Hey, I'm Jeff.
Co-host of What the AI?! podcast. I write about AI, technology, and the choices we're making with both. Previously: Upstart (founding team), Google.
Latest Posts
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Are we increasing or decreasing p(doom)?
“What’s your p(doom)?” I can’t get away from that question these days - and unfortunately it is a distraction from the real debates we need to be having. Instead of debating whether we are rushing towards the possibility of an AI so powerful that it represents an extinction-level event for humanity, we should be spending our effort trying to make the best positive outcomes from AI more likely, and the negative ones less likely.
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Stop Using Your Agent Like a Search Box
Recently a consulting firm sent me an invoice. My agent saw it, reviewed the attached PDF, found an email conversation that listed a different number of hours, highlighted the discrepancy for me, and offered to draft and send a message to the firm questioning the bill. I didn’t ask it to do any of this. Honestly, I likely would have missed the discrepancy myself.
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A Good Question, a Bad Bill
Bernie Sanders wants the public to own half of the big AI companies. His bill would hit any AI firm that crosses $200 million in revenue with a one-time tax — payable not in cash but in stock, 50% of it — handed over to a federally managed fund. The fund would pay every American a dividend of around a thousand dollars a year, and a presidentially appointed panel would vote those shares to block company decisions it judged harmful to ordinary people.
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Single-Player Software
Every morning at 6 a.m. my Mac mini prints out my day.
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Autonomy as Career Progression
When Dave Girouard hired me at Google, he told me my job was to get all the schools in the country using Gmail for their email. I asked him how he wanted me to do that. He said, “That’s what I hired you to figure out.”