Callum Williams

Senior economics writer, San Francisco bureau chief, The Economist. AI, financial markets, real estate, history. Book "The Classical School"

[Callum Williams @econcallum]

Keeping a live thread of specific AI macro predictions that turned out to be wrong

[Philippe Lemoine @phl43]

Once again, I constantly hear about how epistemically virtuous these people are, yet they keep posting this kind of meaningless garbage.

[goodalexander @goodalexander]

what you wanted:
> curing cancer
> 1 person $1b companies
> productivity acceleration

what you get:
> all your software broken in prod
> non stop cyber theft
> aircraft cannot fly
> "Chinese threat" Neo McCarthyism
> brains too fried to even watch NFLX
> surveillance state

[Séb Krier @sebkrier]

Seb's Law: The widespread, transformative societal impact of AI is always approximately two years away, regardless of the current year.

[Jack Blackburn 🇺🇦 @HackBlackburn]

Despite having more ex-PMs than ever, only one of them is in the Commons

They said Rishi Sunak would be straight off to California

Today he asked a question about parking at a local railway station

[Jason Furman @jasonfurman]

@econcallum It's basically all data-centered related and oil and mining.

[Callum Williams @econcallum]

China is not getting these chips directly from the US, but instead from the nebulous category "Other Asia, not elsewhere specified", which basically means that the seller is trying to hide where they are based

[Callum Williams @econcallum]

At least since the @GamersNexus film, the world has known that China was getting loads of AI chips from the West. Newly released world trade data shows soaring imports to China of AI chips, even with these supposedly tight export controls

[Callum Williams @econcallum]

Everyone going nuts over AI capex but overall nonresidential investment in the US grew by only 8% in Q3 2026, about average for recent years

[Mikael Pawlo @mpawlo]

Jensen Huang should have spent more time studying @nntaleb. Trying to maintain a reputation as a family man and a wholesome guy is what made him fragile. If he instead went down the Elon Musk route and cared nothing for his reputation, he would have been antifragile in this situation. Now he might lose half his shares, his job, and his reputation for acting like the rockstar he was not supposed to be. Elon’s reputation not only survives attacks, criticism and controversy - it becomes stronger by it. Elon is antifragile. Jensen Huang, however, decided to brand himself as a good guy, but only played a part.

That’s why he became fragile, and will most likely be asked to stand down.

[Corbin Duncan @kuhhbin]

Jensen Huang must go

We argue in @TheEconomist that his position is untenable

"Like many powerful leaders, he came to believe that he was too important for the normal rules to apply to him."

But he is not the only one. Howard Lutnick has failed to stem the flow of chips to China. More heads should roll

[Callum Williams @econcallum]

The underlying data for our tycoons ranking was, in fact, entirely human-generated. This is a great example of what @ramez talks about AI having poor capabilities over long-horizon tasks. Doing this required estimating hundreds of values from extremely patchy historical data (eg US Steel’s revenue in 1900). We tried to get Claude to do it but there were so many errors that we had to start from scratch.

[Henri Rapson @Hrap]

@econcallum This looks like an excellent example of how delegating to AI without critical judgment can lead to mistakes (Musk = AI), and the design looks explicitly vibe coded.

[Callum Williams @econcallum]

Leaked Russian government estimates of war deaths lines up quite closely with our estimates

[Callum Williams @econcallum]

Extremely useful thread

[Ramez Naam @ramez]

Is AI progress accelerating? 🧵

1. Frontier AI rate of improvement on ECI has been fairly consistent. Fable 5.2's non-final ECI is a bit above trend. The big change is that Anthropic, in purple, has come from behind to take the lead.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

[read about what’s happening with AI]

ME: Wow we’re actually legit fucked this is so bad.

[go outside]

ME: Wait those people are all acting like nothing unusual is happening. Maybe I was just in a paranoid bubble? Yeah it must be that. Phew.

[read more about what’s happening with AI]

ME: Wait no we ARE fucked. Shit. It’s all those people outside who are in a delusional bubble.

[go outside]

ME: Wait...

[Adam Ford @FordCartoons]

@econcallum Wrong. John D. Rockefeller is number 1, Cornelius Vanderbilt is number 2.

[Callum Williams @econcallum]

methodology explained in more detail here https://t.co/sS7sC1jDgX

[Callum Williams @econcallum]

The Economist has updated our quantitative estimate of the greatest tycoons of all time. Musk, Zuckerberg and Amodei all move up the rankings. Bezos still beats them all though. Henry Ford is the greatest of all time

[Callum Williams @econcallum]

Helpful chart from Goldman

[Data Colada @DataColada]

DataColada[141]: Evidence of fraud in 5th paper co-authored by Francesca Gino

https://t.co/P3DQUbkfNa

(Grant, Gino, & Hofmann, AOM, 2011)

[Duncan Robinson @duncanrobinson]

Hard to overstate how much Britons love cheap stuff, especially cheap expensive stuff