FT on how to be a great thinker. Among the suggestions: “(1) Read books. A book is still the best technology to convey the nuanced complexity of the world. That complexity is a check on pure ideology. People who want to simplify the world will prefer online conspiracy theories. (2) Don’t use screens much. That frees time for books and creates more interstitial moments when the mind is left unoccupied, has freedom to roam and makes new connections. Darwin, Nietzsche and Kant experienced these moments on walks. The biochemist Jennifer Doudna says she gets insights when “out weeding my tomato plants” or while asleep. (3) Do your own work, not the world’s. The best thinkers don’t waste much time maximising their income or climbing hierarchies.”
Bloomberg: “In an internal memo that accompanied the meeting, Amodei wrote that there was a 70% chance that sometime this year, AI’s ability to “perform key technical tasks” such as writing code, debugging, and proposing and managing experiments will go from a “helpful tool” to “something absolutely indispensable” that does the majority of these technical tasks, doubling Anthropic’s execution speed. “The majority of the contribution to AI progress will come from AI itself,” Amodei wrote, with the caveat that humans will still play a very central role, “probably for a while due to comparative advantage.” The role of humans could be gradually whittled away, though, until AI begins to create new AI in a kind of recursive loop. This ability, if it’s indeed developed, would send Anthropic’s models shooting up its danger scale. At ASL-4, an AI would have “the ability to fully automate the work of an entry-level, remote-only researcher at Anthropic.” There’s an ASL-5, when the AI has the ability to improve itself with increased acceleration.”
Forbes: ““You’re not letting people off the hook,” explains [Mel] Robbins. “You’re letting yourself off the hook. You stop trying to fix, manage, prove. And you start protecting your peace.” For Robbins, clarity over control is at the heart of power. “When your thoughts, emotions, and actions are aligned with your values,” she says, “that’s when you feel strongest. It’s not about doing more. It’s about being more honest. More grounded. More yourself.” The Let Them Theory doesn’t offer a system or a solution. It offers something steadier—a return to what’s yours, and a release of what isn’t. In a culture that equates busyness with value and burnout with success, Robbins is making a different case built not on striving, but on knowing when to stop.”
Dwarkesh Patel on which current or historical figure has most impacted his thinking: “Carl Schulman. He’s an independent researcher focused on AI who has been studying this and many related fields—from economics to ethics—for a couple of decades. What makes him remarkable is his encyclopedic knowledge across virtually every field relevant to thinking about the future and his willingness to conduct first-order estimates and basic calculations that others don’t. You may not realize it, but much of the AI discourse sits downstream of his work. He’s not as widely known because he doesn’t really like to write books or anything—he prefers to hop on phone calls with people who then write books and blog posts.”
Kevin Scott: “One of those things [we’ve learned] is agents need to be able to access sources of information; they need to be able to take action on behalf of users by making changes in state and systems. Things like booking a hotel room or putting something on my calendar. And I think the way that you really want all of these things to happen is just sort of open protocols where you have real interoperability across the whole landscape of agents, where you can have everybody who has a service or a piece of content that they want to make agent accessible has a way to say, “Hey, here I am.” And then agents, no matter who’s building them, have a way to connect to that content and those services. The way that we talked about it onstage at Build is the agentic web. So what must exist in this world where we have lots and lots of agents doing things on behalf of users that are the moral equivalent of the things that had to emerge when the web was under development 20, 30 years ago.”
