Despite this election, I remain an optimist about America and the world. Humanity will continue to produce new ideas and new innovations to improve our lives. Good people will continue to come together to improve the world. And the political tide will turn. We'll make it so.

Very much agree. Rob Reid @Rob_Reid has made a detailed exposition of costs and approach for how to harden ourselves to get ready for bioweapons made using AI.

if the admin wants people to believe the anthropic decision was made out of genuine security necessity rather than grievance-driven retaliation, high ranking officials could simply stop posting like this

All of these were reported over the past month: • A new pancreatic cancer drug, daraxonrasib, that roughly doubles survival in late-stage disease • A precision lung cancer drug, lorlatinib, that kept 55 percent of patients progression-free after 7 years, versus 3 percent on the old drug • A prostate cancer drug, talazoparib, that halves the risk of progression • An endometrial cancer drug, dostarlimab, where 58 percent of patients hadn't progressed after 4 years, versus 16 percent on chemo alone • An early-detection blood test, the NHS Galleri test, that quadrupled cancer detection but missed its main goal • An mRNA cancer vaccine that halved the risk of melanoma recurrence when added to Keytruda • The most effective weight loss drug so far, retatrutide, which cut body weight by about 28 percent • The first in vivo gene editing therapy, which cut hereditary angioedema attacks by 87 percent from a single injection • A one-time gene edit, VERVE-102, that lowered LDL cholesterol by 62 percent • A feat of pharmaceutical synthesis that raised enlicitide's manufacturing yield 14-fold using engineered enzymes • A functional cure for hepatitis B, bepirovirsen, that cleared the virus in about 20 percent of patients • The discovery that human cells can swap chromosome-sized DNA through nanotubes • An ancestor of CRISPR, VIPR, found in bacteriophages, that silences genes without cutting DNA • A preventive Covid-19 pill, ensitrelvir, that cut symptom risk by 67 percent after exposure • The first PROTAC drug, vepdegestrant, which destroys a disease-causing protein rather than blocking it Every month, Niko and I write a round up digging into the latest news in biotech and medicine, and this month's was astonishing. We share some thoughts on what's responsible for this progress and what it means for science in the future.

The only true AI safety will come from securing the ecosystem. Use AI to harden digital security and speed detection and response. Use AI and biotech to improve pandemic monitoring, pre-design vaccines for all virus families, and prep vaccine manufacturing capacity. Limits in the models are inherently fragile and temporary. Open weight models may always be just months behind the frontier, and they can be jailbroken quite comprehensively. Bad actors will always have access to powerful AI. The thing that stops a bad guy with AI is good guys intelligently using AI and other tools. I support reasonable staged rollout as Anthropic did with Mythos / Glasswing to give responsible actors more time to use the latest models to find vulnerabilities and fix them. At the same time, that will always be a temporary state of things at best. Long term (months, most likely), all of the current frontier capabilities will be available to anyone who really wants them. Plan and build for that world.

The only true AI safety will come from securing the ecosystem. Use AI to harden digital security and speed detection and response. Use AI and biotech to improve pandemic monitoring, pre-design vaccines for all virus families, and prep vaccine manufacturing capacity. Limits in the models are inherently fragile and temporary. Open weight models may always be just months behind the frontier, and they can be jailbroken quite comprehensively. Bad actors will always have access to powerful AI. The thing that stops a bad guy with AI is good guys intelligently using AI and other tools. I support reasonable staged rollout as Anthropic did with Mythos / Glasswing to give responsible actors more time to use the latest models to find vulnerabilities and fix them. At the same time, that will always be a temporary state of things at best. Long term (months, most likely), all of the current frontier capabilities will be available to anyone who really wants them. Plan and build for that world.

AI being winner-takes-all is the scenario most likely to create an unfree society and thus most likely to incite a Butlerian Jihad. Fortunately, AI tech and economics don't show strong network effects or any sign of natural monopolies. Barring that changing, the surest path to a monopolized AI world is to give governments too much power over AI.

Good correction.

Yes. The notion of a race to ASI or a Singularity that disempowers the bulk of humanity creates frantic, antisocial incentives. If you believe that the next few years (or months) determine your fate and the fate of humanity, and that it's a winner-takes-all game, then you should do everything to get there first. If you believe that AI is more like other technologies, that diffusion will take time, that ASI is actually quite hard to achieve, and that the likely AI future is one of many AI companies, then that frenetic urge to be 'first to superintelligence' recedes. I think the latter is both the more likely outcome and that looking at it that way produces a healthier and more pro-social AI industry.

Fantastic findings and thread. A single biological neuron performs an enormous amount of computation, orders of magnitude more than that performed by an artificial neuron in a neural net. Parameter count in an LLM is not the same as number of synapse in a brain, as each of the latter packs in so much more computation.

The fundamental paradox with AI safety: intelligent *humans* with tools made the nuclear bomb, and the cure for polio, and the mindless YouTube videos. We have not solved the *human* alignment problem. (But we are still better off on net with this bundle, to be clear!) 1/2

Excellent piece looking at both economics and risk / uncertainty reduction in cooling the planet through aerosols that reflect sunlight.

I'm not all that surprised by this. Sutton's bitter lesson tells us that generalist models trained on far more data outperform narrower models with less data.

Something else to consider about degrowth—there is probably no non-authoritarian way to implement it. I just don’t see billions of people voluntarily making themselves materially worse off.

Our 2026 Indicators of Global Climate Change paper is out! We find that the human-induced warming was 1.37C in 2025, and the current rate of warming is 0.27C per decade, on track to firmly pass 1.5C in about four years.

La Antártida con una temperatura máxima por encima de los 15 °C, récord absoluto ( 2 °C respecto al anterior registro máximo). Los científicos: "Esto es una locura. Son unos 20 °C por encima de lo normal para esta época del año. Es una anomalía enorme". theguardian.com/environment/…

AI doubters fail to recognize how fast real AI progress is; believers under-appreciate how high a bar world-transformation is. Anthropic ARR is both astonishingly large ($47B, up from just $1B at the beginning of last year!!!!!) and very small (0.037% of the global economy). (I'm aware that Anthropic has been growing at ≥10x / year, and that pace would lead to 100% of global GDP by the end of 2029. They won't sustain that pace. But neither is the $47B smoke and mirrors.)

In 2027, big tech companies expect to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI data centers around the world. Where they choose to build those data centers could help determine the global balance of power. To learn more, @alasdairpr, @TawilTeddy, and I created a detailed financial model showing what drives these $10 billion decisions, and wrote about our findings in a new Carnegie report.

Earth is, by orders of magnitude, the most valuable real estate in the solar system. I love space science, space exploration, and space tech. But there is no substitute for Earth this century, and likely not for centuries beyond that.

Economic growth reduces poverty. Degrowth would increase it. People won't support solutions to either climate change or inequality if those solutions make them poorer.

We are a long, long way from superintelligence.