The Curious Engineer

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Second Thoughts

secondthoughts.ai

Accessible analysis of the big issues in AI. Click to read Second Thoughts, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

AI / MLSociety / politics / economyTech news / industry

’23’24’25’26
Posts
82 from 13 Apr 2023 to 14 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (21 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://secondthoughts.ai/feed

2026 16

  1. Anthropic’s Scion: A Four Year Project in Five Months
  2. What I saw around the Curve, 2026
  3. 14 Reasons Robotics is Hard
  4. Cybersecurity: Let’s Play to Win
  5. Anecdotes Everywhere, Evidence Almost Nowhere
  6. Never Trust A Number
  7. AI Can Help Plan a Bioweapon. Building One is Still Hard.
  8. From Compute Overhang to Compute Crunch
  9. Is AI 2027 Coming True?
  10. Tacit Knowledge: The Missing Factor in AI Bio Risk Assessments
  11. The Centaur Era
  12. To Forecast AI's Impact on Biosecurity, We Asked: Why are Attacks So Rare?
  13. 45 Thoughts About Agents
  14. We Just Got a Peek at How Crazy a World With AI Agents May Be
  15. Discarding the Shaft-and-Belt Model of Software Development
  16. Software Too Cheap to Meter

2025 25

  1. Presenting the Case That the Future Will Be Unrecognizable
  2. Reflections on The Curve
  3. Hyperproductivity: The Next Stage of AI?
  4. A Coalition For The Future
  5. A Project Is Not a Bundle of Tasks
  6. What I Saw Around The Curve
  7. The Future and Its Friends
  8. Human Drivers Will Kill 11 People While You Read This
  9. We’re In the Windows 95 Era of AI Agent Security
  10. GPT-5: The Case of the Missing Agent
  11. 35 Thoughts About AGI and 1 About GPT-5
  12. Short Takes #2
  13. Not So Fast: AI Coding Tools Can Actually Reduce Productivity
  14. The Curve 2025: The Premier Big Picture AI Conference
  15. Short Takes #1
  16. Lab vs. Life: Dissecting “AI as Normal Technology”
  17. When Decades Become Days: Dissecting AI 2027
  18. Announcing the Golden Gate Institute for AI
  19. First, They Came for the Software Engineers…
  20. Finally, A Way to Measure AI Progress; Everyone's Misreading It
  21. If AGI Means Everything People Do... What is it That People Do?
  22. We're Finding Out What Humans are Bad At
  23. China’s DeepSeek Adds a Weird New Data Point to The AI Race
  24. Are We on the Brink of AGI?
  25. The Important Thing About AGI is the Impact, Not the Name

2024 23

  1. LLMs Fight With Both Hands Tied Behind Their Back
  2. The Black Spatula Project: Day Five
  3. The Black Spatula Project
  4. The Future Is Already Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed
  5. What Are the Real Questions in AI?
  6. AI is Racing Forward – on a Very Long Road
  7. To Change the World, Set a Bold Target: Moore's Law as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
  8. No, A Bot Didn't Just Make $150M in Crypto
  9. Learning to Explore: AlphaProof and o1 Show The Path to AI Creativity
  10. AI Creativity Is A Question of Quality, Not Novelty
  11. What It’s Like To Solve a Math Olympiad Problem
  12. AI Could Break Things; Let's Use It As a Wakeup Call To Make Them Stronger
  13. The Unreasonable Magic of Rolling A Tennis Ball Down a Sandcastle
  14. Rather Than Arguing About What We Don't Know, Let's Work Together To Find Out
  15. The Problems That Google Docs Never Solved
  16. A Response to "Situational Awareness"
  17. Grounding the Conversation About AI
  18. One Conversation is Worth a Thousand Angry Takes
  19. What To Expect When You’re Expecting GPT-5
  20. I Don't See How Comparative Advantage Applies In a World of Strong AI
  21. Why Are LLMs So Gullible?
  22. Anatomy of a Hack
  23. What is “Prompt Injection”, And Why Does It Fool Chatbots?

2023 18

  1. Would We Really Shut Down A Misbehaving AI?
  2. Toward Better AI Milestones
  3. When Will AIs Acquire Insight?
  4. The AI Explosion Might Never Happen
  5. Intermediate Superintelligence
  6. When We Forecast AGI, Do We Mean In The Lab Or In The Field?
  7. The AI Progress Paradox
  8. Why We Won't Achieve AGI Until Memory Is A Core Architectural Component
  9. Process vs. Product: Why We Are Not Yet On The Cusp Of AGI
  10. We Need to Recognize How Profoundly Different The AGI Future Will Be
  11. What Will AI Do For Us In The Near Term?
  12. To Address AI Risks, Draw Lessons From Climate Change
  13. A Unified Theory of AI Risk
  14. Get Ready For AI To Outdo Us At Everything
  15. Beyond the Turing Test
  16. An Intuitive Explanation of Large Language Models
  17. I’m a Senior Software Engineer. What Will It Take For An AI To Do My Job?
  18. GPT-4 Doesn't Figure Things Out, It Already Knows Them