Colin Lewis

#AI & Data Science. AI to augment economic decisions. #Triathlon. Relentless iteration. 科林. Deep interest in China Innovation

[Colin Lewis @ColinWPLewis]

Selfie moment with @sama - Incredibly humble and smart. Privileged to listen to Sam talk today.

[Rob Wiblin @robertwiblin]

Every day is just a 2010s LessWrong blog post.

[Ramez Naam @ramez]

I'm deeply uncomfortable with:

1. US government having substantial voting shares in any AI company.

2. USG investing in or extracting shares from specific AI companies and not others.

I understand the case for having a bulwark against hypothetical future AI job loss.

At the same time the greatest AI risk is concentration of power. Few things would accelerate that more than the USG being able to (and having the incentive to) kingmake specific AI companies.

If you think this is a good idea, imagine all the ways it could be used by an administration you deeply distrust or that you view as having totalitarian leanings, whatever your political beliefs are.

The AI landscape ought to be one of democratization of AI, diversity of options for customers, and checks and balances within the private sector, and between private companies, users, and government. Not one where government co-opts these companies, directly or indirectly.

[NewLimit @newlimit]

Following breakthrough results, we’re bringing longevity medicine to human trials.

We’ve raised a $435M Series C led by @foundersfund to make it happen.

Reprogramming cell age has the potential to create more healthy years for everyone. We're closer than ever to realizing it.

[Izabella Kaminska @izakaminska]

I first became aware of this story in 2023, which is when I first wrote about it in my Blind Spot newsletter (see attached screen shot).

At the time the affair was being treated as a purely political story in Poland. i.e. as part of the standard slanging match between the PiS and PO parties ahead of the election that year. Donald Tusk was using it as leverage against PiS, claiming the shortcomings of the system were evidence of mass corruption by the former government.

That may or may not have been true. What mattered to me is that when I looked into the details of what was going on i found evidence of a potentially systemic (and even apolitical) market-driven failure anchored to poor structural incentives. This was unlikely to be resolved without admission that the root cause was the outsourcing at the heart of the system.

I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be interesting if it turned out that the main driver of illegal migration these days wasn’t the risk-oriented “for profit” human traffickers we constantly hear about, but rather the much less exciting realm of faceless support staff working in professional processing centers? All of them merely responding to economic incentives and opportunities arising from the Western governments putting their trust in third parties to reduce frictions and costs?

In many ways it reminded me of the very same problems banks encounter with respect to using digital systems or poorly trained staff to comply with KYC and AML rules.

Either way, I thought the story was important and political enough to merit further investigation. Since I was also senior finance editor at Politico Europe at the time, I pitched the idea of doing something more significant on the story a number of times. Unfortunately there was no interest. They certainly didn’t think the scaling element of the story was interesting.

I pursued the story independently.

[Colin Lewis @ColinWPLewis]

I find the total opposite in university cohorts, especially 18/19 year olds... 85% plus are strong supporters of AI.

[Ramez Naam @ramez]

The youngsters really distrust and disdain AI. Had dinner with a friend and their 19yo son. He's studying CS, wants to go into game dev. Absolutely hates AI and rejected any suggestion I use it for some simple things in his life. Reports that his friends generally feel the same way.

[Dorothea Baur (Dr.) @DorotheaBaur]

„The main promise of prediction is power, not accuracy. If a prediction manages to enhance the power of the prophet, or the patron of the prophet, then it can count as a success, at least for them.“ @CarissaVeliz, Prophecy, p. 70. Brilliant book!

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Earlier this month, our run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion.

This growth has been driven by organizations across many industries deploying Claude in their core operations, and by a growing number of people using it for their everyday work.

Read more: https://t.co/V1fdqOxQdY

[Colin Lewis @ColinWPLewis]

@CarissaVeliz My review is up on Amazon... hope it helps

[Colin Lewis @ColinWPLewis]

Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future - A Review of @CarissaVeliz's excellent / must read book

https://t.co/b0OmuLur6x

[Lulu Cheng Meservey @lulumeservey]

“The question is not whether AI will shape the world; it will. The question is whether YOU will help…”

Tonedeaf disaster

Obvious move would’ve been to focus on the graduates as the protagonists, instead of framing them as accessories to AI’s world takeover

“The question is not whether you will shape the world; you will. The question is how…” simple switch

