The People’s Internet

How to shape the technology that shapes us
Project Liberty
If there is a meta-takeaway, it is that humans have always found a way to reconnect and come back together. After a season of aloneness, history shows that our greatest breakthroughs are born from profound moments of unity.

People Want Control of Their Data
Project Liberty
According to research from Project Liberty Institute released last month, there’s broad global sentiment that online companies and platforms have too much personal information about everyday people, and those people don’t have the control they desire to manage their personal digital privacy.

Social Networks, Not Social Media
Clubs, connections, and community.
Glimpse into Glass
Glass may look similar to other services on the surface (there are conventions), but it’s built on fundamentally different principles. For one, we don’t have follower counts. In fact, we don’t show counts at all. When you appreciate a photo, it’s not a performative act broadcast to the larger network; it’s a private acknowledgment to the creator. We emphasize comments and discussion, modeling thoughtful engagement through design and community norms. Over time, our members have embraced this approach, despite years of conditioning by other platforms. It’s been glorious to witness. And, of course, the big one: Glass operates as a paid membership-based community.

Steve Rosenbaum, The Sustainable Media Substack

Davos 2025 At Future House: Leaders Gather To Take On Social Media’s Impact On Gen Z

Taylor Lorenz, UserMag

Discussing free speech w/ Hamish
A recording from Taylor Lorenz’s live video

Michael Spencer, AI Supremacy

Is DeepSeek the new DeepMind?
AI supremacy isn’t just about compute or U.S. leadership, it’s about how you work to make models more efficient and improve their accessibility for everyone.

Digital Future Daily

What’s behind the DeepSeek freakout?

In tech terms, what freaked everyone out about DeepSeek’s R1 model is that it replicated — and in some cases, surpassed — the performance of OpenAI’s cutting-edge o1 product across a host of performance benchmarks, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

China pulls a Silicon Valley on… Silicon Valley

Given America’s strict export controls on high-end chips, analysts are still trying to figure out the exact details of how DeepSeek managed to match the top American models on a shoestring. DeepSeek itself claims it was done with ingenuity rather than fancy equipment — based on good old-fashioned optimization and low-level programming grunt work.

Dean W. Ball, Hyperdimension

On Private Governance
Forging a new path

I am pleased to inform you that I will be taking on a consulting role with Fathom, a new nonprofit working on AI governance and organizer of the recent (and excellent) Ashby Workshops, as a fellow. In that capacity, I will be researching private governance of AI—that is, standards, best practices, and other mechanisms for the governance of frontier AI that are developed outside of formal governments (though with oversight from government)

Novus Ordo Seclorum
Reflections on DeepSeek
It’s not that we understand something that others are not smart enough to get. It’s all pretty straightforward, actually. Mostly I think we are just early. Early to the insight that AI is going to overturn countless things about the status quo, including at least some things that most people like, or at least find comfortably familiar. Early to the idea that this technological revolution will be intense, chaotic, and filled with uncertainty. Early to the excitement, and early, I must admit, to the anxiety. Early to the knowledge that we are stepping into a novus ordo seclorum—a new order of the ages. And early to feeling all of this in our bones, rather than just understanding it in some abstract intellectual way

Ner DiamantAI

Teaching Machines to Reason
Explanation of DeepSeek’s R1 paper
Perhaps the most exciting part of their research came next. The team discovered that they could create smaller, more efficient versions of their system through a process called distillation. Think of it like creating a concentrated essence of the original model’s capabilities.

Steve Newman, Am I Stronger Yet?

China’s DeepSeek Adds a Weird New Data Point to The AI Race
V3 and R1 are Impressive Work, With Many Implications – but not “China Has Caught Up”

Yascha Mounk

15 Observations About Artificial Intelligence
Thoughts about DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and the future of humanity.

Dwarkesh Patel, Podcast

What fully automated firms will look like
Everyone is sleeping on the *collective* advantages AIs will have, which have nothing to do with raw IQ: they can be copied, distilled, merged, scaled, and evolved in ways humans simply can’t.

Dana Blankenhorn: Facing the Future

The Lesson of DeepSeek
Tech Changes From the Bottom Up

The Coming Biotech Era
A New Era of Abundance
Now add AI. If you’re looking for a Ph.D research project, you can query AlphaFold and come up with a proposal quickly. AI will get you halfway through the grant and paper writing process. All you need to do then is your experiment, and new techniques like Cryogenic Electron Microscopy (Cryo-EM) speed that process along.

