Timothy Lee
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Articles by Timothy Lee
Tesla is finally scaling up driverless robotaxi service
I have a reputation as a Tesla skeptic, and something I regularly hear from Tesla owners is “you need to try the latest version of Tesla’s FSD technology — it wasn’t that good a year ago but it’s really impressive now.” I take comments like this seriously, and I try to drive (or ride) in Teslas as often as I can. But I also think people who say this tend to underestimate how difficult it is to judge autonomous systems based on casual observation.
Middle Market Transaction Update Fall 2026
Fall 2026 M&A Update During the second quarter of 2026, deal volume (as measured by Cap IQ) and average pricing in middle market M&A (as measured by GF Data®) was relatively stable compared to prior quarters’ activity. Surveys conducted by GF Data® captured 85 middle market M&A transactions in 2Q26, matching the reported transaction volume in 1Q26. Valuation multiples declined modestly during the quarter, with the average all-industry EBITDA multiple decreasing from 7.3x in 1Q26 to 7.0x in 2Q26.
Second Quarter 2026 | Segment Focus: Building Materials
Executive Industry Trends Real GDP and construction GDP both rose in Q1 2026, increasing 2.7% and 0.8%, respectively, from Q1 2025. June labor data were mixed: the national unemployment rate increased slightly to 4.2%, while construction unemployment rose more sharply to 4.7%. Residential and highway spending, industrial production, and all three tracked commodity input-price indexes increased year-over-year, while non- residential spending declined.
Middle Market Transaction Update Summer 2026
Summer 2026 M&A Update FEATURE ARTICLE: Preparing For A Successful Transaction: A Guide for Private Business Owners During the first quarter of 2026, deal volume (as measured by Cap IQ) and average pricing in middle market M&A (as measured by GF Data®) increased in tandem for the first time in five quarters, reversing a recent trend. Surveys conducted by GF Data® captured 80 middle market M&A transactions in 1Q26, representing a 5% decrease from 4Q25.
Why it might not make sense for you to own a self-driving car
Last month I got to check out a self-driving car unlike any I’d seen before. The roof had a Waymo-like rack of sensors. Inside, the doors had small video screens instead of side mirrors. At the touch of a button, the rectangular steering wheel folded into the dashboard and a video screen slid in front of it, putting the car into self-driving mode. The prototype vehicle, made by a startup called Tensor, was parked on a San Francisco street outside the Ride AI conference.
I don’t think we are close to “AI scientists”
In February, my colleague Kai Williams pointed out that LLMs have an uncanny ability to recognize authors based on their unpublished prose. In recent weeks, journalists like Megan McArdle and Kelsey Piper have confirmed this. I decided to try it out for myself. Back in 2012, a friend paid me $500 to write an essay about the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist. It never got published. So on Friday, I opened ChatGPT in incognito mode and pasted in five paragraphs from the essay.
How Long Until AI Doesn’t Need Humans?
How long until AI systems can sustain their own existence — such that, if every human died, they could keep growing their own population? METR’s Ajeya Cotra and Understanding AI’s Timothy B. Lee discuss the path toward this “self-sufficient AI.” She thinks it’s nearly imminent; he believes it might never happen.
This site can’t be reached
By eliminating ongoing legal uncertainty, the AFA would encourage growth, investment, expansion and hiring across the franchising and small business sector. Year after year, public opinion polling shows that Americans feel more positively toward small businesses than any other institution in America, even ahead of the military and police. While politicians often profess support for small businesses, however, their deeds too often don’t match their words.
Why it’s getting harder to measure AI performance
Before we get to today’s article, I want to recommend some audio content about autonomous vehicles: Back in 2010, my friend Ryan Avent and I made a bet about the future of autonomous vehicles. The bet came due last month and I won. Ryan and I did a postmortem on my podcast, AI Summer. You can listen here or search for “AI Summer” in your favorite podcast app. PJ Vogt’s podcast Search Engine just did a two-part series on autonomous vehicles.
In 2011, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published an essay that became a kind of manifesto for Silicon Valley during the 2010s. “Software is eating the world,” Andreessen declared. Computers and the Internet had already revolutionized a bunch of information-oriented businesses: books, movies, music, photography, telecommunications, and so forth. Software also played a major supporting role in more tangible industries.
Middle Market Transaction Update Spring 2026
Spring 2026 M&A Update Middle market M&A activity rebounded in the fourth quarter of 2025 following the typical late-summer slowdown experienced in the third quarter. Surveys conducted by GF Data® captured 84 transactions in 4Q25, representing a 25% increase from 3Q25, though activity remained below prior-year levels.
