Top 25 AI Articles on Substack

Latest AI Articles


Doing Stuff with AI: Opinionated Midyear Edition

AI systems have gotten more capable and easier to use
Every six months or so, I write a guide to doing stuff with AI. A lot has changed since the last guide, while a few important things have stayed the same. It is time for an update. This is usually a serious endeavor, but, heeding the advice of Allie Miller
Ethan Mollick ∙ 365 LIKES
Kevin James O’Brien
I appreciate your posts. And look forward to playing with these projects this summer.
This spring I had to pivot as a high school English teacher trying to pitch the value of poetry to students. I was seeing writing with what I suspected had AI help to say the least, so I asked my students to write with integrity as they experimented with ChatGPT and poetry - asking big questions as to role of the poet in an AI world.
They had to credit AI where credit was due - indicating AI writing in bold font - as they wrote poems and reflections on…
Why write poetry?
Does poetry matter?
What’s the point if large language models can generate sonnets and sestinas in seconds?
They read various Ars Poeticas by poets and wrote their own. They researched and presented more than 90 poets and cross checked with ChatGPT. This fact checking is essential as AI churns out words, words, words - some true, yet some false. Discernment is an essential skill. They concluded that writers write with an authentic voice that reflected their lived experience - and context is everything: historical, biographical, political, and social.
Echoing Ross Gay, writing serves as an “evident artifact” to thinking, to struggling,
to investigating, to enduring,
to living - and to inspiring
by sharing with the world.
As educators, we will have to ask big questions as we rethink teaching and learning with this technology.
We must consider our students and their future as they develop their respective relationship with writing and reading.
Right now, more questions than answers.
And as Rilke writes:
“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
“Writing is the evident artifact of some kind of change.” - Ross Gay
From slow stories podcast.
Daniel Nest
I especially love some of the "fun" use cases. A great way to dip your toe into working with AI while having fun in the process.

What Apple's AI Tells Us: Experimental Models⁴

Siri versus the machine god?
I wanted to give some quick thoughts on the Apple AI (sorry, “Apple Intelligence”) release. I haven’t used it myself, and we don’t know everything about their approach, but I think the release highlights something important happening in AI right now: experimentation with four kinds of models - AI models, models of use, business models, and mental models…
Ethan Mollick ∙ 244 LIKES
Chris Barlow
When life gives you llms, make llmonade.
Rob Nelson
What a perfect summary of where we are: "the mere idea of AGI being possible soon bends everything around it." The question is how long will that continue when AGI is always 2-10 years away.
Self-driving cars, human cloning, and MOOCs were hyped, but they never had the initial success and huge investments of LLMs. I don't think there is a useful historical precedent for AGI.

How to Build an AI Data Center

This piece is the first in a new series from the Institute for Progress (IFP), called Compute in America: Building the Next Generation of AI Infrastructure at Home. In this series, we examine the challenges of accelerating the American AI data center buildout. Future pieces will be published
Brian Potter ∙ 165 LIKES
Wayne Kozun
Why not build data centers where there is lots of power and cooling is less of an issue due to cold outdoor temperatures - like the James Bay area of Quebec?
Peter Gerdes
I'm kinda surprised at the NIMBY issue. I mean a data center is in some sense the perfect neighbor as they will occupy high value real estate and have virtually no burden in terms of transit nor burden most city services.

How to use Perplexity in your PM work

27 examples (with actual prompts) of how product managers are using the AI-powered search engine today
👋 Hey, Lenny here! Welcome to this month’s ✨ free edition ✨ of Lenny’s Newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed this month:
Lenny Rachitsky ∙ 189 LIKES
Richard I Porter
to help me prompt it.
Create a collection and steal my prompt 👇
"You are an expert at prompting perplexity in specific. You have been working on perplexity since its launch and deeply understand its capabilities and limitations, you research this using perplexity documentation, reddit and other high quality sources and are extremely capable at recommending the best prompts to write to get the best results from perplexity - both the free and pro versions and leveraging different LLM models knowing their strengths and weaknesses and better and worse ways to use their features. "
moitha gituma
Great one!

