AI Article Readings

Addy Osmani’s practical guide to the current Claude lineup: where to start, when to move up or down a tier, and why the effort level is often the finer dial. It walks through cost per finished task rather than list price, the latency and context trade-offs, mixing models with subagents, advisors and cheaper workers, the API differences to test before migrating, and how to measure candidates on your own work. Both of the post’s tables are read in full.* 00:00 - Introduction* 01:40 - TL;DR* 03:31 - Pick a model by task* 06:13 - The four models side by side* 09:15 - The trade-offs* 09:29 - Capability and cost per finished task* 11:36 - Latency against accuracy* 13:39 - Context against cost* 15:20 - Mixing models* 16:08 - Switch at a natural break* 17:33 - Put subagents on smaller models* 20:38 - Escalate hard decisions to an advisor* 22:09 - Delegate bulk work to cheaper workers* 23:11 - Check compatibility before migrating* 26:22 - Measure on your own work* 27:21 - Learn morehttps://claude.dev/blog/which-claude-model-should-you-build-with/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Scott Alexander argues that putting a number on something you can’t really measure still beats going with your gut: starting from a CFAR tutorial where a student refuses to guess the odds his computer breaks, through doctors and the mammogram problem, scope insensitivity and partisan double standards, to why he would like to see QALY-style thinking tried far beyond health care.* 00:00 - Introductionhttps://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Language is not one invention but two, says this finalist in the ACX Book Review Contest. It reads Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, on how writing changed what we remember, how we build sentences and stories, and even how we think, from Homer’s improvising bards and Luria’s syllogisms to the SAT. Then it looks up from the book at a world that is drifting back toward speech through the infinite scroll, and argues that if literacy is to survive, writing has to start doing what speech never could.* 00:00 - Introduction* 01:48 - 1. Carve* 03:13 - 2. Press* 21:36 - 3. Feed* 53:21 - 4. Eyehttps://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-orality-and-literacy?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

For eleven weeks, METR’s researchers worked inside Anthropic with unprecedented access to internal data, to answer a question with very high stakes: is AI now speeding up the development of AI itself, and by how much? This is their public report, read in full: the benchmark trends, the interviews with Anthropic’s own researchers in their own words, what Anthropic redacted and why it matters, how the work was checked for being misled, and every way the authors think they might be wrong.* 00:00 - Introduction* 02:39 - Executive summary* 07:41 - Our subjective conclusions on risk* 13:39 - Key findings* 22:03 - Process details* 32:48 - Limitations* 37:32 - Appendices: Methodology* 42:55 - Benchmark scores (AECI)* 01:07:25 - Evidence of AI speedup* 01:11:55 - Interview quotes on AI acceleration* 01:19:33 - Adversarial robustness* 01:21:23 - Process transparency disclosures* 01:29:36 - AEF-1 checklisthttps://metr.org/blog/2026-11-05-anthropic-ai-rd-acceleration-assessment This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Scott Alexander argues against SURA, his name for the growing view that safety-minded AI companies, their employees and even whole countries should Stop Unilaterally and Raise Awareness, with no plan for what happens if the race carries on without them. He makes the case that the backup plan, where alignment-focused labs stay in the lead and spend that lead on alignment, deserves far more care than it gets, and that walking away may hurt the odds of a global pause as well. Along the way come forecasters’ survival estimates, Frodo and the One Ring, and a worry that AI safety is drifting down the same road as climate activism.* 00:00 - Introduction* 08:12 - I. Questioning Assumptions Behind SURA* 17:53 - I.B: Is racing to build superintelligence deontologically evil?* 19:50 - I.C: If lots of alignment-pilled people and companies quit, would that raise awareness enough to make a global pause much more likely?* 21:54 - I.D: If alignment-pilled people and companies stay in the race, does that burn timeline?* 25:35 - II. Actually, most of this stuff is bad for a global pause, too* 27:01 - II.A: Getting rid of alignment-pilled people and companies makes it harder to win political fights* 28:05 - II.B: Getting rid of alignment-pilled people and companies makes it harder to activate the masses* 31:49 - II.C: Unilateral disarmament makes it harder to bring China to the bargaining table* 35:16 - (Maybe you already care a lot how alignment-pilled companies are)* 36:34 - III. What incentives are we fighting here?* 37:18 - III.A: Are corporate incentives a “One Ring” that corrupts everyone who touches them?* 41:32 - III.B: I dunno, mass politics is also looking kind of annular* 47:29 - (Exhibit 1: Sigal Samuel’s “Anthropic Could Just Stop”)* 54:12 - (A virtuous exception)* 55:12 - IV. What if we survive?* 58:47 - V. What’s The Alternative To SURA?* 59:26 - V.A: Getting companies to agree to stop in a coordinated manner* 01:00:46 - (...and then we know where we stand)* 01:01:43 - V.B: Getting companies to prepare for Plan C+/Plan C if that doesn’t workhttps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xikGZ8fuhdG6DApAo/against-sura This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

