KY

Always a last peak. Views are my own and do not represent my employer. RT & Likes ≠ endorsements.

[Heather Long @byHeatherLong]

Inflation is so high that it's erasing all wage gains.

Inflation: 4.2% in May for the past year
Wage growth: 3.4% in May for the past year.

Americans are getting squeezed financially. This isn't just "bad vibes" about the economy. There is real pain, especially for middle-class and lower-income households. It's tough because so many basic items are seeing sizable price increases: gas, electricity, food, medical care.

[John Scott-Railton @jsrailton]

NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware.

Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner.

Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order safety alignment is risky.

When closed (and open) models ship with aggressive refusals, they will be sprinkled with second-order blindspots that attackers will discover...and exploit.

We are only in the earliest days of attackers leveraging these features, and it wouldn't surprise me if users systems that need to handle complex cybersecurity issues demand that models be less safety-blunted.

In the weeds: @SocketSecurity's post also shows why intention matters in how you design a malware analysis pipeline to avoid prompt manipulation.

H/T to colleagues that shared this with me https://t.co/f3Aj9TYxU4

[KY @Interneconomics]

Trump officials asked a government AI-testing unit to stop issuing public reports, the latest signal the White House is tightening control over AI models as national-security concerns grow https://t.co/MxDQzzAz1r via @WSJ

[Aaron Slodov @aphysicist]

annual reminder to read this if you're getting into manufacturing

[Peter Berezin @PeterBerezinBCA]

I agree with my friend Anna that the China shock is a useful analogy for the AI shock.

[Adam Shuaib @adamshuaib]

The strongest predictor of who does extraordinary work is whether they ever obsessed over something pointless. We've seen this across 5000 startup meetings, but the pattern showed up across everyone from scientists to athletes.

We’ve met people who spent two years optimising their fantasy football algorithms, or memorised every player in the NBA at 11, or collected thousands of train tickets, or built a Lego replica of their school; none of these activities really had much point.

What they were demonstrating was the hardest skill in any field; the mental capacity to stay focused on a boring task for much longer than it deserves. The path to genius is mostly boring repetition, and people who achieve it have a broken off-switch. It is tough to fake having spent years obsessed with boring things that didn't matter.

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

Dear followers,
Please see this discussion on AI and future work between myself, @deanwball @emollick and @clarashih
Somehow, I was again the least optimistic person in the debate.
In the Hybrid A.I.-Human Work Force, Who Will Actually Thrive? — NYT https://t.co/FTRbPMOtvP

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is a super exciting release - Claude Fable 5 is the same underlying model as Mythos but with added safeguards. The benchmarks are great and it's SOTA on everything by a margin but I'll add that *qualitatively* also, this is a major-version-bump-deserving step change forward (imo of the same order as Claude 4.5 was in November), peaking especially for long problem-solving sessions on very difficult problems. You can give it a lot more ambitious tasks than what you're used to, the model "gets it" and it will just go, and it's never felt this tempting to stop looking at the code at all (but don't do this in prod!). The model still has quirks that people will run into and the safeguards are configured to be a little too trigger happy for launch, which can hopefully be tuned over time.

I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything - explainers, visualizers, dashboards, bespoke single-use apps (e.g. a full wandb that is hyper-specific just for your project), you can 10X your test suite, auto-optimize code, run giant research projects with custom HTML for the results, anything! "Free your mind" (Matrix ref). Really looking forward to all the things people build!

[Zara Zhang @zarazhangrui]

If you've adopted AI at your company but haven't seen any tangible results, read this 1990 article: "The Dynamo and the Computer" by Paul David.

When electricity first arrived, factories that "adopted" it barely got faster. They just swapped the steam engine for an electric one and ran everything else exactly as before: same machine layout, same workflow, same management. Electricity in, no real gains out.

The most common mistake with any new technology is to drop it into the old organization and then declare the transformation done.

The real leap came decades later, when each machine got its own small motor. Suddenly machines no longer had to be lined up around one central drive shaft. They could be rearranged around the actual flow of work.

The productivity gains didn't come from electricity. They came from REDESIGNING THE ENTIRE FACTORY around it.

AI is the same. Bolting it onto your existing process gets you a faster steam engine. The payoff comes when you redesign the work itself.

(link to paper in comments)

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

It was great to sit down with the one and only @shaneparrish. Shane brings unique questions that caused me to think deeper. Hope you enjoy it.

Also - Ted Talk just dropped also. 2-1. :) https://t.co/AnllMRUjXW

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

Students without access to LLMs are 2 to 8 times more creative than students with access.

That is the finding of a new paper comparing 2,200 college admissions essays written by humans before ChatGPT with essays generated by GPT-4.

The key point is not individual creativity. GPT-4 can write well, sometimes better than individual students. The problem is collective creativity.

Each new human essay added new semantic territory. New ideas. New angles. New experiences. New combinations.

Each new GPT-4 essay added much less.

The authors call this the diversity growth rate: how much novelty each additional text contributes to the collective pool of ideas.

Humans kept expanding the pool. GPT-4 made the pool converge.

Even when the authors pushed GPT-4 to be more creative, changed parameters, or used chain-of-thought prompting, the homogenizing effect remained.

This is the real danger of AI in education.
Not that students will write worse.
That everyone will write the same.

*
Full paper in the first reply

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

Energy factoid of the day:

The entire annual global LNG market equals to about six weeks of coal demand in China and India.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

This is worth reading.

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use.

Its capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available.

[KY @Interneconomics]

@TheStalwart @jerometenk theoretically the US consulate could give you good advice. But hard to say these days and it's out of the way.

[SemiAnalysis @SemiAnalysis_]

We just published a deep dive on why Unitree is going to dominate global robotics. Timing could not be better. (2/2)
https://t.co/0HKSayvvTK

[Barely Investible Capital Management Ltd @LowAlphaHighVol]

Wow. That’s some serious commitment. Not a good era to be bearish AI. Goes on to say:
“The idea is to rely on local suppliers including Huawei Technologies Co. for at least 80% of technology such as AI chips, effectively squeezing out $NVDA and $AMD”

[KY @Interneconomics]

From giant debt deals to IPOs, tech companies keep raking in investor cash https://t.co/n7S7y1TOz6 via @WSJ

[KY @Interneconomics]

@TheStalwart @fundocabral @zzbar Has been the case for American passports as far back as the handover. I can attest to that from personal experience.

[KY @Interneconomics]

@TheStalwart @fundocabral @zzbar That would be odd. An American passport does not need a visa for a short stay on tourism or business. Chinese passport holders needed a visa back then for sure and maybe still nominally today though I hear approvals are very easy today for Chinese passports.