One Useful Thing
20 stories
One Useful ThingVoices30 Months on the Exponential (in Charts) My second book on AI, Co-Existence, is out today (and you can get it here ), 30 months after the release of Co-Intelligence in early 2024.
One Useful ThingVoicesThe Dot and the Swarm I generally think I have done a good job anticipating the direction and pace of AI over the few years I have been writing this Substack, but I think I recently got something fairly large wrong.
One Useful ThingVoicesThe Overhang We are still on an exponential curve of AI development. I try to put out a Substack post every couple weeks or so, yet, as the pace speeds up, that sometimes feels too slow.
One Useful ThingVoicesAgency and Agents Agency is the initiative to act. Increasingly, it is going to determine what happens next with AI, and whether that is good or bad for us. But whose agency?
One Useful ThingVoicesAn opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff Every few months, I write a guide for people who want to use AI to do stuff. This time, a lot has changed, in part because what it means to “use AI to do stuff” encompasses so much more “stuff” than…
One Useful ThingVoicesThe twilight of the chatbots If you feel like things are accelerating in AI, you are probably right. Better AI models from the leading American AI labs have been releasing more quickly than ever (though government interventions…
One Useful ThingVoicesWhat it feels like to work with Mythos I had early access to the first Mythos-class AI model being released to the public, Claude 5 Fable. Much of the discussion of Mythos has centered on its impact on software security, but I tested it…
One Useful ThingVoicesCo-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence It has been two years since Co-Intelligence , my book about AI, was published, and it was successful beyond what I could have hoped (it was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into…
One Useful ThingVoicesChoosing to Stay Human If you go to your favorite social media site, you will find it full of posts that start to look suspiciously similar to each other: Many of the comments to these posts are also generated by AI.
One Useful ThingVoicesSign of the future: GPT-5.5 I had early access to GPT-5.5 1 , and I think it is a big deal. It is a big deal because it indicates that we are not done with the rapid improvement in AI.
One Useful ThingVoicesClaude Dispatch and the Power of Interfaces AIs are already far more capable than most people realize. A large part of this so-called capability overhang comes not from the limits of AI (though, of course, they still have many limits), but…
One Useful ThingVoicesThe Shape of the Thing In October of 2023, I wrote about the “Shape of the Shadow of the Thing,” speculating on the Thing that AI might turn into in the coming years.
One Useful ThingVoicesA Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era I have written eight of these guides since ChatGPT came out, but this version represents a very large break with the past, because what it means to “use AI” has changed dramatically.
One Useful ThingVoicesManagement as AI superpower I just taught an experimental class at the University of Pennsylvania where I challenged students to create a startup from scratch in four days.
One Useful ThingVoicesClaude Code and What Comes Next I opened Claude Code and gave it the command: “ Develop a web-based or software-based startup idea that will make me $1000 a month where you do all the work by generating the idea and implementing…
One Useful ThingVoicesThe Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients Back in the ancient AI days of 2023, my co-authors and I invented a term to describe the weird ability of AI to do some work incredibly well and other work incredibly badly in ways that didn’t map…
One Useful ThingVoicesThree Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 I’ve been testing Google’s new Gemini 3 model. It is very good. But rather than give you benchmark numbers, I’m going to show you how far AI has come in three years by asking the AI to demonstrate…
One Useful ThingVoicesGiving your AI a Job Interview Given how much energy, literal and figurative, goes into developing new AIs, we have a surprisingly hard time measuring how “smart” they are, exactly.
One Useful ThingVoicesAn Opinionated Guide to Using AI Right Now Every few months I write an opinionated guide to how to use AI 1 , but now I write it in a world where about 10% of humanity uses AI weekly .
One Useful ThingVoicesReal AI Agents and Real Work AIs have quietly crossed a threshold: they can now perform real, economically relevant work. Last week, OpenAI released a new test of AI ability, but this one differs from the usual benchmarks built…
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