a PR disaster: A rushed launch, an unreleased model, unconfirmed rumors of data contamination… but not all is bad. Reasoning AI models might not be reasoning after all: A new study finds that AI often relies on pattern-matching and other heuristics rather than reason.
GPT-5, o3, and o4-mini Are Coming Soon

2 weeks ago | thealgorithmicbridge.com | Alberto Romero

There’s been a change of plans:(Here’s the original plan from February 2025.)Some random thoughts on what we should expect. Deep Research is really good but expensive and slow (it uses o3). o4-mini will likely be in the ballpark of o3 performance-wise but will fix those other limitations, making the best AI research assistant in the world widely available, even for free users at a limited rate.
AI Died the Day It Was Born

3 weeks ago | thealgorithmicbridge.com | Alberto Romero

A guy who goes by Henry tweeted this:there should be a name for the phenomenon where naming something kills itSomeone answered: Vergegenständlichung. It's a German word that means turning a vague feeling into a clear object. Sadly, I don't understand German, so it didn’t work on me. In English, it loosely translates to objectification (without the political connotation) or, to be unambiguous and academic, thingification.
AI Is Learning to Reason. Humans May Be Holding It Back

3 weeks ago | thealgorithmicbridge.com | Alberto Romero

For all the talk about superhuman AI, we keep training our models like apprentices. They watch and imitate—rarely any glimpse at novelty or inventiveness. They learn from our math, our logic, our language, and our feedback. We choose the data. We choose the rewards. We grade their answers. We define the guardrails and instruct them on what they can say and what they can’t. We show them what reasoning looks like. But we are faulty reasoners ourselves. So we are imposing a ceiling.
What I Learned at Ghibli Day

3 weeks ago | thealgorithmicbridge.com | Alberto Romero

It's been a week. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Ghibli Day—as we might as well call it, given that OpenAI didn't bother to name the model that set it off—was special. Full of unexpected joy (especially for spouses of AI nerds) and also full of excess. That day, I had a bittersweet insight: humans don’t know how to deal with abundance. We think we do.
Weekly Top Picks #104

3 weeks ago | thealgorithmicbridge.com | Alberto Romero

You can’t believe your eyes anymore: Solving image generation will have second- and third-order effects for years to come. Then comes video. Be wary of the demons hiding under pitiful masks: A comic strip of “My Life As ChatGPT” goes viral… with an unexpected twist. New Anthropic study: On the biology of an LLM: We don’t know how AI works, so we have to do experiments like a biologist: open up that thing and look inside.
Congratulations on the Studio Ghibli Collection, OpenAI, but Not Much Else

4 weeks ago | thealgorithmicbridge.com | Alberto Romero

ChatGPT's new image-generation capabilities are outstanding. JustlogintoX and search for “ChatGPT” or “Ghibli”—people are reasonably freaking out and loving it. If I were an influencer, I’d call this a “ChatGPT moment”, if nothing else in attention capture. But while we’re in awe, it feels only fair to mention Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, a new state-of-the-art AI model that deserves at least as much attention, although it will get none. Since my job is to obey the crowd, I say we, too, forget about it.