Cal Newport
FollowThe latest interviews, podcast appearances, and blog posts from Cal Newport, updated daily.
The Good Thing About Hard Things
A new research paper titled “AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance,” which was recently presented at the Conference on Language Modeling, has been ...
It’s Time to Investigate the AI Labs
Over the last several months, the two leading frontier AI labs have shown some brazen behavior. It started with a series of carefully planned announcements ...
Superintelligence is a Fairy Tale. But Chasing It Can Still Cause Harm.
Yesterday, multiple Anthropic employees casually announced online that they thought the types of AI they’re building could kill billions of people. Not in some distant ...
Anthropic Just Threatened to Kill Billions of People. This Is Not Okay.
Yesterday, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic engineer, resigned. As he explained on X: “[OpenAI and Anthropic] are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our ...
Wendell Berry and the Promise of the Deep Life
Wendell Berry died last week at 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he farmed his land using traditional techniques and wrote with ...
Are We at War with AI Agent “Civilizations”?
I thought I was done talking about the OpenAI hacking attack from July, but I was wrong. Last week, OpenAI released more details about the ...
How To Handle AI Anxiety: A Computer Scientist and a Buddhist Teacher On Managing Uncertainty | Cal Newport & Matthew Brensilver
Will AI take our jobs? Kill us? This episode provides both fact-checking and a psychological survival guide.
Has AI Gone Rogue?
The AI story of the summer should probably be the uncertain financial position of the AI labs hoping to launch record-breaking IPOs shortly. Technology news, ...
On AI Coding and Its Discontents
Back in January, I received a note from a senior software engineer in Silicon Valley. He described himself as an AI skeptic who became converted ...
Did OpenAI’s New Model “Go Rogue”?
A couple of weeks ago, the AI company Hugging Face announced that they had discovered an intrusion into their production infrastructure. They didn’t know the ...