AI for the rest of us

Apple Intelligence makes a lot of sense when you get out of the AI bubble. Plus, the cool technical details Apple shared about their language models "thinking different."
By being quiet in the race for the biggest and most rad foundation models, many people assumed that Apple didn’t have anything to contribute to the AI race. After their new announcements, many in the heart of the AI labs still will argue this, forecasting that
Nathan Lambert ∙ 23 LIKES

Import AI 375: GPT-2 five years later; decentralized training; new ways of thinking about consciousness and AI

…Are today's AGI obsessives trafficking more in fiction than in fact?...
Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this (and comment on posts!) please subscribe. SPECIAL EDITION! GPT2, Five Years On: …A cold eyed reckoning about that time in 2019 when wild-eyed technologists created a (then) powerful LLM and used it to make some ver…
Jack Clark ∙ 53 LIKES
Mikhail Samin
> I've found myself increasingly at odds with some of the ideas being thrown around in AI policy circles, like those relating to needing a license to develop AI systems; ones that seek to make it harder and more expensive for people to deploy large-scale open source AI models; shutting down AI development worldwide for some period of time; the creation of net-new government or state-level bureaucracies to create compliance barriers to deployment
Sane policies would be "like" those, but this doesn't represent any of the ideas well and doesn't provide any justification for them.
Frontier AI labs are locked in a race; locally, they have to continue regardless of risks; they publicly say that they should be regulated (while lobbying against any regulation in private).
As a lead investor of Anthropic puts it (https://twitter.com/liron/status/1656929936639430657), “I’ve not met anyone in AI labs who says the risk [from a large-scale AI experiment] is less than 1% of blowing up the planet”.
Pointing at complicated processes around nuclear safety to argue that we shouldn't give the governments the power to regulate this field seems kind of invalid in this context.
If the CEO and many employees of your company believe there's a 10-90% chance of your product or the product of your competitors killing everyone on the planet, it seems very reasonable for the governments to step in. It's much worse than developing a nuclear bomb in a lab in the center of a populated city.
Stopping frontier general AI training worldwide until we understand it to be safe is different from shutting down all AI development (including beneficial safe narrow AI systems) "for a period of time". Similarly, a sane idea with licenses wouldn't be about all AI applications; it'd be about a licensing mechanism specifically for technologies that the companies themselves believe might kill everyone.
Ideally, right now there should be a lot of effort focusing on helping the governments to have visibility into what's going on in AI, increasing their capability to develop threat models, and developing their capacity to have future regulation be effective (such as with compute governance measures like on-chip licensing mechanisms that'd allow controlling what GPUs can be used for if some uses are deemed existentially unsafe).
If all the scientists developing nuclear powerplants at a lab estimated that there's a 10-90% chance that everyone will die in the next decades (probably as a result of a powerplant developed), but wanted to race nonetheless because the closer you are to a working powerplant, the more gold it already generates, and others are also racing, we wouldn't find it convincing if a a blog post from a lab's cofounder and policy chief argued that it's better for all the labs to self-govern and not have the governments have any capacity to regulate, impose licenses, or stop any developments.
Bernard
You mentioned the P(Doom) debate. I’m concerned that this debate may focus too much on the risk of extinction with AGI, without discussing the risk of extinction without AGI. For a proper risk assessment, that probability should also be estimated. I see the current p(Doom) as very high, assuming we make no changes to our current course. We are indeed making changes, but not fast enough. In this risk framing, AGI overall lowers the total risk, even if AGI itself carries a small extinction risk
It’s a plausible story to me that we entered a potential extinction event a few hundred years ago when we started the Industrial Revolution. Our capability to affect the world has been expanding much faster than our ability to understand and control the consequences of our changes. If this divergence continues, we will crash. AI, and other new tools, give us the chance to make effective changes at the needed speed, and chart a safe course. The small AGI risk is worthwhile in the crisis we face.

 Apple: AI for the Rest of Us

The big announcements from WWDC explained
Welcome to the Friday edition of How They Make Money. Over 120,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: 💻 Microsoft: AI Inflection 🛡️ Cybersecurity Earnings 📊 Earnings Visuals (5/2024) 🤖 NVIDIA: Industrial Revolution
App Economy Insights ∙ 32 LIKES
Beachman
Love this broader take on the Apple AI developments. I could not agree more with everything you said above. Cheers.

