The mistake of conflating intelligence and power • If this is your definition of intelligence is "the ability to achieve your goals across a wide variety of domains", then Stalin was the most intelligent person who ever lived.

Notes on pretraining parallelisms and failed training runs.

RLVR might be disproportionately bad at science • the verification loop for theories can be on the order of decades and centuries, and even then we know today as the better theory can often actually make worse predictions

Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch • AlphaGo is still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play.

David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution • "Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere."

Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served • It's shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations and a blackboard

What I've been thinking about this weekend - More open questions, intelligence vs power, the problem of verification in science, the parallel discovery of Darwinism • Hodge podge of things I was thinking about this weekend.

Blog prize for the big questions about AI • The not-so-secret point of this whole contest is so that I can hire a research collaborator

Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat • “If our next several years are a trillion dollars in scale, we have the supply chain to do it"

Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses • The true story of Einstein, Newton, and Darwin

Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute • Plus, why an H100 is worth more today than 3 years ago

I’m glad the Anthropic fight is happening now • “Preface to the highest stakes negotiations in history.”

How cosplaying Ancient Rome led to the scientific revolution • Ambassador visiting Renaissance Florence: “Where am I? None of this has existed for a thousand years."

Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential" • "That's why I'm sending this message of urgency"

Notes on Space GPUs • Turning my Elon prep into a blog post

Elon Musk - "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space” • “Those who live in software land are about to have a hard lesson in hardware.”

Hiring scouts to help me find guests • $100/hour, fully remote. Ideal candidate is maybe a grad student/post doc/or working in one of: bio, history, econ, math/physics, AI/hardware.

What I've been reading recently - Jan 10, 2026 • Nonlinear dynamics and Chaos, Machines of Loving Grace, Max Hodak’s theory of consciousness, Neural network training makes beautiful fractals

Adam Marblestone – AI is missing something fundamental about the brain • The brain's secret sauce is its reward functions, not its architecture.

Capital in the 22nd Century • Piketty was wrong about the past. He’s probably right about the future.

An audio version of my blog post, Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

Sarah Paine – Why Russia Lost the Cold War • Oil crisis, Sino-Soviet split, ethnic rebellions, and arms build-up

Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025) • Why I'm moderately bearish in the short term, and explosively bullish in the long term

Podcast Strategy Doc (December 2025)

Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research • “These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. It's a very fundamental thing.”

RL is even more information inefficient than you thought • And implications for RLVR progress

Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI • Plus a tour of Fairwater 2, the most powerful AI datacenter in the world

Sarah Paine – How Russia sabotaged China's rise • Plus, where Russia and China go from here

Thoughts on the AI buildout • Fab CapEx overhang, 1 GW a week, China privileged in long timelines, and much else

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away • "The problems are tractable, but they're still difficult”

Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable • Life is continuous with Earth’s geochemistry

Some thoughts on the Sutton interview • I have a much better understanding of Sutton’s vision now

On The Vital Question by Nick Lane • Life is continuous with Earth's geochemistry??

Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine • Plus, how VLA models work, self-improvement from deployment, and China’s hardware advantage

How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine • “The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril” – Winston Churchill

Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel • Is the answer already in our genome?

China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer • Plus, how solar fits into the next 10 years

Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard • “Chickens are unbeatable at converting grain into protein”

Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China • Plus, the most lopsided naval battle in human history

Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history • The most consequential figure of the 20th century

Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner • An audio version of the original blog post

Sarah Paine 6 part July lecture series - free tickets for paid subscribers • 6 new lectures from my most popular guest, 4 times over.

A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church • The man behind the last few decades of biotech breakthroughs