COMMENTARY | Bad science breeds bad verdicts
Junk science admitted during trial continues to undermine our judicial system, unfairly affecting individual parties, consumers and industries. When judges allow flawed evidence to corrupt verdicts, that rewards frivolous litigants, encourages future “jackpot justice” claims and fuels widespread distortion of justice. kAmyFC:6D D9@F=5?’E 36 3=2>65 3642FD6 E96J 42?’E 36 6IA64E65 E@ >2<6 67764E:G6 564:D:@?D :? 42D6D H96? “6IA6CE” E6DE:>@?J AFE 367@C6 E96> :D 24EF2==J C@@E65 :?
How to Sound Like an Expert in Any AI Bubble Debate Original
I’m excited to publish this post co-authored with Timothy Lee, one of my favorite writers on technology and artificial intelligence. His Substack Understanding AI is a fantastic guide to how AI works as a technology and a business. In the last few weeks, something’s troubled and fascinated us about the national debate over whether artificial intelligence is a bubble. Everywhere we look and listen, experts are citing the same small number of statistics, factoids, and studies.
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How a big shift in training LLMs led to a capability explosion
1 day ago Can AI manage your stock portfolio? Zerodha users are trying Zerodha, one of India’s largest stockbrokers, has become the first to integrate MCP with Claude AI, a large language model (LLM) built by Anthropic. … 2 hours ago Apple's Surprising AI Strategy for Siri Reportedly Includes OpenAI or Anthropic Apple is reportedly considering partnering with external companies including Anthropic or OpenAI to overhaul Siri’s artificial intelligence, marking …
How a big shift in training LLMs led to a capability explosion
Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon. In April 2023, a few weeks after the launch of GPT-4, the Internet went wild for two new software projects with the audacious names BabyAGI and AutoGPT. “Over the past week, developers around the world have begun building ‘autonomous agents’ that work with large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 to solve complex problems,” Mark Sullivan wrote for Fast Company.
How a big shift in training LLMs led to a capability explosion
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Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book
Harry Potter and the Copyright Lawsuit The research could have big implications for generative AI copyright lawsuits. In recent years, numerous plaintiffs—including publishers of books, newspapers, computer code, and photographs—have sued AI companies for training models using copyrighted material. A key question in all of these lawsuits has been how easily AI models produce verbatim excerpts from the plaintiffs’ copyrighted content.
Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book
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TIMOTHY LEE: Copyright Will Strengthen, Not Weaken AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies require access to enormous amounts of data, including valuable creative works protected by United States copyright and other laws.
Top AI Newsletters of 2025
This list is not exhaustive but features many of the top AI Newsletters on the internet today. 📚 Some of the factors used in the ranking are total paid subscriptions (this is the main criteria) engagement relative to list size ⭐ highlighting emerging writers (also check out the “rising” leaderboards in tech in the app) 💭 simply my own personal judgment (while browsing Substack’s Tech and Biz leaderboards & analyzing who is reading who that is a huge Venn diagram in and of itself).
After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers
Waymo has been in dozens of crashes. Most were not Waymo’s fault. A driverless Waymo in Los Angeles. A driverless Waymo in Los Angeles. The first ever fatal crash involving a fully driverless vehicle occurred in San Francisco on January 19. The driverless vehicle belonged to Waymo, but the crash was not Waymo’s fault. Here’s what happened: A Waymo with no driver or passengers stopped for a red light. Another car stopped behind the Waymo.
Driverless trucks are coming and unions aren’t happy about it
We are five weeks away from the Ride AI summit in Los Angeles on April 2. We’re bringing together industry leaders to discuss what’s working and what comes next for autonomous vehicles. I will be there, and we’ve got a great lineup of speakers, including Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua, Toyota Research Institute CEO Gil Pratt, and executives from Waymo, Kodiak, Zoox, and Wayve—with more speakers still to be announced.
Two years of Artificial Ignorance
This week marks the second anniversary of Artificial Ignorance. 2024 was my first full calendar year of biweekly writing, and it felt like I started to find my footing as a writer (creator? Substacker?). At the very least, it does feel like I'm finally developing some good muscle memory for writing on a weekly cadence.
Redesigning shift work to improve patient care and well-being [PODCAST] Original
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes! Join emergency physician Maureen Gibbons as they explore the concept of rethinking shift work in health care. They discuss how distributing shifts among multiple physicians can reduce burnout, enhance job satisfaction, and improve patient outcomes.