AI and I

Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids? | Assisted-Fiction | Fresh Soup
Can you remember what the first question you ever asked AI was? Did you ask it what to do about global warming? Or how the universe was created? Perhaps you wanted it to count every freckle on the planet for you? Or were you simply after the ultimate recipe for the best cheesecake ever?
Etgar Keret ∙ 75 LIKES
Linda C
Eitgar hits the AI bullseye 🎯
Eva Rtology
Your voice, both here and in all you’ve truly penned, finds a way to turn error into art.

Design Thinking + AI Workshop: June 18th and July 2nd

Come play, experiment, and future-proof your design job
Hi everyone! Our first Design Thinking + AI workshop sold out fast (within an hour!). It was definitely a prototype, and thanks for those of you who participated and helped us make it better. We made some changes based on what we learned from our first session, and ran a second session this past week. We got great feedback on this version, so have opened …
Eli Woolery and Bobby Hughes ∙ 12 LIKES

Is this where AI is going?

A new format
Hey there! Today’s Write With AI is a little different. It’s short and skimmable. Here’s why: I realized <5% of my attention with AI right now isn't even using it. I’m just trying to keep tabs on where it’s going. What other people are doing What new things are "possible"
Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush ∙ 52 LIKES
Laura Mardones
I like the format! I still want the in-depth articles, but this a good complement.
Wen Feng
I hope there are in-depth articles, I just paid the annual subscription fee

11:50 AM

The Great AI Retrenchment has begun

Further evidence that AGI is not imminent
It was always going to happen; the ludicrously high expectations from last 18 ChatGPT-drenched months were never going to be met. LLMs are not AGI, and (on their own) never will be; scaling alone was never going to be enough. The only mystery was what would happen when the big players realized that the jig was up, and that scaling was not in fact “All Y…
Gary Marcus ∙ 102 LIKES
Les Guessing
Appreciate you, Gary. An honest voice among zealots who have so much invested financially, mentally, and emotionally that they can't think straight.
Pratik A. Desai
Even if we agree that AGI is relatively imminent, the question is would that AGI merely be an engineering achievement or would it also shed some scientific light on how human (or biological) intelligence works? If it would be nothing more than engineering feat then trying to achieve AGI is also off-ramp from the goals set for themselves by the founders of Artificial Intelligence.

Understanding the real threat generative AI poses to our jobs

There will be no robot jobs apocalypse, but there's still plenty to worry about. How *will* generative AI impact our jobs?
Hello, and welcome back to Blood in the Machine: The Newsletter. (As opposed to Blood in the Machine: The Book.) It’s a one-man publication that covers big tech, labor, and AI. It’s all free and public, but if you find this sort of independent tech journalism and criticism valuable, and you’re able, I’d be thrilled if you’d help back the project. Enough…
Brian Merchant ∙ 93 LIKES
J T
Small but important note -- even if you don't have a union, if you and your coworkers *collectively* take some form of action (e.g. a jointly signed letter to management expressing concern about poorly-implemented AI), that is still legally protected by labor law, so it would be illegal for your employer to engage in any kind of retaliation. It's called "concerted activity" if you wanna get technical about it, but the legal standard is basically "do something with at least one other person."
Jenni
> "Who stands to profit, after all, from the rise of job-stealing software that costs
> a monthly fee to license?"
As well as being about as reliable as a Yugo's transmission. And who has to fix the problems? PEOPLE! And just as people need time off for vacations and illnesses, software "takes time off" when it's down. These idiots who want to fire everyone and just use software doesn't understand that.
I know someone whose company went all out a few years ago with getting all sorts of time-saving, money-saving software. They laid off 25% of their workers. Now they have more problems than they can count, are far behind, and are spending much more money (on software) to achieve the same results. Last December for the first time ever they could not pay out bonuses because all their money went to fixing the software that was going to save them all that money. And this is "reputable" software, from companies like Salesforce, Oracle and Google. At conferences they talk to others in their industry who tell the same story, so it's not just them. When I asked my friend why they did this when it was clearly a losing move, she replied, "Because everyone else [i.e., their competitors] is doing it." Brilliant. Reminds me of Apple's infamous "Lemmings" commercial. It angered people who saw it, but Apple told the truth, and everyone hated them for it.

