Techdirt opinion piece (April 2024) arguing the effective altruism movement shifted its money and attention from global poverty to AI existential risk.
Why I recommend it: Openly argumentative and from 2024. Effective altruists dispute this framing; see Holden Karnofsky's and Luke Muehlhauser's profiles for their side.
Very Sane AI Newsletter, SE Gyges, 15 September 2026. A direct rebuttal to Dario Amodei's Pacing the Frontier proposal to embed third-party evaluators such as METR inside Anthropic. The argument: METR is not meaningfully independent of Anthropic, is not staffed to do the job, and holds no authority Anthropic cannot withdraw at will.
Why I recommend it: Free to read, no paywall on this post. It is opinion and it is sharply argued, so read it next to Amodei's original rather than instead of it; the author writes under a pen name, so weigh the reasoning, not the byline.
A communal blog where working mathematicians — professors, PhD students, sceptics and enthusiasts alike — write about what AI is doing to their field: authorship, what counts as understanding, where papers will go, and whether the job changes. Recent pieces include Martin Hairer on why he joined the AGMAI advisory group and Jonny Evans on the choices ahead. Submissions are open to anyone in the field, any length.
Why I recommend it: Free to read and free to write for. Worth reading even if you never touch mathematics: it is one of the few places where a whole profession is arguing in public about what AI does to its craft, in its own words rather than a journalist's. These are individual opinions, not findings — the value is the range of them, and the disagreement is the point.
Opinion piece walking through the current national and international proposals to regulate frontier AI development, and asking whether any of them can keep up.
Why I recommend it: Free to read. Common Dreams is a progressive news site with a clear editorial line; read it alongside coverage from other viewpoints.
An essay arguing for building a large model of the natural world — weather, oceans, ecosystems — as its own kind of general intelligence, separate from language models.
Why I recommend it: One argument, well written, worth reading as a counterweight to the LLM-only view of where AI is heading. It is a manifesto, not peer-reviewed research.
The Argument essay arguing that much of the current AI debate misreads the problem: delegating decisions is the intended feature, not an accident, and that reframing should change how we govern it.
Why I recommend it: Read this alongside the optimistic AI takes — holding both views is what makes you sound credible on the topic.
