New post on the difference between 3 notions of productivity gain from AI (AKA uplift). Uplift on old tasks (AI-speedup on tasks you do in avg 2022 day) Uplift on new tasks (AI-speedup on tasks you do in avg 2026 day) Uplift in value (AI increasing your goals accomplished)

Forthcoming in the AER: "Talent Hoarding in Organizations" by Ingrid Haegele. aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.12…

AI strategies everywhere hinge on widely available American frontier AI. Post-Mythos, amid compute crunches, security concerns and distillation crackdowns, that paradigm is under threat. Today, I argue the era of widespread access to frontier AI is almost over.

UK AISI has access to a "newer Mythos Preview checkpoint", which now performs significantly better on its cybersecurity benchmarks: TLO: 6/10 attempts successful (up from 3/10 for the original Mythos) Cooling Tower: 3/10 attempts successful (previously unsolved by AI)

gpt-5.5 prompt for codex seems to have a duplicated line trying to get it to not talk about creatures? Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. [...] Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query gh link: github.com/openai/codex/blob…

When Claude Mythos found zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser, the US government was caught flat-footed. The White House stood up an emergency interagency task force. Treasury pulled bank CEOs into an impromptu meeting. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) – the agency charged with protecting US critical infrastructure – and as of late April still reportedly lacked access to Mythos. This kind of surprise is preventable. The Trump admin has already tasked the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) with building state capacity to understand and predict future national security-relevant AI developments. But CAISI has been severely underfunded. It’s currently a $15M pilot project. In a new research report, @arthurctellis and I estimate CAISI needs ~$84M to fully deliver on its mandate. In other words, for the cost of a single F-35A fighter jet, the US government could have real situational awareness on frontier AI and not be surprised by future Mythos moments. This situational awareness can be used to inform policy and asks to the AI labs, including governance surrounding model release, safeguards, know-your-customer regimes, security protocols, and product specifications. But without a detailed understanding of these models’ capabilities — what they’re good at, how effectively they discriminate between offensive and defensive activities, whether they’re securely implemented — we’re flying blind. To estimate what it’d cost to give the government these capabilities, we translated every CAISI tasking from the AI Action Plan into FTEs and dollars, calibrated against peer evaluation orgs like METR and Anthropic's interpretability team. Two scenarios: - Limited CAISI ($26M, 56 FTE) — partial coverage of its most important taskings - Equipped CAISI ($84M, 184 FTE) — full mandate The administration's FY2027 PBR already proposed $27M for CAISI, a meaningful increase, but this was before Mythos revealed the urgency of the full mandate. To close the remaining gap: - Congress can increase FY2027 appropriations pass the EPIC Act (creates a NIST Foundation) - The Executive can reallocate NIST STRS, tap Commerce's NRE Fund, request $84M in FY2028 PBR The price tag is small relative to comparable investments. $84M is: → A medium DARPA project → ~1 hour of the Department of War's operating budget → Less than half of NIST's Information Technology Laboratory budget And it's still less than what peer governments spend on CAISI’s peer institutions, pound-for-pound. As a fraction of their overall government budgets: UK AISI: 57 ppm Japan AISI: 32 ppm Canadian AISI: 8 ppm Current CAISI is: 1 ppm For the cost of one F-35, the administration can fully fund its own AI readiness mandate and equip the US government to anticipate the next big AI breakthrough. Full report: ifp.org/funding-for-caisi/

🇹🇷🇬🇭 A single Turkish ship anchored off Ghana's coast generates over a quarter of the country's electricity. The MV Karadeniz Powership Osman Khan is 299 meters long and pumps out up to 480 MW of power. It has been doing this since 2017. No power plant to build. No years of construction delays. Karpowership, the Turkish private company behind it, has quietly turned this model into a global business, deploying floating plants to countries with chronic energy deficits across Africa and beyond. Africa has an infrastructure gap that traditional investment has failed to close for decades. Turkey found a way to monetize that gap with engineering.

For 45 years, Berkeley built virtually no new housing. By the mid-2010s, it was the most expensive college town in America. Shortly thereafter, YIMBYs took over and kicked off a building boom. Today, nominal rents are below 2018 rates—remarkable progress on affordability.