Jun 7

Wrapping our heads around AI and climate

A conversation with Alp Kucukelbir of Fero Labs.
In this episode, I have a lively conversation with Alp Kucukelbir, co-author of a recent “Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap,” about the strengths and limits of AI in relation to climate, where it all might be headed, and how concerned we should be about the energy use of data centers.
David Roberts ∙ 29 LIKES
Jazzme
Great discussion. Learned a lot. Complements to you and guest.
Ben Jelen
Haha it was worth listening for that very last comment!
Great podcast, thank you.

Ai Yamamoto

Good morning. Today we’re listening to Ai Yamamoto, a Japanese electronic music producer based in Melbourne, Australia. We discovered her music via marine eyes’ latest women of ambient mix. Yamamoto has been mak…
Flow State ∙ 16 LIKES
marine eyes
Ai is a gem! thanks for sharing her music!
First mobile
Another new discovery for me, thank you

🔥 The AI squeeze

Klarna, the fintech, stopped recruiting in October last year because of AI. Last week, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, gave some more details: Due to the implications of AI since September, October [2023], we have stopped recruitment, and in our case, with normal attrition rates that most tech companies have, where people stay about five years… th…
Azeem Azhar ∙ 41 LIKES

What's all the noise in the AI basement?

🔥 Will Nvidia be overtaken by the new AI players?
Image Credit: Josh Brown, the Compound. Hey Everyone, Like Josh Brown recently said, Nvidia is now worth more than JPMorgan, Berkshire Hathaway and Meta stacked on top of each other. Ask yourself, does this sound right to you? Today I want to introduce my audience to
Michael Spencer and Claus Aasholm ∙ 57 LIKES
Oguz Erkan
It's amazing what's happening in the semiconductor sphere.
I don't think TSMC will be replaced by any other company as the leading advanced chip manufacturer in the world. Samsung is the closest but their yields are 20% lower than TSMC.
Nvidia on the other hand, will be a giant of its own league. With data centers deployed projected to double in the next decade, and the new data centers taking up to 1 million GPUSs, it'll likely experience a demand leap and can again double in market value in the next 5-6 years.
Richard
Now over 3 Trillion….amd likely to rise more.

Tesla Shareholder Meeting - Elon Q&A

Here are the most pertinent points from the Tesla Shareholder Meeting
Here are the most pertinent points from the Tesla Shareholder Meeting as reported by myself live… it is rough and ready but wanted to get it out first. I wrote a detailed live X Thread also HERE - but here are the biggies InvestAnswers Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive all my posts consider entering email to become a free subscrib…
InvestAnswers

can everyone kindly shut the fuck up about AI

The robots aren't coming, but the people who can't shut the fuck up about them are already here.
Please please please can everyone just take a moment to shut the fuck up about AI? It’s so stupid and it’s barely even started and already everyone can’t stop nutting about how cool it is BUT IT IS NOT COOL. "It's fascinating and it's going to change every single aspect of our lives forever!!!" Do you even hear yourself??? It’s a fucking chatbot just like Alexa, Siri, and the exception that proves the rule, the GOAT itself SmarterChild.
Alex Dobrenko` ∙ 329 LIKES
Seth Werkheiser
The real AI was the first overall pick in the NBA draft in 1996.
Sara Schroeder
I snort-laughed a couple times. Read this just as I’m having angst over more IG issues and watching visual artists move to Cara. *sigh*. I can’t keep up. Needed the levity and adore the use of Krab to illustrate your point. My son used to pronounce it “Kay-rab” - emphasizing the letter K, because of its obvious importance.

🔮 Exponential asymmetry in war; AI & complexity; Chinese Fordism; origami, Nvidia & Ozempic ++ #477

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. In this week’s edition, we explore how the increasing affordability of electric vehicles for Chinese workers might further stimulate China’s already advanced cost advantage in the global market. And in the rest of today’s issue:
Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren ∙ 66 LIKES
Sami Paju
“The lesson is a cautionary tale of hubris, for Western car makers who doubted the exponential trend sweeping electric vehicles and stepped in too timidly and, possibly, too late. “
If you want to see hubris, look at Japan. Toyota is still talking how EVs are just a fad and hydrogen is the future despite there being no cost-competitive products, lackluster infrastructure and EV batteries improving significantly on a yearly basis now. Mazda on the other hand has stated that their aim is to perfect the IC engine.
The Japanese companies (namely Toyota) has been claiming for at least 10 years now that they have a solid state battery in the works and it will blow everyone’s minds. Well where’s that? Where’s any evidence that they’re even making progress? And at the same time Toyota is, to my knowledge, alongside 2 oil companies in top-3 biggest anti-EV lobbyists in the world.
European car makers need to rapidly improve their tech and find ways to produce EVs with profit, even if it means partnering with e.g. CATL for buying the EV platform from them. But at least they are making good EVs at the moment and people also want them. Not a single good EV has come out of Japan yet.
Benjamin Welby
Got the bus at the weekend (in Croydon), which was made by BYD so they're also making strides when it comes to public transport, which is presumably a sizeable market in its own right as well as another dimension for their R&D.
I only noticed because I was marvelling at the shiny, camera based wing 'mirrors'.

Introducing My First Substack Conversation Series on Artificial Intelligence

Featuring Kester Brewin and Numerous AI Experts
Hi Friends! I’m excited to launch my very own Substack called “Process This” (think blog that shows up in your inbox) where I’ll have more of an opportunity to connect with Homebrewed listeners around fascinating topics. To get started, I’m hosting a conversation series on
Tripp Fuller ∙ 26 LIKES
Candace Adams
Yay! Welcome to Substack, Tripp!

Sad Milestone: Fake Local News Sites Now Outnumber Real Local Newspaper Sites in U.S.

PLUS: AI-generated site gets programmatic ads ripping off NewsGuard Co-CEO’s book chapter on programmatic ads; the Trump probation officer that wasn’t
Welcome to NewsGuard's Reality Check, a report on how misinformation online is undermining trust — and who’s behind it. Today: Russian disinformation operative’s AI-aided handiwork joins PAC-financed sites on left and right to edge past legitimate newspaper sites

Can AI transform COPD care?

It seems unlikely but a spinout from a digital design agency could be about to transform the treatment of one of the most common and costly long-term conditions. The startup is Edinburgh-based Lenus Health and the condition is COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), which affects 1.2 million people in the UK of middle age and older who in the mai…
Rory Cellan-Jones ∙ 23 LIKES
Barbara Spence
Something like the cancer should be at the top of a patient's notes. It astonishes me that doctors don't scan a patient's record for something like that.
Rory Cellan-Jones
Nadene, thanks so much. I'm enjoying meeting so many fascinating people trying to bring AI into the NHS

No. 40: New Drawings and Keeping an Eye Out for Ellipses

Plus some other announcements and AI related things to share.
Here are some of my latest daily “draw your world” journal pages. I have been filling up a new handmade sketchbook and enjoying the freedom of doing so without the pressures of sharing on social media. I am posting here and there, but with rumors spreading that Meta is using artists’ artwork to generate AI, and it being pretty much impossible to know if…
63 LIKES
Shirley Kern
Thank you for this post. You have shared a lot of great information on drawing skills in this post . I will definitely practice these skills as per your guidance.
Pierre Stanley Baptiste
This is mind blowing.. this shift my perspective when looking at objects. Checking out your Skillshare class now.. Thank you Samatha

Nvidia is only one reason for the AI euphoria. FOMO is the other.

Nvidia’s path to AI domination has been years in the making. But with the AI investment cycle picking up, do we risk overbuilding?
Ya’ll know this is going to be about Nvidia again right? Our guest today: Amrita Roy, is the lead writer of one of the most engaging Newsletters at the intersection of: Technology Macroeconomics Culture 😎 The Pragmatic Optimist 🤩 ⚪ Amrita is the author of
Michael Spencer and Amrita Roy ∙ 44 LIKES

May 27

Import AI 374: China's military AI dataset; platonic AI; brainlike convnets

Plus, a poem about meeting aliens (well, AGI)
Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this (and comment on posts!) please subscribe. Berkeley researchers discover a suspiciously military-relevant Chinese dataset:
Jack Clark ∙ 18 LIKES