
Research & grantmaking @coeff_giving • Leave me anonymous feedback: https://xitter.cf/t.co/0YmbLhCA2R
New York
Joined November 2016
- Tweets782
- Following547
- Followers3K
- Likes7.1K
Deena Mousa retweeted
We started a Substack! coefficientgiving.substack.c…
One of my favorite things about working at @coeff_giving is how much good public writing our staff produces. A few of my favorites from the past year:
1️⃣ @Lewis_Bollard's great end-of-year newsletter on big wins for farmed animals:
farmanimalwelfare.substack.c…
2️⃣ @deenamousa on why there aren't more AI radiologists, in @WorksInProgMag:
worksinprogress.co/issue/the…
3️⃣ Andrew Snyder-Beattie on four pillars for countering catastrophic biological risk, from our biosecurity team's new blog:
defensesindepth.bio/the-four…
None of those are on our website, so you would've had to know where to look. Now, posts like that will all be in one place.
Deena Mousa retweeted
This is one of the most important questions about AI and one that I've thought about. In countries like India, much of the economy is informal — heavily reliant on tacit knowledge that's not written down anywhere, processes never codified, "I know a guy who knows a guy" networks, and pervasive corruption. This underground economy is trapped in a vicious cycle: low wages + extreme illegibility → no incentive for private actors to build AI for their use cases → everything stays informal + low productivity. I don't know if governments and/or NGOs can help break this cycle, but if they can, its impact would easily exceed that of rural electrification. India has successfully built and deployed digital infrastructure for legibility in the past — Aadhaar and UPI — so there is hope.
Two important and depressing readings on related points:
Dispatches from India arjunramani.com/india-dispat… by @arjun_ramani3. There's a lot in there and I won't try to summarize it, but it helps explain why this project is not just a matter of building technology. "Many of the basic facts needed to operate in Indian society are not recorded anywhere, but rather sit inside the heads of various information brokers who live off the rents from keeping that information private." In other words, codification will be actively resisted by rent seekers who are adapted to the current system.
AI could keep poor countries poor newsletter.deenamousa.com/p/… by @deenamousa. Past waves of technology and globalization benefited poor countries because they got to export the products and services created through their cheap labor. AI probably won't have this effect — it substitutes cheap labor even more cheaply. (Implication: this makes it even more important for them to find ways to use AI to improve their local economies.)
Reading @random_walker made me think: one of the great (and most undersung) achievements of the 20th century was rural electrification. If "AI is the new electricity", what is "rural AIification"? "Rural" here is obviously a metaphor, though it has some literal elements too.
Deena Mousa retweeted
Really strong from Deena.
Especially appreciated this point: political arrangements can mean that very poor countries experience literally no benefit from extraordinary technological advances.
Malawi's GDP per capita keeps falling, even as agricultural productivity increases.
Deena Mousa retweeted
Interesting article by @deenamousa on why Malawi is poor.
My guess is that part of the story has to do with transportation costs. Other countries are landlocked as well, but Malawi is uniquely tied to Mozambique for transit access, which has issues
newsletter.deenamousa.com/p/…
Deena Mousa retweeted
I joined @TheEconomist's The Intelligence podcast today to discuss why AI models still underperform in most languages and what we can do about it
My new piece in @TheEconomist: frontier AI models still underperform badly in most languages — 12-29 percentage points worse than in English depending on the model
A real issue as global deployment for use cases like medical diagnosis is accelerating
Deena Mousa retweeted

The Economist@TheEconomistApr 2
🇬🇧
United KingdomConnected via WebAccount-level information, not a live location or per-post device.
“It had the knowledge, it just got lost in translation.” @deenamousa tells “The Intelligence” why AI models underperform in languages other than English bit.ly/4bOsSXj
What happens to a growth model built on services in the AI age?
Raghuram Rajan joined @oliverhanney & @deenamousa @coeff_giving on Ideas in Development to discuss how India's economy grew through services exports & whether that model is resilient to AI: youtube.com/watch?v=blmDjuoy…
Deena Mousa retweeted
A Kanchipuram Sari is not mere fabric.
It is a language with grammar, a financial instrument you can wear, a biological object dyed with chemistry, & a cultural archive woven by history & hand.
For over a millennium, it functioned as liquid wealth. In desperate times, the silk could be burned away, leaving behind real silver & gold.
A garment that protected its wearer, even in fire.
