Archive - Understanding AI

Claude-powered coding tools are poised to transform programming

A deep dive into the powerful tools that were made possible by Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

May 29 •

I spent time testing Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, and o3

OpenAI's o3 did best on my quirky homebrew problems, with Gemini 2.5 Pro a close second.

May 27 •

I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taught me

I used AI in my plasma physics research and it didn’t go the way I expected.

May 19 •

Three great articles on the modest pace of AI progress

We're not going to get a "fast takeoff" in 2027. These pieces explain why.

May 1 •

April 2025

March 2025

After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers

Human drivers keep crashing into Waymos that aren't even moving.

Mar 26 •

Amazon's self-driving unit just hit a major setback

Zoox's custom robotaxi lacks mandatory features like brake pedals and mirrors.

Mar 17 •

Nobody knows what to do about AGI

Lots of people want policymakers to take AGI seriously. But what does that mean?

Mar 14 •

It's time to take AI job loss seriously

Big change is coming and policy needs to adjust.

Mar 12 •

Matthew Yglesias

OpenAI just released GPT-5—it just didn’t call it that

OpenAI's GPT-4.5 demonstrates the power and limits of pretrained models.

Mar 7 •

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