Arul Murugan

I am really enjoying the near-daily stream of interesting papers on the economics of frontier AI. The field building is working and now we have interesting work coming from senior economists as well as junior econ researchers and PhDs. From here, I would like to see computer scientists involved. Collaborations across CS and econ are still very rare even as this area grows. Relative to what we have now, I think the econ work can be sharpened to have more acuity in its study of frontier AI technology. More CS folks at NBER convenings; more economists at NeurIPS and ICML.

AI agents seem to be killing the ability to do cold outreach. Look at it from my perspective — someone who gets dozens of unsolicited invitations/requests in my email from strangers every day. In the past there used to be a sharp distinction between unpersonalized mass emails and those that were meant specifically for me. My spam filter could mostly automate this classification, and it even when it didn't, it would take me only a few seconds to tell if an email was worth reading/responding to. Now the distinction is gone because it is trivial to use AI to send out mass emails that appear deeply knowledgeable about each recipient's work and expertise. I guess we have to go back to the bad old days of needing to be "introduced" to someone before communicating with them.

This is superb. Among other things, I think a great read for anyone starting a PhD or other graduate study with an interest in AI and philosophy. I particularly agree with this quote (unsurprisingly). I'm hopeful that our new School of Government and Policy in DC will train a good number of top quality practitioners in the kind of philosophy and politics necessary to make powerful AI go well.

This is interesting because if anything my ability to manage more projects and my research assistants’ ability to use Claude code means that I'm probably hiring more Chicago-based and international-based RAs now more than before because their productivity and mine is so much greater. Used correctly I think smart young researchers are compliments to me and AI and not substitutes. (And I'm doing this despite the fact that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk cut about 80% of my funding in the past year so I'm hiring despite rather desperate financial constraints).

The first trailer for ‘DUNE: PART 3’ has been released. In theaters on December 18.

Excited to release PostTrainBench v1.0! This benchmark evaluates the ability of frontier AI agents to post-train language models in a simplified setting. We believe this is a first step toward tracking progress in recursive self-improvement 🧵:

more imperfect things