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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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2 months 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.
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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.
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2 months ago | 
understandingai.org | Matthew Yglesias
I’m pleased to republish this post by Matt Yglesias, my former colleague at Vox and now the author of the excellent Substack Slow Boring. I’ve been reading Matt’s work religiously for the last 20 years and in my opinion his newsletter is the single best resource for understanding national policy debates.
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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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2 months ago | 
understandingai.org | Timothy B. Lee
I’m pleased to present this cross-posted episode of AI Summer, a podcast I co-host with Dean Ball of the Mercatus Center. Most episodes of AI Summer are not cross-posted here, so if you enjoy this conversation please subscribe to the newsletter or search for “AI Summer” in your favorite podcast app. The guest is my brother, Andrew Lee, who leads an email startup called Shortwave. For the last two years, Andrew has been exploring how to use AI to enhance the email experience.