The First AI Bust is Here
Sell Hardware, Wait to Buy Software

Marcus on AI

The race for “AI Supremacy” is over — at least for now.
Decades of government kowtowing to Big Tech has thus far failed to produce a decisive victory
Gary Marcus
The race for “AI Supremacy” is over, at least for now, and the U.S. didn’t win. Over the last few weeks, two companies in China released three impressive papers that annihilated any pretense that the US was decisively ahead.

Timothy B. Lee, Understanding AI

I spent two days testing DeepSeek R1
DeepSeek’s R1 model is almost as good as OpenAI’s o1—and much cheaper.

I don’t believe DeepSeek crashed Nvidia’s stock
But let’s talk about DeepSeek anyway.

Luiza’s Newsletter

AI Agents: RIP Autonomy
Emerging AI Governance Challenges
Luiza Jarovsky
Today, I want to discuss the agentic wave and explore why I call it the beginning of the death of human autonomy as we know it, especially through the lens of AI governance.

Noah Smith, Noahpinion

Some simple lessons from China’s big AI breakthrough`
Preventing LLM technology from spreading is a futile effort, but export controls can still work.

The Conversation

Why building big AIs costs billions – and how Chinese startup DeepSeek dramatically changed the calculus

Ambuj Tewari, University of Michigan

A machine learning expert breaks down where the money goes in building big AIs, and how DeepSeek found ways to do it far more cheaply.

AI agents’ promise to arrange your finances, do your taxes, book your holidays – and put us all at risk

Uri Gal, University of Sydney

AI systems that can autonomously make decisions on our behalf will be a huge time saver – but we must deploy them with care.

Silicon Valley’s bet on AI defence startups and what it means for the future of war – podcast

Gemma Ware, The Conversation
Political theorist Elke Schwarz talks to The Conversation Weekly podcast on her new research about venture capital investment into defence start-ups.

Could AI replace politicians? A philosopher maps out three possible futures

Ted Lechterman, IE University
From impartial debate mediators to a full-blown ‘algocracy’, we have to think carefully about how AI will impact politics.

Opening the black box: how ‘explainable AI’ can help us understand how algorithms work

David Martens, University of Antwerp; Sofie Goethals, University of Antwerp

AI systems can appear to be black boxes – often, even experts don’t know how systems reach their conclusions. The nascent field of “explainable AI” aims to address this problem.

Medieval theology has an old take on a new problem − AI responsibility

David Danks, University of California, San Diego; Mike Kirby, University of Utah
Autonomous AI is still designed by people − so who or what is really responsible for its actions? For centuries, theologians have posed similar questions about mankind and God.

Today’s Smerconish Poll

Yesterday’s Poll Results

Associated Press

Links to PM Headlines

Links to other Headlines

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman and Noah Smith have a chat
In which we talk about Paul’s departure from the NYT, Substack writing, Trump, the 1980s, the future of manufacturing, and more!

Noah Smith, Noahpinion

Too many Americans still fear the future
Some progress is being made, but politics is getting in the way.

Robert Reich

The basic equation
What’s behind the apparent chaos today in Washington

Anne Applebaum, Open Letters

Can Europe Still Have Sovereign Elections? Can anyone?
The real challenge posed by Elon Musk

Yascha Mounk

Francis Fukuyama on Trump 2.0
Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama discuss the first few days of the Trump administration–and what it means for domestic and foreign policy.

Dr Dan Goyal, The Antidote

Fascists Lack the Agency for Political Decision Making
Neuroscience, psychology, and sociology suggest that those who support authoritarianism and fascism do so without ever making a ‘conscious’ decision.

John Della Volpe from JDV on Gen Z

Young Men Are Speaking. Is Anyone Listening?
Introducing a data-driven Gen Z persona built from real conversations, real experiences, and their own words

Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring

Congressional Republicans’ coming war on poor people
What we know about GOP reconciliation plans

David Rothkopf, Need to Know

The Deputy President Says it’s Time to Move Beyond the Holocaust
Silence in the Face of the Resurgent Politics of Hate is Complicity

Don Moynihan, Can We Still Govern?

