Did you wake up this morning thinking "I wish someone would explain 'sparse autoencoders' in an approachable way"?
Do you wish you knew about 'Golden Gate Claude', perhaps the best AI model ever created?
It's your lucky day--all of that and more below!
AI models are very different. We don’t actually know how they work. Despite more capital investment than for any technological endeavor in history (roughly 50 Manhattan Projects after adjusting for inflation), we are, in some sense, flying blind.
open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...
AI models are very different. We don’t actually know how they work. Despite more capital investment than for any technological endeavor in history (roughly 50 Manhattan Projects after adjusting for inflation), we are, in some sense, flying blind.
open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...
lol this is an incredible video
LLMs will usher in a democratization of intellect. Now you too can have a junior (AI) scholar that you can blame for errors and fraud. Previously, only the top scholars had access to that kind of power.
lol. for all we know, Claude is randomly assigning service disruptions.
Assuming you're using agentic AI tools, my default work mode is now: every single task is an opportunity to figure out how to get Claude to make that task easier/better for me. Anytime it works well, save it to claude.md so that it just does it automatically next time.
lol this is an incredible video
There’s about to be a lot more of everything. More bots. More ads. More scams. More disinformation. More scientific discoveries. Imagine everything you know about automation and scale it up. The world is going to change very quickly.
open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...
Here's a simple vibe coding example that could be useful for teachers or anyone that needs to create clear and engaging documents. Tell Claude to organize it into an .html file.
Here's the prompting: claude.ai/share/c4d1e3...
Here's the result: brendanbartanen-svg.github.io/substack-emb...
There’s about to be a lot more of everything. More bots. More ads. More scams. More disinformation. More scientific discoveries. Imagine everything you know about automation and scale it up. The world is going to change very quickly.
open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...
My Ezra Klein impersonation with Claude only beat out the real thing (www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/o...) by one day, in case you're wondering how fast the world is moving right now. Will "vibe coding" make it into the state of the union?
Fascinating study and a demonstration of one of the deep challenges with LLM-based AI models: because they are trained on human-generated text, they can exhibit patterns resembling human cognitive biases (e.g., anchoring) even in clinical contexts where the stakes are high.
What many don't yet grasp is just how quickly all of these things—the good, the bad, and the ugly—are coming down the line. AI models have reached capability that allows for basically anyone with an internet connection to spin up functioning apps using just ideas expressed in natural language.
I'm sharing a recording of a workshop on working with AI agents that I gave last week at UVA. If you're at all curious about what the big deal is with AI models in 2026, I try to break it down here in an approachable, non-technical way.
youtu.be/wcZq5xBbkTM
I used Claude Cowork to write referee reports. Here's what happened.
open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...
Fascinating/terrifying/exciting is basically my default reaction to all things AI these days.
What many don't yet grasp is just how quickly all of these things—the good, the bad, and the ugly—are coming down the line. AI models have reached capability that allows for basically anyone with an internet connection to spin up functioning apps using just ideas expressed in natural language.
Brendan & Claude do a version of that recent NYTimes The Daily episode about "What's agentic AI and why does it matter?" specifically for quant education researcher types
Absolutely fascinating/terrifying/exciting
Agree, though what's most concerning is we have extremely capable models today that can produce high-quality work (even if not perfect) across nearly any domain of white collar work...and all of that is progressing without much academic/public awareness. Academics need to get into the arena on this.
Easily one of the best things I've read on substack.
Wow! This use of AI and the comparison between AI and human reviews (of a very nice paper!) is super interesting.
Thanks for reading! It's a brave new world.
I used Claude Cowork to write referee reports. Here's what happened.
open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...
