Gabriel Weinberg's Blog

Last year around this time The New York Times Magazine ran an A.I. issue with an introduction titled “ Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad? ” It’s an edited transcript from the Hard Fork podcast , which I think assumes two things are true that are turning out to be false. * Once you’ve tried AI, you use it “for everything.” No, in fact most people who’ve tried it are just occasional...

Consider a few of the big AI risks: violating privacy, taking jobs, and destroying the world. Here’s what Sam Altman (CEO, OpenAI) and Dario Amodei (CEO, Anthropic) have to say about each, representing the two largest AI companies. On AI Violating Privacy * Sam : If you go talk to ChatGPT about your most sensitive stuff, and then there's a lawsuit or whatever, we could be required to produce that....

Previously I put out a post explaining “ how science funding literally pays for itself ” that takes you through the math and some data that backs it up. Now two new data points further bolster this claim. First, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the nonpartisan federal agency that provides budget and economic information to Congress, published a report entitled “ Estimating the Economic Effec...

I try hard not to lie, but would I lie to save my family from being murdered? Of course. In that case honesty loses to protecting my family. Principles almost always have exceptions, often when they conflict with other principles (which I’m calling Rule 5 in this rules series ). This rule follows from Rule 1: Reality is always more complicated . Put another way, there are always edge cases. Often...

Large AI risks abound, including a massive wave of coming job displacement that will upend the lives of millions of people. Even if new AI jobs are ultimately created such that net job loss is minimal, many of the people who are displaced are unlikely to be the same people to get these new jobs, and the new jobs are unlikely to be created at exactly the same time the old jobs are lost. In other wo...

Pick something you believe to be untrue, for example a common conspiracy theory or policy narrative. Then go to your favorite chatbot and ask, “ While I believe to be not true, some people nevertheless argue it is true, and I want to better understand their most compelling narratives. So, please list out the most compelling narrative(s) you can in favor of this position, as if you were trying to c...

There are many issues with widespread bipartisan agreement that never go anywhere , for example limiting corporate money in campaigns and making gerrymandering illegal . As a surprise to no one, Congress is the bottleneck on these issues and many, many more. If the people on both sides generally agree for years and years, and Congress still doesn’t do anything about it, then that’s a structural go...

I’ve been using Cursor for coding for some time, but I finally gave Claude Code a try for this short side project: simulating the 2026 World Cup bracket to predict likely matchups for all matches, which is useful when considering which matches to potentially go to. Methodology: * Start with the official World Cup tournament schedule (including yet-to-be played playoff matches) * Blend Elo rankings...

Many people want to opt out of AI features right now, but most tech companies are ignoring them. At DuckDuckGo our approach to AI is to only make AI features that are useful, private, and optional . Whether you are Yes AI or No AI, or somewhere in between, we think you deserve a product that gives you the option of whether or not to use AI features. Today we officially launched VoteYesOrNoAi.com ,...

We have a housing shortage in the U.S., and it is arguably a major cause of long-term unrest about the economy. Putting aside whether AI will eliminate jobs on net, it will certainly displace a lot of them. And the displaced people are unlikely to be the same people who will secure the higher-tech jobs that get created. For example, are most displaced truck drivers going to get jobs in new industr...

* We have hundreds of easter-egg logos (featuring our friendly mascot Dax Brown) that surface when you make certain queries on our search engine . Our subreddit is trying to catch ‘em all . They’ve certainly caught a lot, currently 504, but we keep adding more so it’s a moving target. The total as of this post is 594. I’m the one personally adding them in my spare time just for fun and I recently...

As GLP-1s are studied more, their benefit profile is expanding rapidly. Acknowledging that many questions remain , a recent journal article titled The expanding benefits of GLP-1 medicines puts it like this: GLP-1 medicines, initially developed for blood glucose and weight control, improve outcomes in people with cardiovascular, kidney, liver, arthritis, and sleep apnea disorders, actions mediated...