Compelling Mass Civil Servant Resignations Will Create Chaos
Twitter is not a model for government reform

Dana F. Blankenhorn, Facing the Future

Global Trumpism
Avoid, Accept, Adjust, then Advance

Charlie Sykes, To the Contrary

The Most Embarrassing Person in Washington is…
RFK Jr., Tulsi, Kash, Karoline Leavitt, Zuck, Ronjon, or…

Michael D. Cohen, 24Sight News

DOGE: The You Cannot Be Serious Committee
What to make of the House’s DOGE committee makeup

Steve Schmidt, The Warning

A resplendent day for Jim Acosta and journalistic integrity
PLUS: Join Ron Fournier and me on Substack Live TONIGHT at 8 pm ET

Chris Cillizza

The Morning: Legacy media just keeps caving to Donald Trump
The writing is on the wall, people.

MAJOR unforced error by Donald Trump 
The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight

Paul Krugman

Oppose, Oppose, Oppose — and Do It Loudly

Today, however, I’m going to make an exception, and offer three words of advice to Democratic politicians and MAGA opponents in general: oppose, oppose, oppose. And make noise. A lot of noise. Don’t make conciliatory gestures in the belief that Trump has a mandate to do what he’s doing; don’t stay quiet on the outrages being committed every day while waiting for grocery prices to rise. I can’t promise that taking a tough line will succeed, but going easy on Trump is guaranteed to fail.

I need to tell you about something that just happened in Davos — and no, it’s not what you’re reading about in the mainstream press. While the main congress center was wrestling with AI regulation and climate urgency, I found myself in a parallel universe called Future House, watching something I honestly never thought I’d see: tech pioneers, business leaders, and the generation they’ve been exploiting all coming together to tackle the digital crisis hiding in plain sight.

Then something even more extraordinary happens. Frank McCourt — yes, that Frank McCourt, the kind of capitalist who usually defends the free market like it’s his firstborn — stands up and says something that probably made Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms tingle: “I’m all for making money. That’s not the issue. It’s just at what expense.” When a businessman like McCourt starts questioning the cost of profit, you know the tectonic plates are shifting.

The People’s Internet

How to shape the technology that shapes us
Project Liberty
If there is a meta-takeaway, it is that humans have always found a way to reconnect and come back together. After a season of aloneness, history shows that our greatest breakthroughs are born from profound moments of unity.

People Want Control of Their Data
Project Liberty
According to research from Project Liberty Institute released last month, there’s broad global sentiment that online companies and platforms have too much personal information about everyday people, and those people don’t have the control they desire to manage their personal digital privacy.

Social Networks, Not Social Media
Clubs, connections, and community.
Glimpse into Glass
Glass may look similar to other services on the surface (there are conventions), but it’s built on fundamentally different principles. For one, we don’t have follower counts. In fact, we don’t show counts at all. When you appreciate a photo, it’s not a performative act broadcast to the larger network; it’s a private acknowledgment to the creator. We emphasize comments and discussion, modeling thoughtful engagement through design and community norms. Over time, our members have embraced this approach, despite years of conditioning by other platforms. It’s been glorious to witness. And, of course, the big one: Glass operates as a paid membership-based community.

Steve Rosenbaum, The Sustainable Media Substack

Davos 2025 At Future House: Leaders Gather To Take On Social Media’s Impact On Gen Z

Taylor Lorenz, UserMag

Discussing free speech w/ Hamish
A recording from Taylor Lorenz’s live video

Michael Spencer, AI Supremacy

Is DeepSeek the new DeepMind?
AI supremacy isn’t just about compute or U.S. leadership, it’s about how you work to make models more efficient and improve their accessibility for everyone.

Digital Future Daily

What’s behind the DeepSeek freakout?

In tech terms, what freaked everyone out about DeepSeek’s R1 model is that it replicated — and in some cases, surpassed — the performance of OpenAI’s cutting-edge o1 product across a host of performance benchmarks, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

China pulls a Silicon Valley on… Silicon Valley

Given America’s strict export controls on high-end chips, analysts are still trying to figure out the exact details of how DeepSeek managed to match the top American models on a shoestring. DeepSeek itself claims it was done with ingenuity rather than fancy equipment — based on good old-fashioned optimization and low-level programming grunt work.

