AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan) on Thoughtfluence

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan) on Thoughtfluence

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AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)16d

A big-tent or small-tent AI safety movement?

The unstated disagreement that underpins safety debates

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)19d

AI existential risk probabilities are (still) too unreliable to inform policy

How speculation gets laundered through pseudo-quantification

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)1mo

The AI-as-Normal-Technology view of loss-of-control incidents

A middle ground between the cybersecurity and AI safety communities

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)2mo

AI agents can't yet do open-ended AI research

Early evidence from two case studies

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)3mo

What will be left for us to work on?

My keynote at ICML 2026

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)3mo

Up the Stack: How AI’s Escape From the Commodity Trap Risks Enterprise Lock-in

Critics and boosters are both looking in the wrong place

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)4mo

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

Coding agents as normal technology

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)4mo

Did Google’s AI agents really build an operating system for $916?

The importance of independent evaluation

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)4mo

Do AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention?

Let’s not skip the hard work of AI governance

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)6mo

Open-world evaluations for measuring frontier AI capabilities

Introducing CRUX, a new project for evaluating AI on long, messy tasks

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)7mo

New Paper: Towards a science of AI agent reliability

Quantifying the capability-reliability gap

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)8mo

AI Won’t Automatically Make Legal Services Cheaper

Applying the AI as Normal Technology framework to legal services

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)8mo

Fact checking Moravec's paradox

This famous aphorism is neither true nor useful

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)13mo

A guide to understanding AI as normal technology

And a big change for this newsletter

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)15mo

Could AI slow science?

Confronting the production-progress paradox

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)17mo

AGI is not a milestone

There is no capability threshold that will lead to sudden impacts

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)18mo

AI as Normal Technology

A new paper that we will expand into our next book

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)22mo

Is AI progress slowing down?

Making sense of recent technology trends and claims

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)22mo

We Looked at 78 Election Deepfakes. Political Misinformation is not an AI Problem.

Technology Isn’t the Problem—or the Solution.

AI Snake Oil (Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan)23mo

Does the UK’s liver transplant matching algorithm systematically exclude younger patients?

Seemingly minor technical decisions can have life-or-death effects

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