I know it's Sunday and Father's Day and whatnot, but I can't stop thinking about this piece by @brendanbartanen.bsky.social and what it means for AI and research.

Re-upping my post on AI interpretability from a few months back in light of the government's decision to ban access to Mythos/Fable for foreign nationals. For now, AI "guardrails" are just a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole. Read more: brendanbartanen.substack.com/p/we-dont-re...

An easy next step if you want to know more: direct your AI model of choice to examine the public Gitbhub repo and explain to you everything Claude did to create its products: github.com/brendanbarta...

It's time to move on from this outdated understanding of what AI models do. Agentic AI is not just fancy autocomplete. The models can pull data, write code to analyze it, verify claims, create audit trails, etc. It's not error-proof and vigilance is essential, but it's not the ChatGPT of 2024-2025.

I think the era of automated social science is starting to emerge. Here's why: open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...

I think the era of automated social science is starting to emerge. Here's why: open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...

Did you wake up this morning thinking "I wish someone would explain 'sparse autoencoders' in an approachable way"? Do you wish you knew about 'Golden Gate Claude', perhaps the best AI model ever created? It's your lucky day--all of that and more below!

AI models are very different. We don’t actually know how they work. Despite more capital investment than for any technological endeavor in history (roughly 50 Manhattan Projects after adjusting for inflation), we are, in some sense, flying blind. open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...

AI models are very different. We don’t actually know how they work. Despite more capital investment than for any technological endeavor in history (roughly 50 Manhattan Projects after adjusting for inflation), we are, in some sense, flying blind. open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...

lol this is an incredible video

LLMs will usher in a democratization of intellect. Now you too can have a junior (AI) scholar that you can blame for errors and fraud. Previously, only the top scholars had access to that kind of power.

Assuming you're using agentic AI tools, my default work mode is now: every single task is an opportunity to figure out how to get Claude to make that task easier/better for me. Anytime it works well, save it to claude.md so that it just does it automatically next time.

lol this is an incredible video

There’s about to be a lot more of everything. More bots. More ads. More scams. More disinformation. More scientific discoveries. Imagine everything you know about automation and scale it up. The world is going to change very quickly. open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...

Here's a simple vibe coding example that could be useful for teachers or anyone that needs to create clear and engaging documents. Tell Claude to organize it into an .html file. Here's the prompting: claude.ai/share/c4d1e3... Here's the result: brendanbartanen-svg.github.io/substack-emb...

There’s about to be a lot more of everything. More bots. More ads. More scams. More disinformation. More scientific discoveries. Imagine everything you know about automation and scale it up. The world is going to change very quickly. open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...

My Ezra Klein impersonation with Claude only beat out the real thing (www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/o...) by one day, in case you're wondering how fast the world is moving right now. Will "vibe coding" make it into the state of the union?

Fascinating study and a demonstration of one of the deep challenges with LLM-based AI models: because they are trained on human-generated text, they can exhibit patterns resembling human cognitive biases (e.g., anchoring) even in clinical contexts where the stakes are high.

What many don't yet grasp is just how quickly all of these things—the good, the bad, and the ugly—are coming down the line. AI models have reached capability that allows for basically anyone with an internet connection to spin up functioning apps using just ideas expressed in natural language.

I'm sharing a recording of a workshop on working with AI agents that I gave last week at UVA. If you're at all curious about what the big deal is with AI models in 2026, I try to break it down here in an approachable, non-technical way. youtu.be/wcZq5xBbkTM

I used Claude Cowork to write referee reports. Here's what happened. open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...

What many don't yet grasp is just how quickly all of these things—the good, the bad, and the ugly—are coming down the line. AI models have reached capability that allows for basically anyone with an internet connection to spin up functioning apps using just ideas expressed in natural language.

Brendan & Claude do a version of that recent NYTimes The Daily episode about "What's agentic AI and why does it matter?" specifically for quant education researcher types Absolutely fascinating/terrifying/exciting

What is agentic AI and why should you care? open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...

Easily one of the best things I've read on substack.

What is agentic AI and why should you care? open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...

Wow! This use of AI and the comparison between AI and human reviews (of a very nice paper!) is super interesting.

I used Claude Cowork to write referee reports. Here's what happened. open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...

I'm shifting my research agenda...but it's not what you think open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...