2025 letter

The Compute Theory of Everything, grading the homework of a minor deity, and the acoustic preferences of Atlantic salmon

METR’s benchmark has become a bellwether of AI capability growth, but its design isn’t up to the task, argues Nathan Witkin

From Zhengdong Wang’s 2025 letter: I don’t mind repeating Sutton throughout this letter because he wasn’t even the first to say it. This year I had many edifying conversations about the unreasonable effectiveness of compute with my colleague Samuel Albanie, who alerted me to a prescient 1976 paper by Hans Moravec. Moravec is better known for observing that what’s hard for robots is easy for humans, and vice versa, but in a note titled “Bombast,” he marveled:

What I read and found interesting recently, along with my thoughts on them. Books 2026 is off to a decent start on the book reading front, especially on my goal of reading more fiction this year. First up are the fiction reads. 1/ Everything’s Fine – Cecilia Rabess Romance novel, of a kind. Entertaining, but […]

Progress, Optimism, Loss, Overcoming FOMO