beginning to dawn on me that we’ll probably never see a day when the first AGI is revealed. it won’t be like the moon landing or even the announcement of the iphone. just a steady climb up the capability ladder, with no consensus on where the threshold lies or when we cross it

I realize this view of history is extremely common these days, but I think ppl underestimate the technological and cultural progress between 100k ya and the rise of cities 5k ya, and again from there to the height of the Bronze Age, and then to the classical era, and so forth.

Here's a great paper by Nobel winner Philippe Aghion (and Benjamin F. Jones and Charles I. Jones) on AI and economic growth. The key takeaway is that because of Baumol's cost disease, even if 99% of the economy is fully automated and infinitely productive, the overall growth rate will be dragged down and determined by the progress we can make in that final 1% of essential, difficult tasks. And this logic still applies *even* in a world with AGIs that can automate *every* task a human can do. In this world, the "hard to improve" tasks would no longer be human-centric ones, but physics-centric ones. The economy's growth rate stops being a function of how fast/well the AGI can "think" and starts being a function of how fast it can manipulate the physical world. Essentially, post-AGI does not necessarily mean post-scarcity: the entire cost and value of the economy becomes concentrated in the physically constrained tasks: generating energy, mining resources, manufacturing goods, transportation and so on. nber.org/system/files/workin…

We're in a strange spot right now with AI. The anti-AI crowd believes progress has halted and are doing a victory lap. Insiders at all labs maintain advancement continues at pace. Only one of these versions of reality will survive the new year. Gemini 3 is very close now.

I promise you that 'openai is secretly not agi-pilled' is a bad take if you believe it, I'd be excited to take the opposite side from you in a wide variety of financial transactions

Convention wisdom is that bioweapons are humanity's greatest weakness – 100x cheaper to make than to defend against. Andrew Snyder-Beattie thinks conventional wisdom is likely wrong. He has a plan cheap enough to do without government. Useful even in worst case scenarios like mirror bacteria. Effective enough to save most people. In one of my all-time fav interviews he lays out a low-tech 4-step approach developed by his research team at Open Philanthropy, to fix a problem most have thought unsolvable. ASB is hiring for many roles in this project from logistics to biotech to manufacturing, and has $100s millions to deploy. Enjoy, links below! 2:10 How bad it could get 9:19 The worst-case scenario: mirror bacteria 18:14 Why low-tech 25:30 Prevention 31:21 The “4 pillars” plan 33:09 ASB is hiring now to make this happen 35:11 Everyone was wrong: biorisks are defence dominant 40:23 Pillar 1: Lungs 55:53 Pillar 2: Biohardening 1:15:19 Pillar 3: Detection 1:28:40 Pillar 4: The wrench hypothesis 1:40:12 The plan's biggest weaknesses 1:44:44 Would chaos make this impossible to pull off? 1:51:50 Would rogue AI make bioweapons? 1:57:57 We can feed the world even if all the plants die 2:07:03 Could a bioweapon make the Earth uninhabitable? 2:09:35 What ASB is hiring for 2:30:27 How to protect yourself and your family (On the 80,000 Hours Podcast, available anywhere you get podcasts.)

As a researcher at a frontier lab I’m often surprised by how unaware of current AI progress public discussions are. I wrote a post to summarize studies of recent progress, and what we should expect in the next 1-2 years: julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/fa…

Imagine if ChatGPT highlighted every word it wasn't sure about. We built a streaming hallucination detector that flags hallucinations in real-time.