Timothy B. Lee
binarybits.bsky.social
Timothy B. Lee
@binarybits.bsky.social
Reporting on AI and the future of the economy. Computer science masters degree from Princeton.

Subscribe to my AI newsletter: http://www.understandingai.org
April 6, 2025 at 12:22 AM
March 5, 2025 at 3:04 PM
Excited to launch a new podcast with @deanwb.bsky.social about AI. It's called AI summer, and can be found on all major podcast apps. The first episode is an interview with political scientist @jonaskonas.bsky.social about AI policy in the Trump era. www.aisummer.org/p/jon-askona...
January 14, 2025 at 6:53 PM
This Texas bill sounds worse than SB 1047. Kind of incredible that it was introduced by a Republican. www.hyperdimensional.co/p/texas-plow...
January 2, 2025 at 2:08 PM
Doesn’t everyone have these?
December 26, 2024 at 4:11 AM
The key to low-crime cities is more police, not more incarceration. This might be the area where wokeness has most distorted Democratic policymaking. I would love to see a Democrat in 2028 run on bringing back Bill Clinton's more-cops-on-the-beat agenda. www.noahpinion.blog/p/good-citie...
December 23, 2024 at 2:41 PM
@robseamans.bsky.social you’ve got a not-very-subtle impersonator.
December 22, 2024 at 4:16 PM
Can someone explain the threat model behind this warning? It has never occurred to me that loose fitting clothing would be a fire risk. Is the idea like the garment catches fire when the child reaches over a candle?
December 22, 2024 at 1:37 AM
I found o1 is bad at literal maze problems and it seems to be for roughly the reason you said. www.understandingai.org/p/openai-jus...
December 22, 2024 at 1:13 AM
Expects making mistakes isn't new. What's new is that the Internet has made it far easier for non-experts to publicize and complain about their mistakes. Which makes it seem like today's experts are worse than those of the past. www.slowboring.com/p/have-exper...
December 21, 2024 at 8:52 PM
Oh I misinterpreted the second one. I said pawn to e4 and it interpreted this as asking for an illegal sideways pawn move.
December 20, 2024 at 4:06 PM
GPT-4o now draws chess board diagrams. Neat, I thought. Oh wait... 🤦‍♂️
December 20, 2024 at 3:54 PM
It would be so stupid for democrats to pass up a deal to abolish the debt ceiling. As democrats constantly explain when their guy is in office, the debt ceiling doesn’t do anything constructive because Congress still has to approve changes to taxes and spending. www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rc...
December 20, 2024 at 12:44 PM
Ilya Sutzkever in 2023: "The data situation is still quite good, there is still lots to go."

Ilya Sutzkever in 2024: "We've achieved Peak Data, and there will be no more. We have to deal with the data we have."

I wrote about the end of the pretraining era. www.understandingai.org/p/its-the-en...
December 19, 2024 at 7:08 PM
Convincing argument from Dean Ball that mandatory "algorithmic impact assessments" (passed in Colorado, under consideration in several other states) are a bad idea. www.hyperdimensional.co/p/impact-ass...
December 9, 2024 at 8:54 PM
The popularity of GLP-1 weight loss drugs is powering an insane boom in Danish manufacturing. www.apricitas.io/p/weight-los...
December 9, 2024 at 8:42 PM
I think it's weird that civil liberties groups aren't more concerned about potential censorship by foreign governments. The US government isn't perfect but the Chinese government has a much worse record when it comes to free speech. www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...
December 6, 2024 at 8:32 PM
The jagged frontier of LLM capabilities.
December 6, 2024 at 4:43 PM
Quick Googling suggests that daily circulation is down more than 80 percent over the last 40 years. Newsroom has gone from ~350 reporters to ~70 (who now technically work for Cleveland.com rather than the Plain Dealer.
December 4, 2024 at 3:15 PM
I think the moral of the story here is that presidential systems are bad. www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12...
December 3, 2024 at 6:47 PM
The concept of “indigenous land” is not at all progressive once you think through the implications. open.substack.com/pub/noahpini...
November 30, 2024 at 6:50 PM