Steering AI Beyond Automation
By Gabriel Unger and Arvind Narayanan. Unger is an economist at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab.
AI Snake Oil24 min read
AI agents
12 stories
The AI-as-Normal-Technology view of loss-of-control incidents
A middle ground between the cybersecurity and AI safety communities
AI Snake Oil60 min read
AI agents can't yet do open-ended AI research
The goal of leading AI labs is recursive self-improvement (RSI): the automation of AI research using AI agents. RSI also underpins forecasts of explosive AI progress. How can we assess if we are close to this milestone?
AI Snake Oil6 min read
What will be left for us to work on?
I had the honor of giving a keynote at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul last week titled “What will be left for us to work on?” I addressed the widespread anxiety about how we should adapt as AI capabilities increase.
AI Snake Oil33 min read
Up the Stack: How AI’s Escape From the Commodity Trap Risks Enterprise Lock-in
Our goal in this essay is to move beyond the debate over whether AI is a bubble. We do so in two ways: clearly separating current financials from the question of who captures value in the long run, and recognizing that the labs are not confined to be model providers.
AI Snake Oil25 min read
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
There is great anxiety and uncertainty about AI replacing jobs. How can we move past vague warnings and bombastic predictions and bring data to bear on this question?
AI Snake Oil18 min read
Did Google’s AI agents really build an operating system for $916?
By Stephan Rabanser, Sayash Kapoor, Rishi Bommasani, Andrew Schwartz, Arvind Narayanan
AI Snake Oil5 min read
Open-world evaluations for measuring frontier AI capabilities
Introducing CRUX, a new project for evaluating AI on long, messy tasks
AI Snake Oil38 min read
New Paper: Towards a science of AI agent reliability
Suppose you hear about a new AI agent for improving productivity — by making purchases, or writing code, or sending emails, or handling a customer on your behalf. Should you trust it? Can the agent do the job reliably enough? After all, there are many horror stories of agents going wrong.
AI Snake Oil10 min read
A guide to understanding AI as normal technology
When we published AI as Normal Technology, the impact caught us off guard. It quickly became the most influential thing either of us had ever done.1 We took this as a strong signal to spend more of our time thinking and writing about the medium-term future of AI and its impacts, offering grounded…
AI Snake Oil27 min read
AGI is not a milestone
There is no capability threshold that will lead to sudden impacts
AI Snake Oil21 min read
AI as Normal Technology
This post is over 15,000 words long—it is a new paper on our vision for the future of AI. We are pleased to announce that an expanded version of these ideas will become our next book together.
AI Snake Oil80 min read
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