Today, that loom meets AI, microbes, & cryptography — systems trying to relearn lost grammar, grow colour without poisoning land, & turn trust from promise into proof.
What happens when a thousand-year-old loom meets 21st century’s thinking machines?
Issue 3: Kanchipuram Saris & Thinking Machines, written by Nivedita, designed & built by @AltCarbonIndia
altermag.com/articles/kanchi…
Great piece by @deenamousa on how @GiveDirectly - probably my favourite nonprofit - has been using machine learning to target direct cash transfers in LMICs. newsletter.deenamousa.com/p/…
Deena Mousa retweeted
Replying to @rSanti97
When you ask someone what their book club is reading and it is also Demons
Deena Mousa retweeted
Occasionally I collect and share links to papers and articles I enjoyed on our internal chats. Conor and Tom, who run our AI Policy Perspectives blog, asked me to pick a few favourites, so here they are! aipolicyperspectives.com/p/s…
Deena Mousa retweeted
How AI-powered tools like PainChek, an app that scans a person's face for tiny muscle movements, are helping healthcare providers better assess patients' pain (@deenamousa / MIT Technology Review)
technologyreview.com/2025/10…
techmeme.com/251016/p15#a251…
Deena Mousa retweeted
"AI isn't replacing radiologists" good article
Expectation: rapid progress in image recognition AI will delete radiology jobs (e.g. as famously predicted by Geoff Hinton now almost a decade ago). Reality: radiology is doing great and is growing.
There are a lot of imo naive predictions out there on the imminent impact of AI on the job market. E.g. a ~year ago, I was asked by someone who should know better if I think there will be any software engineers still today. (Spoiler: I think we're going to make it). This is happening too broadly.
The post goes into detail on why it's not that simple, using the example of radiology:
- the benchmarks are nowhere near broad enough to reflect actual, real scenarios.
- the job is a lot more multifaceted than just image recognition.
- deployment realities: regulatory, insurance and liability, diffusion and institutional inertia.
- Jevons paradox: if radiologists are sped up via AI as a tool, a lot more demand shows up.
I will say that radiology was imo not among the best examples to pick on in 2016 - it's too multi-faceted, too high risk, too regulated. When looking for jobs that will change a lot due to AI on shorter time scales, I'd look in other places - jobs that look like repetition of one rote task, each task being relatively independent, closed (not requiring too much context), short (in time), forgiving (the cost of mistake is low), and of course automatable giving current (and digital) capability. Even then, I'd expect to see AI adopted as a tool at first, where jobs change and refactor (e.g. more monitoring or supervising than manual doing, etc). Maybe coming up, we'll find better and broader set of examples of how this is all playing out across the industry.
About 6 months ago, I was also asked to vote if we will have less or more software engineers in 5 years. Exercise left for the reader.
Full post (the whole The Works in Progress Newsletter is quite good):
worksinprogress.news/p/why-a…
In 2016 Geoffrey Hinton said “we should stop training radiologists now" since AI would soon be better at their jobs.
He was right: models have outperformed radiologists on benchmarks for ~a decade.
Yet radiology jobs are at record highs, with an average salary of $520k.
Why?
Deena Mousa retweeted
Andre Geim argues we should do more weird research
@deenamousa and I argued the same in @asteriskmgzn: asteriskmag.com/issues/09/a-…
Deena Mousa retweeted
Two education-related questions:
1) What are the biggest schooling expansions in developing country history, besides SD INPRES?
2) Are any of their effects detectable in aggregate series like GDP?
Deena Mousa retweeted
New blog post, new coauthor!
Attention is the main thing we have, in experiencing a day and a life, and we’re currently in an attenzione pickpocket situation. How do we get it back? Not sure, have enjoyed reading other people’s ideas, here are some more:
OK but actually: should there be GLP-1s but for attention?
@JacobTref and I turned one of our recent convos in to a short post on this: nanransohoff.substack.com/p/…
Deena Mousa retweeted
In which @deenamousa makes her British discourse debut. (Adapted from work on heat adaptation in developing countries—make of that what you will.)
Deena Mousa retweeted
*New* @givewell podcast - We share some rough estimates on forecasted aid cuts:
- $60b in global health funding pre-cuts
- $6b of that is extremely cost-effective (twice our current "10x" bar, ~$3k/death averted)
- 25% cuts forecasted in these extremely cost-effective programs
































