#Expert opinion

AITri Dao says Etched designed and produced its chips within two years by hardcoding attention into silicon and reaching high MFU. He expects hardware built for LLM inference to cut the cost of intelligence by 10x. The quoted Etched post says it has built its first racks after an A0 tapeout, raised $800m, holds $1B+ in customer contracts, and plans to ship the racks this summer.

AIHamel Husain argues that an AI product whose output is hard to verify is a product design problem, not just an evaluation problem. He shows before-and-after sketches for an AI data agent, a PE lesson planner, and a workers' compensation report tool, each adding provenance, scoped edits, and checkable evidence. He notes that designing for verification also makes evals easier to build and grade.

AIDean W. Ball argues that the current government restrictions on frontier model releases amount to a de facto preapproval regime without a known safety standard. He proposes that independent verification organizations audit labs against their own safety frameworks, with government certifying or licensing the auditors. The post also argues that broad distribution of frontier AI is needed to learn what good safety practice looks like.

AIAndrej Karpathy describes Claude Tag, which lets teams tag Claude into Slack channels and delegate tasks to it. He calls it a third paradigm for LLM interfaces, after websites and downloaded apps, with a persistent, asynchronous entity working alongside teams with org-wide tools and context.

AIEugene Yan says he likes Claude Tag's multiplayer form factor because other people can reply in the thread to give Claude context and direction. Claude Tag, per the background post, lets teams in Slack tag Claude in as a team member with access to chosen channels and tools.

AIFei-Fei Li replied to smallfly's reflection on AI, automation, and human creativity, saying World Labs is founded on empowering human ingenuity and productivity. The post thanks smallfly for working with World Labs and links to a Fast Company article about World Labs, Marble, and spatial intelligence.

AIDean Ball will join OpenAI on July 6 as Head of Strategic Futures, a new small team reporting to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon that will shape frontier AI policy on catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and government relations. Ball says he will keep writing independently at Hyperdimensional, with no OpenAI preapproval or editorial discretion over his work.

AIJohn Schulman says PPO gained a second wave in the LLM era for reasons not anticipated in the original paper. He points to the importance-ratio objective, which corrects biases from numeric error, asynchronous training, and forward-pass noise, and to the clipping objective, whose effect on entropy was unknown at publication, citing DAPO's arXiv paper.

AIDean Ball analyzes the Trump Administration's export controls on Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models after a jailbreak and a refused de-deployment request. He argues that the episode shows the need for a technocratic framework that separates political judgments about fairness from technical judgments about threats, in place of ad hoc executive action.

AIMistral states that this model and upcoming ones will be open-weight. The company argues that open weights are critical for customer confidence and for research and developer communities. It contends that systems reachable only through someone else's interface cannot be owned, inspected, audited, or improved, especially if data recording can no longer be turned off.

AIAmazon CTO Werner Vogels argues that the verification bottleneck matters more than ever. The post is a short reply to Yaron Minsky's remarks on Jane Street's ambition to make formal methods as pervasively useful for building software as sophisticated type systems are today.

AIThe US government issued an export control directive suspending access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, inside or outside the United States. Anthropic says the order forces it to disable both models for all customers, while other Claude models are unaffected. Anthropic calls the directive a misunderstanding and says it is working to restore access as soon as possible. The author disagrees with the decision and questions why Anthropic did not anticipate it, given its claim that only it can safely handle these models.

AIThe essay argues that AI compresses the execution layer of software work while decision-making and accountability remain human, so AI is not yet replacing software engineers. It cites AI-attributed layoffs at Block, Snap, and Intuit that the authors say were not driven by AI, and WARN Act filings in which only one company checked an AI box. A Federal Reserve analysis is cited as finding software engineer employment growing about 3 percentage points per year more slowly after ChatGPT than a no-AI counterfactual.

AIAnthropic, which has long advocated transparency requirements for frontier AI, says that approach is no longer enough. The post suggests risks are now clearer, so transparency alone does not meet the need.

AIDario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, now believes frontier models should undergo mandatory third-party testing for cyber, bio, and autonomy risks. He argues that these testers should have the power to block or revoke deployment of models posing catastrophic risk.

AIAnthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a new essay, "Policy on the AI Exponential," arguing that AI is advancing much faster than policymaking processes were designed to handle. The essay describes where he believes the technology currently stands and outlines the actions needed to close that gap.

AIAndrej Karpathy says Claude Fable 5 is the same underlying model as Mythos with added safeguards, and that it leads on nearly all benchmarks. He describes it as a step change, especially for long, difficult problem-solving sessions where it handles more ambitious tasks without close supervision. He notes that its safeguards are set a bit too aggressively at launch and may be tuned over time.

AIEthan Mollick, who had early access to Claude 5 Fable, reports that it outperformed other public models in his tests, including an isochrone travel-time map and a nine-and-a-half-hour software build called Concord. He says the model delegated work to other agents and made many design choices he could not see or weigh in on, leaving him closer to a client than a hands-on operator. He also notes high token usage, frequent fallback to Claude 4.8 Opus under security guardrails, and persistent quirks in its writing style.

AIMichael Truell says working with agents should feel like collaborating with a colleague, not just exchanging text chats. He envisions interacting with them through gestures on a shared screen and live conversation. The post builds on Cursor's Design Mode, which lets users point, draw, or talk to update a UI.

AIEthan Mollick is releasing Co-Existence on October 20, a new book about working with AI systems that are sometimes, but not always, better than humans. The book follows his 2024 title Co-Intelligence, which he says was written about an era of chatbots rather than autonomous agents. Mollick also reports writing every chapter draft himself while using AI readers and fact-checkers, and building the book's website with Claude Code using Opus 4.8.

AIAnthropic's internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development, possibly toward recursive self-improvement in which AI autonomously builds a more capable successor. Sam Bowman says the acceleration in technical R&D over recent months has been wild and faster than expected.

AIOpenAI's Mark Chen said that after Mythos showed AI models can prove 80-year-old theorems, he expected them to also find cyber vulnerabilities, and they did. He added that researchers in math may now be thinking the same idea in reverse, applying cybersecurity-style capability to mathematics. The post offers no specific models, benchmarks, or figures.

AIGeorgi Gerganov says Computex this year shows a strong signal for local AI, with major players like NVIDIA and Microsoft embracing and discussing local AI workloads. He adds that dedicated consumer hardware and models are on the way.

AIEugene Yan says stronger models have made finding software vulnerabilities easier, so the bottleneck has moved to verification, triage, and patching. He shares lessons from working with security teams on these new bottlenecks and links to a Claude blog post on using LLMs to secure source code.

AIJeremy Howard reports that Opus 4.8 is more cooperative and less over-agentic than Opus 4.7 while coding. He says it pauses to ask for input where Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 would push ahead, but he calls it far too expensive.

AIThe Foundation for American Innovation launched a Physical Intelligence team to address regulatory and legal barriers to deploying autonomous robotics and other physical-world AI in the United States. The team plans to focus on regulatory climate, technical trajectory, industrial strategy, and liability and cybersecurity frameworks. The article argues that physical AI will matter most where human on-site labor drives costs, such as construction.

AIEthan Mollick argues that using AI as a default for writing, without thinking, risks undermining the human effort that builds skill and style. He cites two Wharton-linked studies: a Turkish high school experiment where ChatGPT access hurt test performance, and a Taipei Python course where a personalized AI tutor raised exam scores by 0.15 standard deviations. Mollick calls the difference how AI is used, not whether, and notes that the tools for tutor-style learning are not intuitive to access.

AIAnthropic co-founder Dario Amodei spoke at the Vatican's presentation of Magnifica Humanitas, arguing that AI's questions extend beyond the AI research community. He said frontier labs face commercial, geopolitical, and competitive incentives that can conflict with doing the right thing, so outside voices from religion, civil society, academia, and government are needed. He described AI models as grown rather than engineered, and framed three questions for the Church's discernment, beginning with duty to the global poor.

AIBenedict Evans argues that predicting AI's job impact by occupation is mostly impossible, citing accountants: despite a century of accounting automation from calculators to spreadsheets and ERP systems, the number of accountants kept rising. He says job titles and business models change over time, so exposure scores based on census categories can mislead.

AIGoogle claimed a team of agents built an operating system from a single prompt for about $916 in API fees, using Gemini 3.5 Flash and Antigravity 2.0. The authors argue the prompt was many thousands of lines, the scaffold and human intervention are undefined, and no code, logs, or similarity analysis were released to verify the claim. They still see value in such open-world evaluations, which need stronger methodological norms and independent scrutiny.

AIJeremy Howard calls Gemini Flash 3.5 disappointing despite praising its intelligence and speed. He argues it was trained to maximize evaluation scores rather than to help humans, so it often performs unrequested actions instead of doing what was asked.

AIAndrej Karpathy announced that he has joined Anthropic and is excited to return to research and development work on frontier LLMs. He said he remains passionate about education and plans to resume that work in time.

AIChris Olah, speaking for Anthropic, argues that the questions posed by AI extend far beyond the AI community and urges religions, civil society, academics, and governments to participate in shaping a positive outcome. He says he is glad the Catholic Church is engaging and is honored to speak at the presentation of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, scheduled for May 25.