About Timothy B. Lee
I’m a reporter who has written about technology, economics, and public policy for more than a decade. Before I launched Understanding AI, I wrote for the Washington Post, Vox.com, and Ars Technica. I have a master’s degree in computer science from Princeton.
I’m working on Understanding AI full-time, and I have no outside investors or donors. Since I started it in 2023, paying subscribers have accounted for a large majority of my income (you can see full details on my source of income on my disclosure page). Their support allows me to work on the newsletter full-time.
About Understanding AI
Fifteen years ago, I was surprised by the rapid progress of self-driving cars. During the 2010s, I was surprised by the rapid progress of image recognition software and voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa.
But none of those technologies surprised me as much as ChatGPT did when I first tried it late 2022. Then I was surprised again when OpenAI released its impressive o1 model in 2024.
LLMs still have significant weaknesses, but still I think the pace of progress over the last five years has been stunning. And not just in chatbots. We’ve seen rapid progress in everything from self-driving cars to predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins.
Between 2021 and 2023, I wrote a newsletter that covers the economy in a “full-stack” way, writing about important economic developments in the worlds of business, policy, finance, technology, and so forth. Understanding AI aims to do the same thing for the AI industry:
I have a master’s degree in computer science and I have written in-depth explainers about how AI works.
Drawing on two decades of experience writing about tech policy, I’ve written about the legal and policy landscape for AI.
Building on my reporting for Full Stack Economics, I’ve written about how generative AI could affect the labor market and the broader economy.
I’ve written written about the philosophical issues raised by generative AI. How does artificial intelligence compare to human intelligence. What kinds of data will AI systems need to achieve human-level intelligence?
I’ve found that pproaching these issues from multiple directions yields insights that you wouldn’t get from a newsletter that only focuses on one of these angles. Writing technology explainers sharpens my thinking about philosophy and policy questions. Writing about startups and the labor market helps me figure out which models and techniques are truly adding value.
Understanding AI is a daily newsletter that helps you “keep up” with every new development in the AI world. I publish about one article a week that helps readers understand the most important trends and debates in the AI world.
If that sounds interesting, please click here and subscribe to Understanding AI.
Subscription policy
I publish two to six times per month, with about half of my posts being limited to paying subscribers.
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