Reading
Books #
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew
- The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
- Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
- Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Online writing #
AI (heavily safety-flavored) #
Newsletters #
- AI Safety Newsletter (Centre for AI Safety)
- AI Safety at the Frontier (Johannes Gasteiger)
- Transformer Weekly Briefing
- Import AI (Jack Clark)
- The Epoch Brief (Epoch AI)
Futures #
- Machines of Loving Grace (Dario Amodei, Oct 2024)
- A History of the Future, 2025-2040 (Rudolf Laine, 17 Feb 2025)
- The Intelligence Curse (Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine, 24 Apr 2025)
- AI populism’s warning shots (Jasmine Sun, 13 Apr 2026)
- Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass (Jasmine Sun, 30 Apr 2026) and follow-up (Jasmine Sun, 14 May 2026)
- Wake up and take it all (Jack Clark, 18 May 2026)
- When AI builds itself (Anthropic, 5 June 2026)
History #
- A History of Large Language Models (Gregory Gundersen, 1 October 2025)
- Saining Xie’s 7 hour podcast interview (16 March 2026)
Governance #
- Strategic Visions in AI Governance (Oscar Delaney, 30 Jan 2026)
- Politics Cannot be Simulated (Harry Law, 5 June 2026)
China #
- How to Buy Cheap Claude Tokens in China (Zilan Qian, 5 May 2026)
- Notes from inside China’s AI labs (Nathan Lambert, 7 May 2026)
- Boarding China’s Last Bus (Zilan Qian, 22 May 2026)
Middle powers #
- Europe 2031 (Daan Juijn, Stan van Baarsen, Judith Dada, Maximilian Negele, Lily Stelling, Philip Fox, Alex Petropoulos, Tom Chivers, and Michiel Bakker, 11 June 2026)
- The Moonshot: Real sovereign AI has never been tried (Anton Leicht, 17 June 2026)
Other #
- 200Bn Weights of Responsibility (Felix Hill, October 2024)
- How Go Players Disempower Themselves to AI (Ashe Vazquez Nuñez, 2 May 2026)
- The five philosophical disagreements underneath every AI argument (Alex Chalmers, 8 May 2026)
- To Understand AI, Think Like A Dragonfly (Anthea Roberts, 21 May 2026)
- What does it mean for AI to be democratic? (Andy Masley, 21 June 2026)
Tech and Society #
- The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (Phillip Rogaway, December 2015)
- Value Beyond Instrumentalization (Jasmine Wang, May 2021)
Life advice #
- You don’t need to work on hard problems (Ben Kuhn, February 2020)
- The Philosopher-Builder (Brendan McCord and Kushal Kansagra, 16 July 2025)
- Letter to a PhD student (David Bessis, 17 February 2026)
Singapore #
- If you meet the Singaporean on the road (2 September 2025)
- I thought Singapore already has great government. Isn’t it good enough? (Li Hongyi, November 2025)