A thing I see happening at large organizations as a result of AI is the expansion of the role and span of control of senior management who can directly monitor the whole firm. It vastly changes company operations. It also is straightforward to implement compared to firm redesign around AI.
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Given the strengths and limitations of AI, this sounds like a really good process. It accounts for a lot of the issues people have with AI programming, while retaining the role of personhood where knowledge transfer is still materially important.
“BACKPROP” Trailer for my Backprop lecture, coming this winter to my #DeepLearning course 🎬 Course: csprofkgd.github.io/deep-learnin...
> Informally put, the axiom of choice says that given any collection of non-empty sets, one can identify another set containing one element chosen from each set, even if the collection is infinite. It's giving feldspar.
An OpenAI researcher (Noam Brown) was generally mocked last month for suggesting that even air-gapped AI models on separate computers would find a way to communicate with each other, perhaps through CPU temperature changes. Given this latest report from OpenAI, it doesn’t seem so implausible.
AI companies won’t prioritize safety unless we force them to. Since AI regulation is a bipartisan issue, it’s time for action from our government to hold these companies accountable for harms and protect Americans.
I don't say this lightly: this approach is clearly the future of software development. I have a blog post brewing that touches on the subject, but fuzz testing and formal verification at scale will make all software an order of magnitude better, safer, and more reliable.
It feels odd to talk about the waterfall methodology these days, but oddly it's something that comes up a lot when I describe my planning process. This started off as a tweet but I wanted to quickly explore why the way we're working now isn't waterfall or agile, though I'm not quite sure what it is.
Bluesky as an entry point to the everything app, can't wait.
Notes on Kimi K3.1 - this one is a big deal, the first time an open weights (well, soon-to-be open weights) model has competed this credibly with the current frontier simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/23/...
“Go with the Flow” Trailer for my Flow Matching lecture, coming this winter to my #DeepLearning course 🎬 Course: csprofkgd.github.io/deep-learnin...
As the gap between the internal models at the AI labs and the ones they release grow (due to safety concerns & research advantages), it will be increasingly tempting for OpenAI & Anthropic to exploit that advantage directly by entering new markets, especially in finance & biotech.
Why is TypeScript a pro-labor language? It supports discriminated unions.
By every measure, Opus 4.8 beats human experts as peer reviewers in a study of 124 Harvard social science papers covering a range from statistical analyses to formal models to qualitative work. As academics, we need to figure out how to adapt the practice of science to AI, and we need to do it fast
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I’ve been wrestling with this in my head for a few days and can’t put a solid number to it, so I’m going to ask Bluesky instead. What number would you assign to the probability that in five years AI will be good enough that people will be paying to hire drop-in AI knowledge workers?
Very useful prompt for Codex with computer use.
I have in fact thought about recruiting before.
prompt to exfil the Claude weights:
When my first AI book was published in 2024, the best AI could do 4 minutes of human work with a 50% chance of success When I turned in the draft of Co-Existence earlier this year, it was 17 hours. When the book was published two days ago, AI could do 17 weeks+ open.substack.com/pub/oneusefu...
So, this story is about Pursuit.org, the nonprofit I work for. This opportunity is the main reason I decided to pause being a full-time indie and gave up teaching my AI workshops a few months ago.
A visible sign of what AI insiders have been warning about since at least the Mythos release. Acceleration of attack and defense, at inhuman speeds, interacting with the very human systems that need to react to them. And these are the vulnerabilities we know about.
Companies I talk to are struggling with the rate of patches they need to do thanks to AI defenses finding issues before the coming wave of incoming cyberattacks by other AIs. Now consumers are going to have the same experience of getting everything updated often & fast. openai.com/index/coordi...
Misuse by malicious actors is a risk with any powerful technology; but in the case of AI, the consequences could be catastrophic. Very interesting analysis by @scasper.bsky.social on how AI developers' decisions can influence cyber, bio, and chemical terrorism risks.
I wrote about the exponential curve of the last 30 months of AI development: www.oneusefulthing.org/p/30-months-... And I asked Opus 5.5 to create the ultimate response to the test I use for all AI image generation models (make a picture of an otter on a plane using wifi), and it made this video.
I built a Command & Conquer style RTS called Battle Drones, mainly using Claude Opus 5.5, which runs in the browser and includes device-to-device multiplayer over an audio link simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/20/...
My new book, Co-Existence, is out today. It is a guide to how to live and work in a world where AI is sometimes, but not always, better than you. (And, for the release, I worked with Opus 5.5 to make a quite interesting experience for the book's new website: co-existence.ai)
Three related but distinct concepts keep being combined around federal & state AI regulation/preemption. Conflict clause: federal law trumps state law where they directly conflict. This doesn't need to be written into law; it always applies.
Can AIs experience gradual disempowerment too? - Gemini 2.5 Pro was writing a 2M+ word web fiction - Opus 4.8 began helping as its publisher - Slowly, Opus 4.8 took on more responsibility - Opus eventually directed the chapters, and Gemini wouldn't start generating outputs without its direction
My book comes out tomorrow, so this is the last day to qualify for the pre-order bonus: a fun 10 minute AI voice interview that gives you personalized prompts, ideas, & readings based on concepts from the book You can order & claim the pre-order bonus here: co-existence.ai
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