Understanding AI

Articles

Where frontier language models are today

1 week 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

2 weeks 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.
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

1 month 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.
It's time to take AI job loss seriously

1 month 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.
OpenAI just released GPT-5-it just didn’t call it that

1 month 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.
My brother explains what it's like to run an AI startup

1 month 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.
Driverless trucks are coming and unions aren’t happy about it

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

Exploring how AI works and how it's changing our world.
These pros were stunned by OpenAI Deep Research

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

Are you a journalist who wants to cover AI? Or an AI expert looking to get into journalism? The deadline for the 2025 Tarbell Fellowship is this Friday. Understanding AI is a participating publication, which means you could get paid $50,000 to write for this newsletter. You can click here for details on what I’m looking for, or go directly to the Tarbell website to apply. Earlier this month, OpenAI released a new product called Deep Research.