Mandy McLean

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Some personal news.

Today, I’m leaving The Atlantic after almost 17 years and moving my writing to Substack.

It would be convenient, for the purposes of crafting an exciting departure announcement, to have a dramatic exit story: a fight, a grievance, a shouting match with an editor that ended with me hurling a bunch of leather-backed Thoreau volumes across the open-plan office. That is not the case here.

I love The Atlantic, and I'll remain a contributing writer there. But after almost two decades at one publication, I wanted to write for myself. The things I've published that I'm most proud of—whether it was the original abundance agenda essay, or my piece on workism—emerged from a very personal expression of frustration, or confusion, or curiosity. I want to know what my thinking and writing is like if I lean into a more independent and personal writing life.

That's brought me to Substack, which is already home to an astonishing share of my overall reading. I'm excited to join their community and excited to build my own. The name of the newsletter should be easy to remember: Derek Thompson.

The newsletter will have three main pillars
1. Abundance
2. The frontier of science and technology—GLP1s, AI, biotech, energy breakthroughs—covered in a way that’s both curious and skeptical
3. The anti-social century & the social crises of anxiety and aloneness

Thanks to The Atlantic for 16.8 incredible years and thanks to everybody who follows me across the river.

- dt

[Amjad Masad @amasad]

Favorite thing on the internet now is Big Foot nature ASMR

[Overlap: Business & Tech @Overlap_Tech]

OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor: AI Will Lead to Abundant Intelligence

"We're basically going from making something scarce to making it abundant.

We did it with power. We did it with transportation.

And now AI is doing it with intelligence.

Tens of years from now, it will be hard for people younger than us to imagine a world where intelligence is not abundant."

@btaylor on @KPGrit with @Joubinmir

[vitrupo @vitrupo]

Veo 3 product lead Thomas Iljic suggests the line between video, simulation, and games is starting to blur.

It's a new kind of world-building you can direct like a movie, navigate like a game, regenerate like code.

It's not content. It's simulated reality - built, paused, replayed.

[Education Week @educationweek]

Over the past few decades, the "play" aspect of kindergarten has largely disappeared from classrooms.

However, these three teachers explain how they've kept the "fun and play-based" instruction during this stage of formative learning.
https://t.co/ilXpJPIlVJ

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

An attempt to explain (current) ChatGPT versions.

I still run into many, many people who don't know that:
- o3 is the obvious best thing for important/hard things. It is a reasoning model that is much stronger than 4o and if you are using ChatGPT professionally and not using o3 you're ngmi.
- 4o is different from o4. Yes I know lol. 4o is a good "daily driver" for many easy-medium questions. o4 is only available as mini for now, and is not as good as o3, and I'm not super sure why it's out right now.

Example basic "router" in my own personal use:
- Any simple query (e.g. "what foods are high in fiber"?) => 4o (about ~40% of my use)
- Any hard/important enough query where I am willing to wait a bit (e.g. "help me understand this tax thing...") => o3 (about ~40% of my use)
- I am vibe coding (e.g. "change this code so that...") => 4.1 (about ~10% of my use)
- I want to deeply understand one topic - I want GPT to go off for 10 minutes, look at many, many links and summarize a topic for me. (e.g. "help me understand the rise and fall of Luminar"). => Deep Research (about ~10% of my use). Note that Deep Research is not a model version to be picked from the model picker (!!!), it is a toggle inside the Tools. Under the hood it is based on o3, but I believe is not fully equivalent of just asking o3 the same query, but I am not sure.

All of this is only within the ChatGPT universe of models. In practice my use is more complicated because I like to bounce between all of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity depending on the task and out of research interest.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I don’t think “knowing the tools” is a useful benchmark, most of those tools won’t matter in the long run.

The core problem is leaders unwilling to articulate their vision of how AI will be used, which could establish a benchmark for their company. https://t.co/bHvjoVo8Jb

[George Siemens @gsiemens]

https://t.co/drZT9SjbWQ

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Related

[Mandy McLean @mndmclean]

@TurnerNovak Late-stage capitalism has entered its Wattpad era.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

It does seem policymakers assume that AI will act like other technologies- gradual adoption, displacement from old jobs & introduction of new ones.

I think that is a reasonable base case (thus it always has been), but there seems to be very little preparation for other patterns

[Mandy McLean @mndmclean]

One thing that really stood out in this conversation with Sanjit Biswas: "I think you have to make time to spend with the customer. For me, I'm always curious."
As a former user researcher, this resonates hard. Listening well is underrated, especially in spaces like AI, where it’s easy to build for the tech instead of the people.

[Scr0nkf1nkle @Scr0nkf1nkle]

The Great AI Job Displacement Is Closer Than You Think

[Mandy McLean @mndmclean]

@michaelbhorn @futureupodcast @jselingo @EducationatWork @janemswift Loved this episode. Paid roles that build real skills aren’t just helpful, they’re essential for making college feel relevant and worth the investment.

[Mandy McLean @mndmclean]

@Prashant_1722 @emollick That’s fair. I was trying to capture things like grading, creating assignments, and other behind-the-scenes work that teachers handle on top of teaching and mentoring their students.