Ajeya Cotra on AI safety and the future of humanity
Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:13:23 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Ajeya Cotra works at Open Philanthropy, a leading funder of efforts to combat existential risks from AI. She has led the foundation’s grantmaking on technical research to understand and reduce catastrophic risks from advanced AI. She is co-author of Planned Obsolescence, a newsletter about AI futurism and AI alignment.
Jon Askonas on AI policy in the Trump era
Jon Askonas, an Assistant Professor of Politics at Catholic University of America, is well connected to conservatives and Republicans in Washington DC. In this December 16 conversation, he talked to Tim and Dean about Silicon Valley’s evolving relationship to the Republican party, who will be involved in AI policy in the second Trump Administration, and what AI policy issues are likely to be be prioritized—he predicts it won’t be existential risk. Timothy B: Lee: So we had an election last month.
Why AI language models choke on too much text
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Why AI language models choke on too much text
Compute costs scale with the square of the input size. That's not great. Large language models represent text using tokens, each of which is a few characters. Short words are represented by a single token (like "the" or "it"), whereas larger words may be represented by several tokens (GPT-4o represents "indivisible" with "ind," "iv," and "isible"). When OpenAI released ChatGPT two years ago, it had a memory—known as a context window—of just 8,192 tokens. That works out to roughly 6,000 words of text.
Why the deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise
Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Few journalists explore how AI works and how it's changing our world in such a lucid and accessible manner as Timothy Lee (Bluesky profile). He reports on AI and the future of the economy and with a computer science masters degree from Princeton writes about topics that concern us all.
How a stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom
"You’ve taken this idea way too far," a mentor told Prof. Fei-Fei Li. During my first semester as a computer science graduate student at Princeton, I took COS 402: Artificial Intelligence. Toward the end of the semester, there was a lecture about neural networks. This was in the fall of 2008, and I got the distinct impression—both from that lecture and the textbook—that neural networks had become a backwater. Neural networks had delivered some impressive results in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
America’s housing crisis needs real answers, not Biden’s scapegoating
We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE. The economic law of supply and demand dictates that if the supply of goods or services outpaces demand, prices fall. Most politicians understand this and commonly invoke that law in response to public discontent about high consumer costs.
Why the deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise
Similar points were made by Christopher Alexander (of _A Pattern Language_ fame, which inspired what software types call "design patterns") in his brilliant/weird monograph _Notes on the Synthesis of Form_. It occurred to me after commenting that your history of neural networks here looks a bit like a technology evolving / being augmented-and-replaced while keeping a single name through several significant structural shifts. I wrote about how the history of "computers" followed that path: 1.
Why the deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise
During my first semester as a computer science graduate student at Princeton, I took COS 402: Artificial Intelligence. Toward the end of the semester there was a lecture about neural networks. This was in the fall of 2008, and I got the distinct impression—both from that lecture and the textbook—that neural networks had become a backwater. Neural networks had delivered some impressive results in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But then progress stalled.
Human drivers keep rear-ending Waymos
7 hours ago Tesla has revealed its modular ‘unboxed’ EV manufacturing process that will be used in its upcoming Robotaxi in a new patent application. At Tesla’s 2023 Investor Day, the automaker unveiled a new car manufacturing system, which CEO Elon Musk claimed would be faster, more efficient, and enable the …
Driverless semis could be months away
Tech News Tube is a real time news feed of the latest technology news headlines.Follow all of the top tech sites in one place, on the web or your mobile device.
Second language Spanish vowel production: an acoustic analysis
Second language Spanish vowel production: an acoustic analysis Autores: Mandy R. Menke, Timothy Lee Face Localización: Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics, ISSN-e 2199-3386, ISSN 1939-0238, Vol. 3, Nº. 1, 2010, págs. 181-214 Idioma: inglés Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...) Resumen Findings from a cross-sectional study of the Spanish vowel productions of sixty adult second language learners of Spanish are presented in this article.
On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers
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Media coverage of campus protests tends to focus on the spectacle rather than the substance
Protest movements can look very different depending on where you stand, both literally and figuratively. For protesters, demonstrations are usually the result of meticulous planning by advocacy groups and leaders aimed at getting a message out to a wider world or to specific institutional targets. To outside onlookers, however, protests can seem disorganized and disruptive, and it can be difficult to see the depth of the effort or their aims.
