AI Snake Oil
20 stories
AI Snake OilVoicesNew paper: Emerging trends in AI agent evaluation By Felix Chen, Stephan Rabanser, Sayash Kapoor, and Arvind Narayanan. See the full author list and affiliations here .
AI Snake OilVoicesSteering AI Beyond Automation By Gabriel Unger and Arvind Narayanan. Unger is an economist at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab. One of the most fundamental questions for the field of AI today is: to what extent is the project of AI…
AI Snake OilVoicesA big-tent or small-tent AI safety movement? In recent weeks, two narratives about AI safety have emerged: either AI existential risk is real and imminent, or AI leaders’ and whistleblowers’ claims to that effect are insincere — a “psyop” or…
AI Snake OilVoicesAI existential risk probabilities are (still) too unreliable to inform policy Over two years ago we wrote a detailed deconstruction of p(doom) and argued that its primary effect is to launder vague intuitions and fears through a facade of quantification.
AI Snake OilVoicesThe AI-as-Normal-Technology view of loss-of-control incidents This essay is over 13,000 words long and represents our most substantial writing on AI safety since the original essay.
AI Snake OilVoicesAI 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.
AI Snake OilVoicesWhat 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…
AI Snake OilVoicesUp the Stack: How AI’s Escape From the Commodity Trap Risks Enterprise Lock-in By Arvind Narayanan and Akash Kapur Our goal in this essay is to move beyond the debate over whether AI is a bubble.
AI Snake OilVoicesWhy 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 OilVoicesDid Google’s AI agents really build an operating system for $916? By Stephan Rabanser, Sayash Kapoor, Rishi Bommasani, Andrew Schwartz, Arvind Narayanan At Google’s developer conference earlier this week, the company launched its latest model, Gemini 3.5 Flash…
AI Snake OilVoicesDo AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention? In a recent essay, Derek Thompson engages with AI as Normal Technology (AINT). He agrees with our thesis about AI’s slow labor market impacts, relying on the fact that GDP growth has so far been…
AI Snake OilVoicesOpen-world evaluations for measuring frontier AI capabilities This post is 8,000 words long—it is our new collaborative paper on an emerging type of AI evaluation. The paper is also published in a PDF format here .
AI Snake OilVoicesNew Paper: Towards a science of AI agent reliability By Stephan Rabanser, Sayash Kapoor, Arvind Narayanan Suppose you hear about a new AI agent for improving productivity — by making purchases, or writing code, or sending emails, or handling a customer…
AI Snake OilVoicesAI Won’t Automatically Make Legal Services Cheaper This essay was published in Lawfare’s Research Paper Series. The official version that should be cited is linked here . The essay is co-authored with Justin Curl , a third-year at Harvard Law School.
AI Snake OilVoicesFact checking Moravec's paradox I have launched a YouTube channel in which I analyze AI developments from a normal technology perspective.
AI Snake OilVoicesA 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.
AI Snake OilVoicesCould AI slow science? AI leaders have predicted that it will enable dramatic scientific progress : curing cancer, doubling the human lifespan, colonizing space, and achieving a century of progress in the next decade.
AI Snake OilVoicesAGI is not a milestone With the release of OpenAI’s latest model o3, there is renewed debate about whether Artificial General Intelligence has already been achieved.
AI Snake OilVoicesAI 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 OilVoicesIs AI progress slowing down? By Arvind Narayanan, Benedikt Ströbl, and Sayash Kapoor . After the release of GPT-4 in March 2023, the dominant narrative in the tech world was that continued scaling of models would lead to…
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