A daily journal on superintelligence
One essay every day on superintelligence: the research, the risks, and the questions that will define this century.
Today
A superintelligence would be the most valuable and dangerous thing ever built. Whether it ends up in the hands of a few companies, a few governments, or no one at all may be the defining political question of the century.
Start here
How machines went from failing at simple puzzles to the edge of general intelligence, and what comes next. 6 essays, about 24 minutes of reading.
Recent
Every wave of automation so far has destroyed jobs and created more. Superintelligence could be the first to break that pattern. A look at the history, the evidence so far, and the questions that will decide who benefits.
AlphaFold solved in a few years a problem biologists had worked on for half a century. It offers a glimpse of what a much more general intelligence might do to medicine, materials and discovery itself.
ChatGPT made AI a household word in two months. The more important shift came after, when models learned to reason step by step and then to act on their own. Here is how that happened, and why it matters.
Between 2012 and 2022, AI stopped being a collection of clever tricks and became a matter of data and computing power. This is the decade that put superintelligence on the table.
Machines that think have been promised since the 1950s. The story of how the field kept failing, and why each failure taught it something it needed, is the best way to understand what is happening now.
In 1965, I. J. Good argued that the first machine able to improve itself would be the last invention humanity ever needed to make. Sixty years on, how well does the argument hold up?
Making a capable system do what we actually want, rather than what we literally said, turns out to be one of the hardest problems in computer science. Here is why, without the jargon.
The word is used loosely, often as a synonym for "very good AI". A precise definition matters, because what we fear and what we hope for both depend on it.
Every day
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