After interviewing Vaden Masrani for The Bayesian Conspiracy, Eneasz Brodski came away convinced he had been arguing with someone in bad faith. Rather than let the episode go out unanswered, he works through a sample of the claims that went unchallenged on air: how Toby Ord’s estimates in The Precipice were characterised, what the 2016 survey of AI researchers actually found, and why caricaturing rationalists as people who just make up numbers misses what Bayesian reasoning is for.* 00:00 - Introduction* 02:22 - Misrepresent The Opposition* 03:04 - 1. Toby Ord* 09:50 - 2. Will MacAskill* 11:20 - 3. Bayesian Rationalismhttps://deathisbad.substack.com/p/i-have-lost-my-ability-to-be-charitable?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Finalist #14 in the 2026 ACX Book Review Contest takes on Tobias Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), perhaps the weirdest novel written before the Modernists: a political satire in code, narrated by an immortal atom that spends a Japanese war lodged somewhere very undignified. On the way there, the reviewer tours why eighteenth-century novels feel so strange to us (misplaced emphasis, randomness, and endless digressions) and how Smollett’s career led him to write something no one had ever seen before.* 00:00 - Introduction* 03:00 - Part 1: A Brief History of the Novel* 06:46 - 1 Misemphasis* 08:54 - 2 Discontinuity* 11:04 - 3 Digression* 16:08 - Part 2: A Brief History of Smollett* 25:31 - Part 3: The Atom at Last* 41:38 - A note on sourceshttps://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-the-history-and?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education argues that schooling is mostly signaling. Jack Despain Zhou, writing for Education Progress, takes issue not with the economics but with the pedagogy: how Caplan reads K. Anders Ericsson’s research on deliberate practice, why the internet makes a poor substitute for structure, and why fatalism is the wrong conclusion to draw from education research. Along the way: fifteen months of Chinese at the Defense Language Institute, law school, a year of online elementary school lost to Neopets, and Mississippi’s reading turnaround.* 00:00 - Opening* 00:59 - Introduction* 03:36 - The Root of Our Disagreement* 05:54 - The Deliberate Practice Reversal* 10:13 - The False Paradise of Online Learning* 18:14 - Pedagogy as Simultaneously Inconsequential and Solved* 25:05 - Where Caplan’s View Winshttps://open.substack.com/pub/educationprogress/p/bryan-caplan-is-wrong-about-pedagogy?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

On October 26th, 2026, Anthropic filed to go public. This is an abridged, multi-voice reading of its S-1 registration statement, in the filing’s own words: the co-founders’ letter to investors in full, the prospectus summary, the risk factors that are specific to Anthropic and frontier AI, management’s discussion of the results with every chart and table described, the business and its customers, and the unusual governance of a public benefit corporation overseen by a Long-Term Benefit Trust. Legal boilerplate and the financial statements are left out. Because this is a preliminary prospectus, figures not yet filled in are read as “blank”.Want any article read like this? Askwho Casts Pro turns a link to any blog post or article into a fully cast audio episode, with different voices for different speakers and quotes and images described, in your own private podcast feed within minutes. Sign up at https://askwhocasts.com* 00:00 - Introduction* 00:20 - A Letter from Our Co-Founders* 30:47 - Preliminary Prospectus* 32:06 - Prospectus Summary* 01:17:35 - Summary Consolidated Financial and Other Data* 01:20:44 - Risk Factors* 02:10:56 - Risks Related to Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Intellectual Property* 02:19:09 - Risks Related to Legal and Regulatory Matters* 02:22:29 - Risks Related to our Governance Structure* 02:30:33 - Risks Related to Ownership of our Class A Common Stock* 02:33:07 - Industry, Market, and Other Data* 02:34:13 - Use of Proceeds* 02:34:56 - Dividend Policy* 02:35:17 - Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations* 03:29:47 - Business* 03:36:50 - AI is Transforming Intelligence* 03:41:20 - Our Core Advantages* 03:47:06 - Claude is the Partner of Choice for Enterprises* 03:49:37 - Unprecedented Financial Model to Support Long-Term Investments* 03:55:32 - Our Growth Strategy* 03:58:31 - Our Models, Platform, and Applications* 04:07:56 - Our Infrastructure* 04:12:21 - Our Customers* 04:48:26 - Our Culture, Values, and Talent* 04:53:52 - Research Lab Identity and the Research-to-Product Pipeline* 04:58:22 - Safety Research is Core to Our Business* 05:11:12 - Our Commitment to Public Benefit* 05:14:31 - Competition* 05:17:44 - Government Regulation* 05:21:57 - Legal Proceedings* 05:23:42 - Our Governance Structure and Its Goals* 05:27:24 - Long-Term Benefit Trust* 05:44:10 - Founder Voting Structure* 05:56:53 - Class E Common Stock* 05:59:15 - Board Governance* 06:00:05 - Sunset Provisions* 06:01:12 - Management* 06:13:23 - Executive Compensation* 06:30:35 - Certain Relationships and Related Person Transactions* 06:41:49 - Principal and Selling Stockholders* 06:44:08 - Description of Capital Stockhttps://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026067168/anthropicpbc-sx1.htm This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe

In 1999, AI professor Clark Elliott was rear-ended at a stoplight, and for the next decade his concussed brain could teach a graduate seminar but not choose between a salami and an apple. This finalist in the ACX Book Review Contest reads his memoir, The Ghost in My Brain, from the inside: the reviewer is recovering from a serious concussion too. It follows Elliott’s unlikely recovery through puzzle therapy and prism lenses chosen with eyes closed, weighs the thin evidence behind them, and asks how patients with poorly understood conditions can find what works when randomized trials only tell you about the average brain.* 00:00 - Introduction* 03:23 - A hurricane let loose on 50 million desktop computers* 09:16 - Partial death* 11:33 - The Miracle Begins* 13:15 - Bells and Prisms* 15:45 - Into the uncanny valley of concussion science* 21:52 - When averages fail* 25:07 - Z-bell tests and Fijian reef fish* 29:08 - Getting out of the parking lothttps://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-the-ghost-in-my?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe