The Shape of the Thing
Where we are right now, and what likely happens next
Newsletters 260 stories
The most important question nobody's asking about AI
“Preface to the highest stakes negotiations in history.”
Import AI 448: AI R&D; Bytedance's CUDA-writing agent; on-device satellite AI
If Ukraine is the first major drone war, when will there be the first major AI war?
Last Week in AI #337 – Anthropic Risk, QuitGPT, ChatGPT 5.4
Anthropic officially told by DOD that it’s a supply chain risk, ‘cancel ChatGPT’ trend is growing after OpenAI signs a deal with the US military, and…
Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
Ambassador visiting Renaissance Florence: “Where am I? None of this has existed for a thousand years."
Anthropic vs. the U.S. Government, Nano Banana’s Makeover, Frontier Agent Management, Google’s Mathematics Solutions
The Batch AI News and Insights: I’m thrilled to announce Context Hub, a new tool to give to your coding agents the API documentation they need…
LWiAI Podcast #235 – Sonnet 4.6, Deep-thinking tokens, Anthropic vs Pentagon
Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6, Google Rolls Out Gemini 3.1 Pro, Anthropic CEO Amodei says Pentagon’s threats ‘do not change our position’ on AI
Import AI 447: The AGI economy; testing AIs with generated games; and agent ecologies
What might a superintelligence arcology be like?
Gemini Seizes the Lead, Investors Panic Over Agentic AI, Optimism at Global AI Summit, Local Versus Cloud
The Batch AI News and Insights: We just released a Skill Builder tool to help you understand in which areas of AI you’re strong, where you…
A Dream of Spring for Open-Weight LLMs: 10 Architectures from Jan-Feb 2026
A Round Up And Comparison of 10 Open-Weight LLM Releases in Spring 2026
New Paper: Towards a science of AI agent reliability
Quantifying the capability-reliability gap
Last Week in AI #336 – Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Anthropic vs Pentagon
Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6, Google Rolls Out Latest AI Model Gemini 3.1 Pro, Pentagon threatens to cut off Anthropic in AI safeguards dispute
Import AI 446: Nuclear LLMs; China's big AI benchmark; measurement and AI policy
Will AIs be jealous of one another?
The New Open-Weights Leader, Big AI’s Political Influence, Predicting Illness, Faster Reasoning
The Batch AI News and Insights: Will AI create new job opportunities? My daughter Nova loves cats, and her favorite color is yellow.
After Orthogonality: Virtue-Ethical Agency and AI Alignment
Preface This essay argues that rational people don’t have goals, and that rational AIs shouldn’t have goals. Human actions are rational not because we direct them…
A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era
It's not just chatbots anymore
LWiAI Podcast #234 – Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex, Seedance 2.0, GLM-5
An action-packed episode!
Import AI 445: Timing superintelligence; AIs solve frontier math proofs; a new ML research benchmark
Will 2026 be looked back on as the pivotal year for making decisions about the singularity?
Last Week in AI #335 – Opus 4.6, Codex 5.3, Gemini 3 Deep Think, GLM 5, Seedance 2.0
A crazy packed edition of Last Week in AI! Plus some small updates.
Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"
"That's why I'm sending this message of urgency"
Claude Opus 4.6 Thinks Smarter, xAI Joins SpaceX, AI Outperforms Doctors, Standardized AI Audits
The Batch AI News and Insights: I recently spoke at the Sundance Film Festival on a panel about AI.
AI Won’t Automatically Make Legal Services Cheaper
Applying the AI as Normal Technology framework to legal services
Import AI 444: LLM societies; Huawei makes kernels with AI; ChipBench
How can you quantify creativity?
LWiAI Podcast #233 – Moltbot, Genie 3, Qwen3-Max-Thinking
Google adds Gemini AI-powered ‘auto browse’ to Chrome, Users flock to open source Moltbot for always-on AI, Qwen3-Max-Thinking debuts, and more!