Then you can go on to talk about adapting to change, trying new things, using the power of technology newly available to them. And make it about empowering new graduates

Instead it ended up preachy, condescending, and vaguely menacing all at once

[Vatican News @VaticanNews]

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, will be released on May 25. A presentation event with the Pope and various speakers is scheduled for the same day at the Vatican.
https://t.co/Yi0qywaE1r

[sarah @littIeramblings]

an update: I’ve left AISI to focus on independent writing / advocacy for the next few months

it increasingly feels like The Big AI Thing is getting close, and I wanted the freedom to comment on that. I’ll be aiming to post ~weekly on my blog: https://t.co/prndz1yAa9

[Colin Lewis @ColinWPLewis]

@touraj @CarissaVeliz Thank you Touraj, you are right it truly is an amazing book.

[Colin Lewis @ColinWPLewis]

@CarissaVeliz It is such a good read Carissa, an important book. I just ordered another copy to gift to a friend. Will review it on Amazon. @DorotheaBaur I am sure you will get as much from the book as I did.

[Selina Wang @selinawangtv]

I asked a 12-year-old in Beijing if AI scares her.
Her answer: "If I use AI, then I will be the scary person."

While American parents debate whether kids should use AI at school, China has made it mandatory and is rushing to embed AI across society

My report from China 👇 @ABC

[Logan Graham @logangraham]

A lot of people have been wondering about Mythos, Glasswing, and the vulns we / our partners are fixing. Today, I’m excited for us to start sharing more. (For context, I lead Glasswing @AnthropicAI.)

Two independent evaluations this week—from XBOW and the UK AISI—confirm what we've been seeing internally: Claude Mythos Preview is a step change in autonomous cybersecurity capabilities. We need to start preparing fast for a world of models with this level of capabilities.

The UK AI Security Institute tested the model we shipped at the launch of Project Glasswing and found Mythos Preview is the first model to solve both of their end-to-end cyber ranges, including one (Cooling Tower) which no model had ever cleared. But attackers (and defenders) have sophistication & cost constraints – Mythos is also the only model that clears every one of their tasks estimated over 8 hours under their deliberately low 2.5M-token cap.

XBOW tested it on their offensive security benchmarks, finding "token-for-token, unprecedented precision." It's the only model to succeed at subtle V8 sandbox work.

Other Glasswing partners shared similar stories. In a few weeks of testing, Mythos Preview has helped them find many thousands of (estimated) high + critical severity vulnerabilities, sometimes double what they'd normally find in a year.

I don't share this to boost Mythos. In fact, this is not about Mythos. It’s about preparing for the coming world of models being better, faster, cheaper, and more creative than some of the best human experts at dual use capabilities. Clearly, we need them supporting defenders as widely as can be done safely – and especially the least resourced ones.

Within a year, Mythos will probably look quite dumb (relative to other new models). And others may release openly available or unguardrailed models of Mythos-level capabilities.

We started Project Glasswing because capabilities like Mythos Preview's won't stay rare, or stay in careful hands. We are bringing it to defenders as fast as we responsibly can, while working to figure out, for example, the right safeguards and patching & disclosure processes.

Also, to be clear, compute has never been a limiter in our rollout.

Expect a fuller update on our Glasswing work in the coming days.

XBOW report: https://t.co/Mumtbf3kE3

UK AISI report: https://t.co/vBgqz0AeKJ

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

We stopped everything to write an answer (link below) to Paul Krugman's two posts of today (one informal, one with a simple model) arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States.

The change measured by the Draghi report, he argues, is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi.

Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation. This matters enormously. Divergence with the United States is the strongest evidence for reform in Europe.

1. The growth numbers

Krugman compares the United States, France, and Germany at purchasing power parity in current prices. On that measure, France's and Germany's position relative to America has been roughly constant since 2000.

But current price comparisons miss productivity gains in sectors where prices fall. If America produces twice as much software while the price of each unit halves, the value of American software output looks unchanged even though the volume has doubled.

Most economists therefore use constant prices, which fix the base-year PPP level and apply each country's real output growth on top of it. American output growth has concentrated in tech, where prices have fallen tremendously as productivity rises. In terms of the volume of things produced, America has pulled away from Europe.

