Weekly Top Picks #106
AI is for personal support / A market for AI companions / OpenAI's incoming releases / The "Era of Experience" / How GPT-4.5 was made / My "Google is winning" post on Hacker News
The week in AI at a glance
Personal support is the leading AI use case: People want AI more for support than technical assistance. ChatGPT is no longer an assistant but a companion.
The AI companion era has already begun: Companies are already looking for ways to exploit the market of AI companions.
OpenAI’s week of releases starts later today: They’re launching o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1, and more. Can they stop Google DeepMind’s rise to the top?
The Era of Experience: AI that doesn’t need human data: AI has gotten very far by learning from us; it could go further by experiencing the world itself.
How OpenAI GPT-4.5 was made: OpenAI released a podcast episode on the research that went to build GPT-4.5; recommended for those who doubt its value.
“Google Is Winning on Every AI Front” on Hacker News: My article on Google went viral on HN. Go over there to read some interesting takes.
The week in The Algorithmic Bridge
(PAID) Weekly Top Picks #105: On recent AI progress / Meta's Llama 4 / Reasoning AI isn't reasoning / ARC-AGI 2 / AI experts vs general public on AI / Google owns Pareto frontier / AI 2027
(FREE) Even God Can’t Skip the Bureaucrats: The “AI 2027” forecasting report ignores the unassailable frictions between superintelligence and revolution. You can’t fix the world's inertia just by solving the intelligence bottleneck.
(PAID) Even Optimists Say Recent AI Progress Feels Mostly Like Bullshit: One overlooked benefit of being optimistic is that the rare times you offer a pessimistic view, people take you more seriously. This is one of those times.
(FREE) Google Is Winning on Every AI Front: An exhaustive list of reasons why Google is crushing it lately—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta may not have a chance to win the AI race anymore.