A Learning a Day

The only thing faster than the pace of AI is the pace of AI news. There’s something in it for everybody.

If you’re worried about existential AI risk, look no further than Anthropic’s Claude Opus resorting to blackmail when engineers threatened to shut it down.

On the flip side, if you want to comfort yourself that this is all hype, you can. Early research in Denmark doesn’t yet show changes in productivity or pay.

The opposite side of this story is about how 25% of the most recent Y Combinator start-up batch has 95% of its code written by LLMs.

And if you’re thinking about how robots might take over human jobs, look no further than the dairy robots who are transforming bovian care or Waymo’s better-than-human safety record.

There’s some data to advance whatever narrative you’d like to believe should be advanced. We aren’t yet at the stage where we’re seeing meaningful consensus yet. It is early.

In this time, what’s most important is to treat these datapoints as soft inputs and instead to make sure we’re doing our own due diligence.

If there’s any part of your job that you might do differently with the help of AI, it is important to try doing so… immediately. If you work in technology and there is a system that is worth replacing with a large language model, it is worth doing so immediately as well.

My read is that the idea that “the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed” is truer than ever. And the more we experience this future, the more likely we’ll be able to shape it for ourselves and those around us.

I play a game of soccer every weekend. It’s a fun game that’s just the right amount of competitive – enough that we care about scoring/winning and not so much that it ruins anyone’s mood or threatens a dangerous tackle.

One of the things I’ve observed is that my results are correlated with what I optimize for.

If I optimize for just having fun – defined by running as much as I can and spending more time up front – there’s a higher chance we’ll let easy goals through.

If I optimize for winning, I’ll be doing less of both running or spending time up front, but there’s a higher chance our defense will be better. Being a team player comes with trade-offs.

It’s just a game of weekend soccer. Even so, there’s a powerful lesson to be learnt in strategy and trade-offs.

There are learning opportunities everywhere we look.

Writing here is both a prompt for reflection as it is a prompt to dig deeper into studies and analysis about topics I believe are important.

My process for learning more about these topics – especially around the impact of exponential technologies like renewable energy and artificial intelligence – is to compile links to interesting presentations and articles over time with the goal of going through them over the weekend.

But those weekends show up rarely – if ever.

I tried something different recently – attempting to catch up on all this reading during a couple of the long flights I take during the year. Thanks to inflight wifi becoming more commonplace and reliable, this is possible.

On one such long flight couple weeks ago, I ended up catching up on three months worth of reading. So, if you suddenly see a series of summaries of charts and analysis during these weeks, you know why. :-)

I still love catching the occasional movie. But I appreciate being able to use flight time to geek out on fascinating data.

Noah Smith shared a thought-provoking post on service costs in the US.

It started with a famous chart that many of us have likely seen about how service costs seemed to be exploding even while the cost of goods was coming down.

Interestingly, these service costs seem to be leveling off. This is spending on healthcare.

Also hospital services.

Medical costs have slowed down too.

College tuition has also leveled off.

While it is hard to pinpoint why with trends like this, it is likely that markets have reached some form of equilibrium. There’s only so much a student is willing to pay for college after a point.

It also helps that labor has also been more productive over time.

This doesn’t mean all services are in a good place – childcare has gotten expensive for example.

But these charts point to a good outcome for the quality of life for normal people.

And that’s a good thing.

I’ve written a bunch about the impact Dr. Casey Means’ Good Energy has had on our diet and exercise. One area I haven’t covered is around reducing toxins. We’ve made a few simple changes that have reduced our exposure to chemicals.

(1) Soap: Switched to Dr Bronner’s Castille soap – we love it.

(2) Dishwasher: Replaced plastic dishwasher tablets with Blueland tablets. Goodbye chemicals and plastics.

(3) Laundry: Replaced plastic laundry pods with Costco’s “Ultra clean” with no perfumes or dyes.

(4) Deodorant: Switched to an Alum stone Deodorant. This has been magical for me.

(5) Farmer’s market: We’ve added a farmer’s market stop on our weekend grocery run. I never knew fruit could be so tasty.

(6) Water: We’ve been using a filter for a few years but we realized it doesn’t work for some of the more harmful chemicals in our tap water (thank you EWG’s tap water database). After a bit of research into reverse osmosis (which we learnt removes contaminants and helpful minerals), we’ve gone with Rorra. Its impact has been discernible.

The impact of small changes have a way of adding up and then compounding over time.

Ember Energy’s Global Electricity Review 2025 made for fascinating reading. 3 takeaways –

• Clean power passes 40% of global electricity for the first time since the 1940s. This is amazing to see because we are only getting more electricity hungry as a society.
• Solar doubled in three years – nearly half of the boom came from China
• The growth in fossil fuels came because of hotter temperatures and more cooling needs.

It is fascinating to reflect on the self-perpetuating nature of choices.

Hotter temperatures force more cooling and more carbon for peak loads. The more we use carbon, the hotter the temperatures get, and so on.

I’m hopeful we’ll see this graph go to 60% clean electricity by 2030 – powered by solar. The business case is as simple as it gets – cheap energy from the sun. And this exponential growth makes me optimistic that the picture will look a lot better in a decade.

One of the hard won lessons from experience is appreciating that the hard part isn’t to begin.

Instead, it is to summon the grit to fall and then begin again.

And again.

Moderna, the biotech company, decided to merge its Tech and HR divisions. From the article –

“The biotech company late last year announced the creation of a new role, chief people and digital technology officer, promoting its human resources chief Tracey Franklin to the spot. 

Franklin said she is redesigning teams across the company based on what work is best done by people versus what can be automated with technology, including the tech it leverages from a partnership with AI giant OpenAI. Roles are being created, eliminated and reimagined as a result, she said. 

One of the implications of the rapid increase of AI capabilities coupled with the rapid decrease in cost is that organizations are going to find different answers to the question – which workflows would be cheaper if solved by compute vs. humans?

It is important to remember that these questions have been asked by organizational leaders for the past hundred years.

The difference, however, is that the answers are different now.

I saw 3 noteworthy graphs about AI progress in Azeem’s Exponential View newsletter.

The first is the crazy progress in Math and Coding in the past 12 months.

The next is that task length is doubling every 7 months. More complexity is now the norm.

Finally, the cost efficiency curve is wild. Electricity costs per token are plummeting as models are getting efficient.

In effect, AI models are getting smarter at doing more complex while becoming cheaper. And it is all happening on an exponential scale.

We don’t intuitively understand exponential scale as humans – we grasp linear improvements more intuitively. So I won’t pretend to have fully grasped the implications of these developments.

Except to say that they’re going to have seismic consequences for what we do every day in a matter of years vs. decades.

This photo, taken in Mo’orea, French Polynesia in 2024, captures the eye of a humpback whale named Sweet Girl, just days before her tragic death. Four days after I captured this intimate moment, she was struck and killed by a fast-moving ship. Her death serves as a heartbreaking reminder of the 20,000 whales lost to ship strikes every year. We are using her story to advocate for stronger protections, petitioning for stricter speed laws around Tahiti and Mo’orea during whale season. I hope Sweet Girl’s legacy will spark real change to protect these incredible animals and prevent further senseless loss. | Rachel Moore

The UN World Ocean Day photo winners features some riveting photos. This was the deserved and poignant winner – a reminder to us that other incredible creatures bare the brunt of our choices.

Choose thoughtfully, we must.