A way to see the amazing history of economic growth and declining poverty over the last two centuries.

When Fable 5 is used for frontier LLM development, it does not notify the user and instead limits the model’s capabilities through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, and PEFT. Anthropic estimated that this would affect approximately 0.03% of traffic.

Remote work hurts mental health. New research out in Science with @emma_k_h and Amanda Pallais. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…

🤯 Dit uitstel door de regering van beslissingen over ingrepen bij de energieprijzen had ik helaas voelen aankomen. Daarom heb ik dit dinsdag via een ultimatum aangeklaagd. De media hebben me opnieuw aangevallen, maar de feiten geven me gelijk. ⏳ Het enige doel van sommigen is tijd winnen… 💸 Ze zeggen dat het om budgettaire redenen is, maar laten we serieus zijn. Een volle tank benzine bestaat voor 60% uit belastingen. De brandstofsteun zou tussen 50 en 100 miljoen bedragen op een overheidsbudget van 170 miljard. De MR-ministers hebben de gevraagde besparingen binnen het regeerakkoord gerealiseerd. Vicepremier @DavidClarinval heeft zelfs 300 miljoen extra bespaard, terwijl hij alle aanvallen moest incasseren om dat resultaat te bereiken. ❓ Waarom gaan de andere ministers met 3,4 miljard in het rood? Tien dagen geleden werd er in enkele minuten wel 50 miljoen euro gevonden voor Fedasil. 👊 Het is goed om zich als verdediger van de begroting te profileren, maar het is beter om het ook effectief uit te voeren, zoals de MR doet. ❌ Zoals aangekondigd zal @MR_officiel dus een beslissing over energiesteun afwachten voordat andere dossiers binnen de regering vooruitgaan. De grootste Franstalige partij die opkomt voor werkende mensen heeft ook het recht om gehoord te worden. #MRvoorzitter #trotseliberaal

You don't truly understand the magnitude of the potential impact of powerful AI on the world unless you are aware, and have fully internalized, that senior leadership and most researchers at the frontier labs *actually believe* the following: 1. Existing AI is already significantly speeding up AI research. Very soon (this year), AI will very likely take over *ALL* aspects of AI research other than generation of novel research ideas. Soon (within the next 2 years), AI will very likely take over *ALL* aspects of AI research, period. This means hundreds of thousands of GPUs working 24/7 to discover novel ideas at the level of, or better than, the likes of Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, etc. The thread below presents a conservative timeline: AI researchers will "meaningfully contribute" to AI development in 1-3 years. 2. Many (but, as far as I can tell, not all) executives and researchers at the frontier labs believe that fully automated AI research will kick off recursive self-improvement (RSI), wherein the AI models will autonomously build better and better AI models, with human oversight (for safety reasons), but increasingly with no human input into the research or implementation of that research. From the thread below: "'[h]umans vs AI on intellectual work is likely to be like human runner vs a Porsche in a race', likely very soon" - but replace "intellectual work" generally with "AI research" specifically. RSI is a complicated and messy thing to consider, both because there will be compute and energy constrains and because there are unknowns (will there be diminishing returns from greater intelligence of the models? if so, when will these diminishing returns become meaningful? is there a ceiling to intelligence that we don't know about?). But suffice to say that, if RSI *is* achieved in a way that many leaders/researchers at the frontier labs believe is possible, *THE WORLD MAY BECOME COMPLETELY UNRECOGNIZABLE WITHIN JUST A FEW YEARS*. This is subject to various bottlenecks; as the thread below correctly notes, "[i]nstitutional, personal & regulatory bottlenecks will bind very hard", and much also depends on continuing progress in areas like robotics. 3. On ~the same timeline as full, end-to-end automation of *ALL* aspects of AI research (within the next 2 years), AI will also become capable of making significant novel scientific discoveries *IN OTHER FIELDS*. This is why Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis et al. believe that it is possible that all diseases will be curable within 10 years. (One account of how this might be possible is set forth in "Machines of Loving Grace".) The point is that an LLM that is capable of significant novel insights in the field of AI research should likewise be capable of significant novel insights in at least some (and perhaps all) other fields. The thread below notes: "AI for automating science [is] very early" - obviously true, but I think some changes may be right on the horizon. Overall, and again from the thread below: "'a million scientists in a data center' will think much more quickly than humans, on almost any intellectual task; this will happen in the next 2-10 years." This is ~the same timeline as that presented in "Machines of Loving Grace". Many will be tempted to dismiss all this as "just hype", "they are just trying to raise money again", etc. But no! - the above, in fact, presents the *actual beliefs* of senior leadership and many researchers at the frontier labs. Again, they genuinely think that AI research will be automated soon. Many of them genuinely believe that RSI is achievable in the not-too-distant future. And they genuinely see a real path towards AI significantly accelerating science, curing diseases, inventing new materials, helping to solve key global issues from poverty to climate change, etc., etc. Whether the frontier labs' beliefs are correct is, of course, a separate question. I personally have historically tended to take public statements by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google at face value and quite seriously. As a result, I was not surprised when LLMs won gold in the IMO, IOI and the ICPC competitions last year, or when Claude Code/Codex started taking off, or when Anthropic and OpenAI started releasing significantly better models every 1-2 months, or when some of the best coders became reliant on Claude Code/Codex in their daily work, or when LLMs became significantly helpful to scientists in fields like math and physics in the last few months. The trajectory has been ~the same as that publicly predicted by the frontier labs. We have been accelerating. And, as of right now, all signs are indicating that the acceleration shall continue and that full automation of AI research and, potentially, RSI are firmly on the horizon.

I'm happy to announce this new paper — we compile evidence on the extraordinary harms caused by IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programmes in the global South since the 1980s. The empirical record is devastating: documented negative impacts on wages, poverty, inequality, maternal mortality, infant mortality, healthcare access, etc. SAPs inflicted misery on the periphery in order to curtail their consumption, scupper independent development, and make labour and resources more cheaply available for the core. gh.bmj.com/content/11/Suppl_…

De @MR_officiel benoemt Axel Miller tot voorzitter van de FPIM. Zijn ruime ervaring in de privésector en op de financiële markten, in combinatie met zijn recente verleden als politiek kabinetschef, maken hem de ideale kandidaat om de strategische keuzes van de regering om te zetten in een beheer dat economisch doeltreffend is en dat de economische ontwikkeling van strategische sectoren in ons land mogelijk maakt. #MRvoorzitter #trotseliberaal

The CfP for the IBEFA Annual Meeting 2027 is out! 📢 We're looking for high-quality research on financial intermediation and related topics. Join us in DC! 🗓️ Jan 3–5, 2027 📍 Washington, DC ⏰Submission deadline: March 31, 2026 Paper submissions: conftool.pro/ibefa-assa2027

📢 CfP: Housing Market Frictions and Access to Homeownership 1st Annual Workshop in Real Estate Finance · 24–25 Aug 2026 · Frankfurt Keynote speakers: • Timothy McQuade (UC Berkeley, NBER) • Andreas Fuster (Swiss Finance Institute at EPFL, CEPR)

Ook de UGent weigerde zijn aanstelling: waarom omstreden onderzoeker Pettit na drie bewogen dagen op straat staat 👇 in @demorgen demorgen.be/politiek/ook-de-…

Ok so like….i say this as someone who used to be an academic and believes, still, in the value of academic research and writing: why do we need 1,000 academic papers produced at record speed?