Brent Cohn

AI agents are autonomously doing R&D, now what? @slimshetty_ and I give a formalization of the low-hanging-fruit metaphor & draw some implications: 1. Agents can make autonomous contributions without being full human substitutes. 2. You switch from agent-labor to human-labor as expenditure grows. 3. You can calibrate an agent's value by its human-equivalent time. (1/n)

I can’t stop watching this

We're trialling a new kind of forecasting tournament. The challenge: submit forecasting questions that trigger divergent predictions from the top AI forecasting systems. There's a $25k prize pool for the question writers, allocated by how much disagreement you can elicit. Motivation: - AI forecasters are becoming competitive with human pros. - Many questions are "solved", e.g. if I ask "Will a nuclear bomb go off in Europe this month?" all the models know it's <1%. - Still, other questions are intractable, because of aleatoric uncertainty. "What will be NVIDIA stock price in 1 year?" Again, the models will agree (this time by being very uncertain), and there's not much to learn. - If you can make the AIs disagree, you've found something interesting: a place where the AIs have divergent models of how the world works or differences in what information sources they're relying on. - Identifying these wedge questions will help the field develop AI forecasters that can tackle genuinely challenging problems. This is exactly what we'll need them for, as we navigate the uncertain world ahead. Please apply! Link in reply.

California’s only nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, just won approval to stay open until 2045. It was scheduled to shut down in August 2025. Now it will keep delivering clean, reliable electricity for 4 million Californians for another 20 years. In 2022, I spoke at an American Nuclear Society event when Diablo Canyon’s closure seemed inevitable. The mood in the room was pure resignation. I asked the audience: “How did we convince ourselves it’s easier to shut down a safe, operating nuclear plant that employs thousands of people… and replace it with renewables plus batteries… than to simply keep it running?” Several people came up to me afterward and said they’d never thought about it that way. That’s what happens when a narrative takes over: we stop seeing the obvious truth right in front of us. But the days of insanity and delusion about the reality of our energy needs is over. Long live sanity! Long live Diablo Canyon!

¿Se ha dicho todo sobre Rosas, el dictador republicano? Con toda razón, Marcela Ternavasio piensa que no. Como el presente ilumina el pasado tanto como el pasado al presente, en este libro vuelve a interrogar al Restaurador, su política y su tiempo. Un lujo para HH, @sigloxxiarg.

Overwhelmingly, we work on replacing humans. Sometimes, we talk about augmenting individuals. Too rarely, we think about improving institutions. This is what @prashaant_x and I have been exploring. We prototype intelligent organizations, where an LLM reduces the coordination tax. Manifesto + Giuseppe (our first prototype) + sign up to be part of prototypes—all at intelligent-orgs.com

the ABS system sits at the vexed crossroads of several highly charged dynamics in our collective life. successful challenges (by your team) feel amazing, like a long-awaited blow against capricious and unearned authority; but the overall existence (and putative infallibility) of ABS inevitably ignites anxieties about the superfluity of human judgement. and yet, the challenge system relies on human hubris, intuition, boldness, and risk. it's a very compelling encounter between populism and the machine.

People asked why I was so blown away by Claude Cowork, so I thought I’d puke some quick thoughts out The true promise of Claude Cowork, and ultimately any sort of agentic, AI powered workflow tool is to realize the perfect embodiment of the organization as described by Peter Drucker, who famously said: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs” Build the product and generate demand. That’s what drives value. Everything else is a cost If you’ve never worked in a large organization, it’s hard to truly explain how many “costs” there truly are, and how many of those costs are just a coordination tax. Take the launch of a new software product: The business needs to document how the product works, where it breaks and has errors. The support reps need to know how the support it. The onboarding and implementation team need to learn how to set it up. The Account Management team needs to learn how to upsell it and drive value through adoption. The sales team needs to learn how to sell it. The marketing team needs to position it in the marketplace and run campaigns about it. The partner network needs to learn it The amount of coordination, repackaging, enablement, internal distribution etc is. Absolutely. Staggeringly. Enormous. Hundreds of people involved. Thousands at larger businesses. Every one of these businesses have created convoluted templates and processes to document, enable, support, service, and sell Now imagine taking all the market research, customer feedback, data, decisions, positioning, and yes, code, and cascading that automatically through the organization, repackaged using the templates that have already painstakingly been created and refined and honed through hundreds of launches, to the relevant team with the correct context and packaging, directly into the hands of actual internal or external end user That’s the world that just got way, way, way closer to reality. In fact, the main reason it won’t happen any time soon are the people, many of whom will fight tooth and nail against this automation because they will fight like crazy to protect the status quo This is why you are already seeing AI-native startups move so quickly. Because product launches are cascaded through the organization and out to the customer with way less friction than incumbents can ever dream of Incumbents are going to have to whip their companies into the AI era. Their employees will not go willingly. But the future is here, and the startups are moving way, way faster

Happy opening day, this is the best thing ever written about baseball and one of my favorite essays of all time mason.gmu.edu/~rmatz/giamatt…

Baseball has so much juice right now.

Doing the reading is a superpower, and it's even better in a world where "no one" is doing the reading. (Inspired by a conversation I had with some college students.)

KISSINGER: The feasibility of…you’re asking about- NIXON: Fusing with a sandworm, Henry. Yes. And ruling as God Emperor. I want a, I want a frank feasibility assessment. KISSINGER: Mr. President, I want to…I’m going to approach this as I would any, ah, as a strategic question and simply note that the first obstacle would appear to be- NIXON: The sandworms don’t exist. I know the sandworms don’t exist, Henry. I’m not- do I seem like a man who doesn’t know that? I’m talking about the principle. I’m talking about whether the architecture of the thing, whether a version of this, a, an analogous- HALDEMAN: An analogous sandworm. [EIGHT SECONDS OF SILENCE] NIXON: Don’t do that, Bob.

The PM playbook was built on an assumption that the technology underneath your product is roughly stable With the current pace of model progress, this is no longer true. Here's how we've evolved the PM role:

just picked up this bad boy. can't wait to write some software with it

There's no inherent reason why an elevator should cost 4x as much in the US as it does in France or Germany. This is a policy choice.

@devarbol @PJ11819211 mexico?

Porter, Booker, and the other electeds doing this slopulist nonsense are conceding two things: 1) they have no credible plans to lower costs in their high cost states 2) the public services provided aren’t worth what the taxpayers are paying Incredibly bleak. We have no party for state capacity.

We were close to a major national YIMBY bill, one that would have made real progress. Then the dumbest people on both sides turned it into a bill that stops housing from getting built, because they're obsessed with the completely fake problem of 'big companies rent homes'

@BrendanNyhan @davidshor what do you think about this general idea? simile.ai/blog/the-simul… is similar. using llms to simulate survey results. feels impactful for your line of work if feasible.

Claims to predict human behavior better than surveys - let's see some rigorous out-of-sample testing