Dean W. Ball, Hyperdimension

On Private Governance
Forging a new path

I am pleased to inform you that I will be taking on a consulting role with Fathom, a new nonprofit working on AI governance and organizer of the recent (and excellent) Ashby Workshops, as a fellow. In that capacity, I will be researching private governance of AI—that is, standards, best practices, and other mechanisms for the governance of frontier AI that are developed outside of formal governments (though with oversight from government)

Novus Ordo Seclorum
Reflections on DeepSeek
It’s not that we understand something that others are not smart enough to get. It’s all pretty straightforward, actually. Mostly I think we are just early. Early to the insight that AI is going to overturn countless things about the status quo, including at least some things that most people like, or at least find comfortably familiar. Early to the idea that this technological revolution will be intense, chaotic, and filled with uncertainty. Early to the excitement, and early, I must admit, to the anxiety. Early to the knowledge that we are stepping into a novus ordo seclorum—a new order of the ages. And early to feeling all of this in our bones, rather than just understanding it in some abstract intellectual way

Ner DiamantAI

Teaching Machines to Reason
Explanation of DeepSeek’s R1 paper
Perhaps the most exciting part of their research came next. The team discovered that they could create smaller, more efficient versions of their system through a process called distillation. Think of it like creating a concentrated essence of the original model’s capabilities.

Steve Newman, Am I Stronger Yet?

China’s DeepSeek Adds a Weird New Data Point to The AI Race
V3 and R1 are Impressive Work, With Many Implications – but not “China Has Caught Up”

Yascha Mounk

15 Observations About Artificial Intelligence
Thoughts about DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and the future of humanity.

Dwarkesh Patel, Podcast

What fully automated firms will look like
Everyone is sleeping on the *collective* advantages AIs will have, which have nothing to do with raw IQ: they can be copied, distilled, merged, scaled, and evolved in ways humans simply can’t.

Dana Blankenhorn: Facing the Future

The Lesson of DeepSeek
Tech Changes From the Bottom Up

The Coming Biotech Era
A New Era of Abundance
Now add AI. If you’re looking for a Ph.D research project, you can query AlphaFold and come up with a proposal quickly. AI will get you halfway through the grant and paper writing process. All you need to do then is your experiment, and new techniques like Cryogenic Electron Microscopy (Cryo-EM) speed that process along.

The First AI Bust is Here
Sell Hardware, Wait to Buy Software

Marcus on AI

The race for “AI Supremacy” is over — at least for now.
Decades of government kowtowing to Big Tech has thus far failed to produce a decisive victory
Gary Marcus
The race for “AI Supremacy” is over, at least for now, and the U.S. didn’t win. Over the last few weeks, two companies in China released three impressive papers that annihilated any pretense that the US was decisively ahead.

Timothy B. Lee, Understanding AI

I spent two days testing DeepSeek R1
DeepSeek’s R1 model is almost as good as OpenAI’s o1—and much cheaper.

I don’t believe DeepSeek crashed Nvidia’s stock
But let’s talk about DeepSeek anyway.

Luiza’s Newsletter

AI Agents: RIP Autonomy
Emerging AI Governance Challenges
Luiza Jarovsky
Today, I want to discuss the agentic wave and explore why I call it the beginning of the death of human autonomy as we know it, especially through the lens of AI governance.

Noah Smith, Noahpinion

Some simple lessons from China’s big AI breakthrough`
Preventing LLM technology from spreading is a futile effort, but export controls can still work.

The Conversation

Why building big AIs costs billions – and how Chinese startup DeepSeek dramatically changed the calculus

Ambuj Tewari, University of Michigan

A machine learning expert breaks down where the money goes in building big AIs, and how DeepSeek found ways to do it far more cheaply.

AI agents’ promise to arrange your finances, do your taxes, book your holidays – and put us all at risk

Uri Gal, University of Sydney

AI systems that can autonomously make decisions on our behalf will be a huge time saver – but we must deploy them with care.

Silicon Valley’s bet on AI defence startups and what it means for the future of war – podcast

Gemma Ware, The Conversation
Political theorist Elke Schwarz talks to The Conversation Weekly podcast on her new research about venture capital investment into defence start-ups.

Could AI replace politicians? A philosopher maps out three possible futures

Ted Lechterman, IE University
From impartial debate mediators to a full-blown ‘algocracy’, we have to think carefully about how AI will impact politics.

Opening the black box: how ‘explainable AI’ can help us understand how algorithms work

David Martens, University of Antwerp; Sofie Goethals, University of Antwerp

AI systems can appear to be black boxes – often, even experts don’t know how systems reach their conclusions. The nascent field of “explainable AI” aims to address this problem.

