Seangoedecke

I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies 1 . There are many ways to be successful, and every company works differently. If you're shipping projects and your management chain is happy, it doesn't really matter how you'

In the last few weeks, I've been complaining that everyone is wrong about AI watermarking: it isn't really anti-consumer and it doesn't make the outputs any worse. The watermarking papers demonstrate 1 that this is true, but I thought it might be interest

When you write, you should try to say things that are obviously true, and spend very little time worrying about whether you're being original. Ironically, this is the best way to do truly original writing. Every important idea has been discussed already.

One of the most influential 20th century pieces of writing about AI is Isaac Asimov's The Last Question . Although there are many humans in the story, the protagonist is the computer Multivac, who evolves over the course of ten trillion years from a singl

People are pretty unhappy about Anthropic's recent announcement that they're planning to include a hidden watermark in Claude model outputs. Will this lead to a mass exodus from Anthropic models? Will the introduction of watermarking be a meaningful chang

Every time a new open-weight AI model is released, people say that local models are the future. Why spend billions of dollars building out datacenters when everyone will just be able to run AI models on their laptops or phones? I think this idea is doomed

Everyone knows that AI sycophancy is when the model tells you how smart you are. Wow, you're absolutely right. That's not just a new idea - it's genuinely groundbreaking. You're a very special user. Easy to spot, isn't it? The discussion around AI sycopha

This will be kind of an unusual post. I got a recent email about my writing that I thought was such a good articulation of one common criticism that I'd like to share it (and my response) in full. Here's the email, from William Murray 1 : Hey Sean, I have

Imagine you're the guest on some kind of frenetic, software-engineering-themed game show. The host is constantly flipping over new cards with questions that you have to answer as fast as possible: Is this adjustment to the database schema right? Do these

Why can't models continue to get smarter after they're deployed? If you hire a human employee, they will grow more familiar with your systems over time, and (if…