Tonight at 6pm ET, my friend Jack Leslie will interview Perry Boyle in a live-streamed “town hall” sponsored by the Pequot Library of Southport, Connecticut. They’ll discuss the war in Ukraine specifically and the future of warfare more generally. You can register for the event here. I urge you to do so. Perry is exceptionally interesting. (Sources: dukeghic.org, shorebridge.com, newsitems.substack.com, live-pequot.pantheonsite.io)
1. Brookings:
The latest Census Bureau population estimates show diversity moving up the age spectrum, such that now more than half of the population under age 30 identifies with racial or ethnic minority groups. Minority shares of the under-30 population are larger than those of the total population for the nation, all states, as well as most metropolitan areas and counties, though the specific mix of minority race or ethnic groups varies across each of these places.
These mid-decade statistics tell us that America’s young adult population—beginning with Gen Z—will be the most racially diverse in the nation’s history. (Source: brookings.edu)
2. ScientistTwo:
The ultimate vision for AI in science is problem-driven autonomous research: given a fundamental challenge by a human expert, the AI independently navigates the scientific landscape, uncovers theoretical and empirical bottlenecks, and systematically expands the frontier of knowledge. In this paper, (Google) introduces ScientistTwo, a fully autonomous multi-agent framework designed to realize this vision. Specifically, ScientistTwo takes an initial problem as input, establishes state-of-the-art baselines, formulates novel hypotheses, and coordinates specialized agents to orchestrate an end-to-end discovery cycle without human intervention. Moreover, the framework rigorously conducts experiments using diverse datasets and metrics, refines methodologies through automated ablation studies, and validates research findings via a closed-loop simulated peer-review rebuttal engine. To evaluate ScientistTwo's capabilities against the highest standards of human scientific achievement, we benchmark it across papers accepted at top-tier conferences such as ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS. As a result, ScientistTwo autonomously generates expert-level, publishable papers and fully verified, executable codebases. Its solutions consistently outperform human state-of-the-art models, and achieve higher average review ratings than human-authored papers under automated AI review agents. These results show that ScientistTwo is not merely an assistive tool but an autonomous scientific pioneer capable of pushing the frontiers of human discovery. (Source: arxiv.org. The research paper has not been peer-reviewed. It will almost certainly be accepted for publication in leading science journals.)
3. California Institute of Technology:
A robotic truss builder that was conceived, designed, and built by Caltech researchers and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has successfully built a structure in space—without the help of astronauts—for the first time. The truss builder, part of DARPA's Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials, and Mass-efficient Design (NOM4D) program, consists of an autonomous manipulator that picks up struts and joints held in nearby dispensers to repeatedly assemble identical sections, or bays, of a perimeter truss. (Sources: caltech.edu, darpa.mil)
4. Ajeya Cotra:
For the last few months, some of my colleagues at METR have been working on a deep-access investigation to understand how much Anthropic is being accelerated by its AI systems. From my reading of their report and Anthropic’s RSP, it looks like the “dramatic acceleration” threshold has already been crossed. (Sources: metr.org, planned-obsolescence.org)
5. Zvi Mowshowitz:
METR came out with an extensive report on how much AI is accelerating AI R&D at Anthropic, and thus how close we might be to recursive self-improvement (RSI) and how far that might go.
This is one of the most important questions in the world.
Their answer: Things are already accelerating on the order of a 2x speedup.
