Monday AI Brief #6
On paper, this was a quiet week: there were no major releases, and no big headlines. Online, though, there’s been a big shift in the vibe since the release of Opus 4.5 a month ago. It’s now undeniable that AI is transforming programming, and it feels increasingly likely that the same will happen to all other knowledge work before too long.
But that’s not all—we review the latest evidence of accelerating progress, discuss whether AI might increase the demand for knowledge workers, and look at how Claude handles mental health crises. And shoes! If you’ve been wanting more fashion reporting in these pages, today is your lucky day.
As always, you can get this by email or in a longer and more technical version.
The Jevons paradox for knowledge work
Aaron Levie has a great piece on the Jevons paradox for knowledge work. Just as demand for coal increased when technological advances made steam engines use coal more efficiently, Aaron argues that the market for knowledge work will increase as AI makes knowledge work more efficient.
How it feels to be a programmer right now
Andrej Karpathy is one of the giants of AI (among other things, he co-founded OpenAI and coined the term “vibe coding”). He speaks for every programmer who’s paying attention:
I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue.
Progress is accelerating
Epoch reports that the rate of improvement in ECI (their composite measure of frontier model capabilities) almost doubled starting in April 2024, going from 8 to 15 points per year.
Training Claude to handle mental health crises
There’s been a lot of attention lately on how models engage with people who are having mental health crises. Here Anthropic explains how they train and evaluate Claude for handling some of its most challenging interactions .
The Revolution of Rising Expectations
I recently linked to Scott Alexander’s excellent exploration of the vibecession, which explores why so many people feel financially distressed even when most objective measures of personal financial health seem positive. Zvi just posted a series which addresses the same question, but finds plausible answers that Scott never really got to. He identifies two root causes:
- The Revolution of Rising Expectations: individuals have higher lifestyle expectations than they used to. Further, society has higher expectations: the minimum lifestyle required to be accepted into mainstream society has risen.
- The Revolution of Rising Requirements: legal & regulatory requirements effectively require individuals to purchase more housing / childcare / healthcare than they used to, or might currently want to.
I specifically recommend The Revolution of Rising Expectations, but the full series includes The $140,000 Question and The $140,000 Question: Cost Changes Over Time.
Shoes of Lighthaven: A Photo-Investigation
You’ve probably been losing sleep wondering what kinds of shoes rationalists prefer. You need wonder no longer: Jenneral HQ is here with a comprehensive photo investigation.