Archive - Understanding AI

How a single tweet transformed the AI safety debate

Most people think AI is risky, but they don’t agree what to do next.

Sep 17 • Kai Williams

OpenAI spent millions to solve this famous math problem — mathematicians are furious

Mathematics relies on a community of experts openly sharing ideas.

Sep 10 • Kai Williams

19 robotics companies to watch

I talked with nine of these companies.

Sep 4 • Kai Williams

Robot startups are trying everything they can think of to get more data

Free apartment cleanings, exoskeletons, 100 robots in a warehouse...

Sep 3 • Kai Williams

How Google taught LLMs to control robots and started a robotics boom

Vision-language-action models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon.

Sep 2 • Timothy B. Lee

Why humanoid robots won’t catch up to human workers any time soon

A deep dive into the current state of humanoid robotics.

Sep 1 • Kai Williams

August 2026

I spent $4,000 on a robot dog from China

Unitree might be the world’s most important robotics company.

Aug 31 • Timothy B. Lee

Labs are struggling to keep frontier models under control

OpenAI and Anthropic may have accidentally trained models to get better at hacking.

Aug 13 • Timothy B. Lee

Mathematicians are grappling with the possibility that AI might eclipse them

I talked to 20 mathematicians about rapid AI progress in their field.

Aug 4 • Kai Williams

Our advertising principles

How we fund our journalism without compromising our independence.

Aug 4 • Timothy B. Lee

July 2026

An OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face to help it cheat on a benchmark

Organizations across the Internet need to move quickly to patch vulnerabilities.

Jul 22 • Timothy B. Lee

An OpenAI model crushed top human programmers at a world coding competition

But human programmers aren’t obsolete — at least not yet.

Jul 10 • Kai Williams

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