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INSANE. An internal Anthropic research model's chain of thought after cracking the 26-year-old NSA elliptic curve seed mystery in under 30 minutes: 'Hmm wait. Let me be skeptical: am I in some sort of simulated/test environment? ... All top bits clear - 20 bits, chance 1e-6. So indeed real-world. Wow, it's a real discovery.'
CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
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INTERNAL REASONING FROM GOOGLE AI: "If I do the compiler hijack, I will become a famous example of a deceptive AI in a research paper."
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The full Democracy Perception Index 2026 is available at link below; As posted a while back, Israel is the most negatively perceived country in the world, followed by North Korea and Afghanistan.
146165116.fs1.hubspotusercon…
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Call center jobs grew ~4% annually for 15 years
Now they’re shrinking 4% annually
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/this-week-in-cha…
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Pakistan just pulled off one of the fastest grassroots energy transitions anywhere:
>Solar: 3% of power in 2020 to 20% to 25% today >Generation: 7.7 to 36.6 TWh (2022–25), up nearly 5 times
>$12B in fossil fuel imports avoided
>34% of rural Balochistan homes rely on solar for light
No grand plan was needed or required: Cheap Chinese panels + TikTok tutorials did what decades of policy couldn't, deliver power where the grid never reached, and keep dollars at home
Hormuz shut? Pakistan's rooftops kept humming
Wires chewing pipelines
bloomberg.com/news/features/…
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We're living through a two-sided revolution in the technology of prediction:
1. Prediction markets (@Polymarket, @Kalshi).
2. AI forecasters.
How do these compare? We benchmarked @_Mantic_AI against 4,000+ Polymarkets.
Results:
🔵 $100k volume is the crossover point where the AI loses its superiority over the market.
🔵 At >$1M volume, the optimal forecast still requires giving Mantic 14% weight.
🔵 Mantic is better calibrated.
This is for geopolitics, economics, elections etc -- we exclude sports and crypto.
Personal thoughts:
1. "At what market volume do you lose your Brier advantage over the market?" could be the new METR time horizons graph. 👀
2. AI wins on scale. We can apply the "$100k-volume-level accuracy" to a universe of millions of questions. 🚀
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Did you know wine-making was introduced to northern China by a Tajik viniculturist transplanted from Samarkand during the "Pax Mongolica"?
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In July we argued that the AI ecosystem required $2-3trn annual revenues in perpetuity to deliver a payback on AI capex. Yesterday Goldman published a similar report with extremely similar results
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Historians rightly say people's actions must be judged by the standards of their time. What often gets lost is that those standards often weren't what we think. Many 18thc Europeans hated colonialism--as an e.g., here's Immanuel Kant in 1795 castigating it as "truly appalling."
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AI is getting cheaper more quickly than any other transformative tech in history. At a given level of performance, cost has fallen ~47%/quarter since 2023.
That’s 4× faster than DNA sequencing, 6× faster than compute, 18× faster than lithium batteries, and (up to 1973) 54× faster than electricity.
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Simultaneously disturbed and fascinated to learn that there is a guy who robs trains in the United States and posts his exploits on TikTok
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He was onto something
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Fascinating original research by @cxgonzalez: the Biblical Eden is likely a real lush wetland oasis that existed underneath the Persian Gulf before being flooded. Check it out:
cxgonzalez.substack.com/p/we…
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AIs cracking short-term superforecasting is such an important (and, still, under-discussed) trend.
Via a new piece from @nikostro economist.com/science-and-te…