Pulitzer’s AI Spotlight Series will train 1,000 journalists on AI accountability reporting
The Pulitzer Center has officially kicked off The AI Spotlight Series, a new training initiative that aims to teach 1,000 journalists how to do AI accountability reporting over the next two years. On April 21, roughly 40 journalists gathered at the University of California, Berkeley for the inaugural “Introduction to AI reporting” session, which was built to demystify basic AI concepts for reporters outside the tech beat.
Even if mistrust in news isn’t entirely reporters’ fault, it is their problem
In the United States, many conservatives read news coverage with suspicion or outright hostility. The result is that stories they feel positively about “feel like exceptions” and coverage that “challenges conservative sensibilities, even if fairly, will reinforce pre-existing perceptions,” as Ursinus College journalism professor and Tow Center fellow Doron Taussig wrote in recent work. Fair or not — “a deeply entrenched narrative won’t be dislodged by coverage that breaks even,” Taussig notes.
Debugging tech journalism
This piece was originally published by the nonprofit Asterisk Magazine, “a quarterly journal of clear writing and clear thinking about things that matter.” In November, a few days after Sam Altman was fired — and then rehired — as CEO of OpenAI, Reuters reported on a letter that may have played a role in Altman’s ouster.
IRS Numbers Shred Biden’s “Fair Share” Platitudes
Do wealthy Americans pay their “fair share” of income taxes? If “fair” is defined as a reasonable equilibrium between someone’s share of income earned and their share of income taxes paid, then wealthier Americans actually pay more than their fair share. That might surprise many people, but it’s the inescapable takeaway from the latest Internal Revenue Service (IRS) numbers. It would certainly surprise Joe Biden, to the extent that he ever engages in thoughtful self-reflection.
5 Reasons E&P Sellers Need a Quality of Earnings Report
April 5, 2024 Mergers, Acquisitions, & Divestitures Special Topics Apart from a number of headline deals, M&A activity was sidelined for much of 2022 and 2023. But needing to replenish a depleting asset base with quality mineral acreage, stabilizing interest rates, and pent-up M&A demand are expected to compel buyers and sellers to renew their efforts in 2024 and beyond. As deal activity recovers, sellers need to be prepared to present their value proposition in a compelling manner.
A new game parodies The New York Times’ Gaza coverage
LINK: molleindustria.itch.io ➚ | Posted by: Andrew Deck | April 4, 2024 The latest critique of The New York Times’ coverage of Gaza comes from an unlikely source — an indie game developer. Earlier this week, the Pittsburgh-based developer Molleindustria released its new parody game, called The New York Times Simulator. The game puts each player in the seat of editor-in-chief. On its surface, the objective is simple: build the front page of the Times’ paper each day.
Net Neutrality Could Bring Biden's Censorship To The Whole Internet
The Supreme Court recently heard oral argument in one of the most important cases this term, one with critical implications for First Amendment free speech rights as society proceeds further into a world reliant upon internet service. The controversy at the heart of Murthy v. Missouri is the Biden administration’s effort to pressure or “jawbone” social media to censor various opinions and public policy advocacy about the Covid pandemic that it found objectionable.
5 Reasons Sellers Should Obtain a Quality of Earnings Report
March 11, 2024 M&A Planning & Strategy Special Topics M&A deal flow was sidelined for much of 2022 and 2023, but the economy’s soft landing, stabilizing interest rates, and pent-up M&A demand are expected to compel buyers and sellers to renew their efforts in 2024 and beyond. As deal activity recovers, sellers need to be prepared to present their value proposition in a compelling manner.
Google promotes sketchy product “reviews” from big publishers at the expense of small indie sites, a small indie site argues
LINK: housefresh.com ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | February 20, 2024 If you’re looking to buy an air purifier or a dehumidifier, you could do worse than to start with HouseFresh, an ad-free independent review site that buys air cleaning products with its own money, tests them itself (the process involves incense sticks), recommends the ones it likes, and makes money from affiliate revenue.
DeepMind AI, el nuevo rival de los mejores estudiantes del mundo en geometría
Un sistema desarrollado por DeepMind de Google estableció un nuevo récord de rendimiento de la IA en problemas de geometría. AlphaGeometry de DeepMind logró resolver 25 de los 30 problemas de geometría extraídos de la Olimpíada Internacional de Matemáticas (OIM) entre 2000 y 2022. El prestigio de la Olimpíada Internacional de Matemáticas Eso coloca al software por delante de la gran mayoría de los jóvenes matemáticos y apenas por debajo de los medallistas de oro de la OIM.
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