Kevin A. Bryan
@Afinetheorem
Assoc. Prof. of Strategy, U Toronto Rotman |
Chief Economist, CDL Toronto | Co-Founder, AllDayTA |
Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps (especially now)
20 Following 24K Followers
On the French AI novel: so many reflexively claiming bias or saying "you can't detect AI writing". I will donate $1000 to the charity of your choice if you show me a single literary French text of 1000+ words, pre-2022, with Internet Archive link, that is 100% AI on Pangram. 1/2
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Beautiful demostration of "with knowledge of how to use the right scaffolding, the models can absolutely do lovely things"
for the past few months i've been asking our models to paint. opus 5.5 is very skilled at emulating different styles
every image here is a python program generated pixel by pixel. there is no image model, and no off-the-shelf art software. instead, it's about 7,500 lines of code using standard libraries to emulate different brush styles. the agents don't use any pictures as reference, instead working only from what they know about each painter
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Love it! And Ethan is so good at showing human-centered AI applications - frankly, much better than the average product launch we see from the labs!
For all the tension between AI & the arts, I have received enthusiastic receptions from the William Carlos Williams Society, the TS Eliot Society & others about the AI interpretations of their work that I have posted here. It is possible to use AI as a bridge to arts appreciation
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It is a little amazing how many industries have seen AI barrelling towards them like a runaway freight train for three or four years now, but have developed almost no response to it whatsoever.
Too cool! Abhishek with the poster version of my "Eight Rules for a Progress-Driven Life". Looks great! Get them up in all the schools!
People got upset at me for saying this, but there are no companies outside the US and China even *trying* to build frontier AI (perhaps Korea and UK are close), despite marketing claims. Governments saying "sovereign AI" need to understand this.
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On AI capabilities: the French press is all over the Haitian-Canadian novel C’était ça ou mourir. It's winning basically every award you can win, and was tipped to be the 2nd Canadian winner of the Prix Goncourt. Only one problem: 1/2
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Fascinating followup on famous NHJ article about sending her child to a "not great" school in NYC. But on "underresourced" with "no one to watch the kids at lunch" - NYC spends 44k/student, vs 16 in Denmark, 12 in Toronto, 12k in the TikTok famous "rich" school in Carmel Indiana.
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To be clear, METR staff are almost entirely folks giving up a lot of money they could make elsewhere in order to work on rigorous AI safety evals and analysis. The folks criticizing them are largely cynics who can't imagine what civic-mindedness looks like.
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Today in "tacit knowledge is a complement to AI". Caveat: the *gap* in performance using AI vs not using is higher for less skilled workers (their baseline is bad)! But the erosion of skill when trying to do the thing without AI after using AI for months is also worse for them.
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Nov 2025 LEAP panel of AI experts and superforecasters: 10% chance of AI helping solve a Millennium problem by 2027. "One expert cites the Clay president's June 2025 claim: “We're very far away from AI being able to say anything serious about any of those problems” (Heaven 2025)"
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@TheStalwart @jonluca Neither OAI nor Ant has released a frontier model since 5.6 sol despite having things internally and despite the "China is catching up!" rhetoric. Indeed, Ant *never* released mythos to the public...
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@tylercowen & @ATabarrok don't need more acclaim, but look at this *2019* grant list. Alice Evans (great new book coming). Jason pre-Progress foundation. Saloni/Sam pre-Works in Progress. *17 year old* Aschenbrenner. Tyler's "how to spot talent" book clearly "self-recommending"!
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I honestly think having the US and China compete against each other in a Robot Olympics would do more to raise public sentiment on AI than using frontier models to develop new wonder drugs or whatever.
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Quite wild. And for @lugaricano, definitely pull in folks with small business experience to Rhine. I am sure that for @alldaytahelps, we have paid more in various compliance costs than all of the revenue we've ever earned in EU, despite sales at two dozen schools! Makes no sense.
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A fascinating little glimpse at how Europe keeps destroying its entrepreneurs, one "tiny little obviously reasonable who could possibly object" regulation at a time. The US has a thriving ecosystem of small electronics manufacturers; Europe has just killed its equivalent companies for good. This is just one of thousands of similar regulations that have largely eliminated European technology startups.
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Zero sum thinking is so bad. Europe being more productive is good for Americans - we trade! China having great univ research is great for Canadians - we take their cancer medicine! No fixed pie of prosperity. So much bad political and moral behavior based on not knowing this.
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Though it seems next to no one had appreciated this, US GDP simply doesn't count Nvidia's value-add! Taiwan's stats don't either (which they shouldn't), so the world's largest firm is just left out of GWP!
This is largely because of a politicized decision over a decade ago. People worried that counting the sort of design work firms like Nvidia do as "manufacturing" would interfere with efforts to promote "real" US manufacturing, and it ended up just not being counted anywhere.
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We keep innovating @alldaytahelps Sign up for the Fall here:
If the houses you could rent improved every six months as a result of billions of capex, and ones you owned had to be manually repaired, this might not be a good idea. Internally "built" AI (e.g., finetune of an OS model that's already out of date) is not a competitive advantange
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NEW: Thomson Reuters wanted to rely less on Claude. So it built its own AI model off Alibaba's Qwen.
TR's CTO says using frontier labs for intelligence, instead of building on open source, is like renting a house.
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This is amazing. One of the most inspirational things I've seen in a while.
Editing and aesthetics are the best of the video essay format. The pacing feels like something out of the 70s golden age of documentaries.
The education is basic but original. Combines both essential commonly held facts and a unique perspective.
It displays the cares and interests of @jacob__titus as a creator with great conviction without making it about him at all. In fact he fades into the background of the story.
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