2. Is it all the tech industry?

Krugman concedes this tech divergence but says it is not welfare-relevant. The American growth lead is an accounting artefact of measuring more iPhones at base-year prices, not a sign that Americans are actually richer, because Europeans buy the same iPhones at the same world prices.

This is not the right way to think about the world today, as an earlier Paul Krugman would have argued.

His model assumes tradable goods, interchangeable workers, marginal-cost pricing, and no profits. Each assumption fails.

Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat.

Technology is not priced at marginal cost. Apple's margins are around 40 percent. Anthropic's inference margins are at 70 percent. The major platforms enjoy network effects, switching costs, and lock-in that hold prices well above what a competitive market would deliver. A large share of the productivity gains in technology stays as profit.

A lot of the value of American technology dominance shows up in equity, not in wages. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together are worth $21 trillion, more than the entire combined stock market value of all European stock markets. Around 60 percent of US equity is held by American households. The median French or Spanish household holds almost no equity.

The median employee at Meta, a company with almost 80,000 employees, earned $388,000 in 2025.

This advantage is not going to go away. Krugman's own 1991 paper, cited in his Nobel prize, showed that comparative advantage in modern industries is produced by increasing returns to scale, specialized labor markets, supplier networks and the agglomeration of suppliers, workers, and ideas in particular places. Once an industry concentrates somewhere, the concentration is self-reinforcing. Europe is being pushed away from the next round of technology industries (AI!).

3. What about inequality?

Another retort is that GDP per capita hides substantial inequality, and so even if America is rich on average, this is mostly due to the super wealthy.

But despite the US's high pre-tax income inequality, it also achieves higher median incomes than Europe, in part because of such a high base, and in part because it actually redistributes more than many European countries.

The cleanest comparison is median equivalised disposable household income: income after cash taxes and transfers, adjusted for household size and purchasing power. According to the OECD's 2021 numbers, the median American earns 30 percent more than the median Dutchman, about 31 percent more than the median German, and about 52 percent more than the median Frenchman.

4. What about hours worked?

Krugman points out that while American GDP per person is higher, most of this is because Americans work more. For this divergence to be an hours worked story, Americans must work more relative to Europeans now than they did in 2000.

The opposite has happened. Birinci, Karabarbounis, and See in a 2026 NBER paper show that about half of the American-European hours gap that existed in the 1990s has reversed by the end of the 2010s. Americans work fewer hours per person than they did in 2000, while most Europeans work more.

5. Is America not a bad place to live?

Walk around Alabama and France: surely the former cannot be substantially richer than the latter?

American cities often have poorer centres and richer suburbs or exurbs. European cities preserve richer and more attractive historic cores. A visit to a city as a tourist in America compared with a city in France will leave one having seen different spots on the income distribution. Americans in Europe go to the nicest and richest European cities.

Rather than a walking around test, do a driving around test. Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a level of new-built material wealth that is extremely uncommon in Europe, with thousands of enormous four- or five-bedroom homes. In the South, in places like Nashville and Austin, drive around the downtowns to see hundreds of luxury apartment buildings springing from the ground. This construction boom is replicated virtually nowhere in Europe today.

The other question is generational. Housing often costs more in Europe than in the United States, despite the quality of the housing stock generally being much better. Europe has nice city cores but these are inaccessible to young Europeans.

Consider the salaries available to entry-level workers. The starting pay for a London police officer is $57,000. In Washington, DC, $75,000. The entry-level Deloitte consultant job in Madrid pays around €28,000, roughly $33,000 per year. In Charlotte, the entry-level Deloitte job pays $63,000.

There are many things to dislike about life in America. But relative to 25 years ago, the gap in material wealth has shifted dramatically in America's favor.
https://t.co/VOpQ32R5tg

[Colin Lewis @ColinWPLewis]

@YafahEdelman AI assists scientists eradicate 60% of known cancers

[Michał Podlewski @trajektoriePL]

"Stanisław Lem in his 1964 book Summa Technologiae, argued that humanity will hit an “information barrier” — a point where the volume and fragmentation of information exceed humanity’s ability to filter, interpret, and integrate it into a coherent body of knowledge and it can only be solved by fully autonomous scientists! " - @_rockt co-founder of @Recursive_SI

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health.

That work started with AlphaFold, and now at @IsomorphicLabs with the mission to reimagine drug discovery and one day solve all disease!

We are turbocharging that goal with $2.1B in new funding.