Medieval theology has an old take on a new problem − AI responsibility

David Danks, University of California, San Diego; Mike Kirby, University of Utah
Autonomous AI is still designed by people − so who or what is really responsible for its actions? For centuries, theologians have posed similar questions about mankind and God.

Today’s Smerconish Poll

Yesterday’s Poll Results

Associated Press

Links to PM Headlines

Links to other Headlines

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman and Noah Smith have a chat
In which we talk about Paul’s departure from the NYT, Substack writing, Trump, the 1980s, the future of manufacturing, and more!

Noah Smith, Noahpinion

Too many Americans still fear the future
Some progress is being made, but politics is getting in the way.

Robert Reich

The basic equation
What’s behind the apparent chaos today in Washington

Anne Applebaum, Open Letters

Can Europe Still Have Sovereign Elections? Can anyone?
The real challenge posed by Elon Musk

Yascha Mounk

Francis Fukuyama on Trump 2.0
Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama discuss the first few days of the Trump administration–and what it means for domestic and foreign policy.

Dr Dan Goyal, The Antidote

Fascists Lack the Agency for Political Decision Making
Neuroscience, psychology, and sociology suggest that those who support authoritarianism and fascism do so without ever making a ‘conscious’ decision.

John Della Volpe from JDV on Gen Z

Young Men Are Speaking. Is Anyone Listening?
Introducing a data-driven Gen Z persona built from real conversations, real experiences, and their own words

Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring

Congressional Republicans’ coming war on poor people
What we know about GOP reconciliation plans

David Rothkopf, Need to Know

The Deputy President Says it’s Time to Move Beyond the Holocaust
Silence in the Face of the Resurgent Politics of Hate is Complicity

Don Moynihan, Can We Still Govern?

Compelling Mass Civil Servant Resignations Will Create Chaos
Twitter is not a model for government reform

Dana F. Blankenhorn, Facing the Future

Global Trumpism
Avoid, Accept, Adjust, then Advance

Charlie Sykes, To the Contrary

The Most Embarrassing Person in Washington is…
RFK Jr., Tulsi, Kash, Karoline Leavitt, Zuck, Ronjon, or…

Michael D. Cohen, 24Sight News

DOGE: The You Cannot Be Serious Committee
What to make of the House’s DOGE committee makeup

Steve Schmidt, The Warning

A resplendent day for Jim Acosta and journalistic integrity
PLUS: Join Ron Fournier and me on Substack Live TONIGHT at 8 pm ET

Chris Cillizza

The Morning: Legacy media just keeps caving to Donald Trump
The writing is on the wall, people.

MAJOR unforced error by Donald Trump 
The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight

Paul Krugman

Oppose, Oppose, Oppose — and Do It Loudly

Today, however, I’m going to make an exception, and offer three words of advice to Democratic politicians and MAGA opponents in general: oppose, oppose, oppose. And make noise. A lot of noise. Don’t make conciliatory gestures in the belief that Trump has a mandate to do what he’s doing; don’t stay quiet on the outrages being committed every day while waiting for grocery prices to rise. I can’t promise that taking a tough line will succeed, but going easy on Trump is guaranteed to fail.

I need to tell you about something that just happened in Davos — and no, it’s not what you’re reading about in the mainstream press. While the main congress center was wrestling with AI regulation and climate urgency, I found myself in a parallel universe called Future House, watching something I honestly never thought I’d see: tech pioneers, business leaders, and the generation they’ve been exploiting all coming together to tackle the digital crisis hiding in plain sight.

Then something even more extraordinary happens. Frank McCourt — yes, that Frank McCourt, the kind of capitalist who usually defends the free market like it’s his firstborn — stands up and says something that probably made Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms tingle: “I’m all for making money. That’s not the issue. It’s just at what expense.” When a businessman like McCourt starts questioning the cost of profit, you know the tectonic plates are shifting.

Today’s Smerconish Poll

Yesterday’s Poll Results

Links to PM Headlines

Links to other Headlines

Today’s Smerconish Poll

Yesterday’s Poll Results

Links to PM Headlines

Links to other Headlines

Today’s Smerconish Poll

Yesterday’s Poll Results

Associated Press

Links to PM Headlines

Links to other Headlines