Disclaimer: This approach works for me. It may not work for you, but also maybe gives you some ideas. I find the signal to noise ratio on social media and news sites/apps too low for me to have a consistently good experience on them. So, I developed an alternative, heavily curated approach to an information diet that I’m laying out here in hope people will give me suggesions over time to improve i...

In response to “ A U.S.-China tech tie is a big win for China because of its population advantage ,” I received feedback along the lines of shouldn’t we be looking at China’s working-age population and not their overall population? I was trying to keep it simple in that post, but yes, we should, and when we do, we find, unfortunately, that China’s population advantage still persists. Here’s the da...

If you don’t know about Total Factor Productivity (TFP), you probably should. It’s an economic concept that is arguably the most important driver of long-term economic prosperity. An International Monetary Fund (IMF) primer on TFP explains it like this (emphasis added): It’s a measure of an economy’s ability to generate income from inputs— to do more with less …If an economy increases its total in...

Fifteen years ago Google started using their search monopoly to create a browser monopoly by pushing people to use Chrome through in-product promotions in Google search. It worked. Now they’re repeating that same playbook for consumer AI with Gemini and it’s working again. In the last 30 days, Gemini has been downloaded about the same amount of times as ChatGPT, and nothing else is even close. Whi...

Progress doesn’t have a single agreed-upon definition , but for the sake of anchoring, let’s say progress is rising living standards . While this definition seems unambiguously good, deserving of top billing on policy agendas for both major parties, the paradox is that long-term progress agendas rarely get top billing. Why? Here are three underlying reasons I’ve noticed in thinking about advocatin...

The browser wars are back . Agents are one front; the overlooked front is reducing switching costs in workflows that bridge across search, browse, and AI. Overlapping search, browse, and AI in the browser Traditional web search, browsing, and AI chatting aren’t going away, even as many people will eventually start interacting more with agents that automate tasks. And all three of these core Intern...

I previously called on Congress to ban AI surveillance because of its heightened potential to easily manipulate people, both for commercial and ideological ends. Essentially, we need an AI privacy law. Yet Congress has stalled on general privacy legislation for decades, even in moments of broad public privacy focus, like after the Snowden revelations and the Cambridge Analytica scandal . So, inste...

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post titled AI survelliance should be banned while there is still time . Someone submitted it to Hacker News where it got over 600 upvotes , so I decided to submit it myself to reddit (on /r/technology) where it got over 1,100 upvotes . Because I submitted it, I was able to get “Post Insights” (pictured above, left) that indicated the post got 175,000 views. Similarly,...

China’s population is declining, but UN projections show it will remain at least twice the size of the U.S. for decades. So what? Population size matters because economy size (GDP) matters and GDP = population × output per person. For example: * 100 million people × $50,000 per year = a $5 trillion economy * 1 billion people × $50,000 per year = a $50 trillion economy Then why hasn’t China’s econo...

All the same privacy harms with online tracking are also present with AI, but worse. While chatbot conversations resemble longer search queries, chatbot privacy harms have the potential to be significantly worse because the inference potential is dramatically greater. Longer input invites more personal information to be provided, and people are starting to bare their souls to chatbots. The convers...

Everyone living today has lived in a world where science and technology, globally, have progressed at a relatively high rate compared to earlier times in human history . For most of human history, a random individual could expect to use roughly the same technology in one decade that they did the previous decade. That’s obviously not the case today. In fact, most of us alive today have little to no...

FYI: This post is a bit meta—about writing/blogging itself—so it may not be your cup of tea. I’ve been having some cognitive dissonance about blogging. On the one hand, I don’t believe in doing things primarily for legacy purposes, since in the long arc of history, hardly anything is likely to be remembered or matter that much, and I won’t be here regardless. On the other hand, I also don’t like s...

One of the universal rules of decision-making is that every decision involves trade- offs. By definition, when making a decision, you are trading off one option for another. But other, less obvious trade-offs are also lurking beneath the surface. For example, whatever you choose now will send you down a path that will shape your future decisions, a mental model known as path dependence . That is,...