Category: Essays

Articles about individual essays, blog posts, and long-form arguments that shaped the language-model field and its public discourse. The curated reading guide is [[Seminal AI essays]]; each work below has its own article with full sourcing.

This category contains 14 pages.

  • AI 2027 · The AI Futures Project's April 2025 scenario forecast by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean: a month-by-month narrative of 2025 to 2027.
  • AI and Compute · OpenAI's May 2018 analysis by Dario Amodei and Danny Hernandez showing training compute doubling every 3.4 months since 2012, the trendline that founded the scaling discourse.
  • Machines of Loving Grace · Dario Amodei's October 2024 essay sketching a positive vision of what powerful AI could do for health, poverty, governance, and human flourishing within five to ten years.
  • Seminal AI essays · A reading guide to the thirteen essays and blog posts that most shaped how the field understands large language models, scaling, and AI trajectories.
  • Simulators (essay) · janus's September 2022 essay proposing that language models are best understood not as agents or oracles but as simulators that instantiate agentic and non-agentic simulacra.
  • Situational Awareness (essay) · Leopold Aschenbrenner's June 2024 essay series arguing from compute and algorithmic trendlines that AGI by 2027 is plausible and that superintelligence follows.
  • Software 2.0 · Andrej Karpathy's November 2017 essay framing neural networks as a new programming paradigm in which code is written by optimization over datasets rather than by hand.
  • The Bitter Lesson · Rich Sutton's March 2019 essay arguing that seventy years of AI research show general methods leveraging computation beating methods built on human knowledge.
  • The Illustrated Transformer · Jay Alammar's June 2018 visual walkthrough of the Transformer architecture, which became the standard first explanation used in university courses worldwide.
  • The Most Important Century · Holden Karnofsky's 2021 Cold Takes series arguing that transformative AI this century could make it the most important century ever for humanity.
  • The Scaling Hypothesis · Gwern Branwen's May 2020 essay on GPT-3: meta-learning, the blessings of scale, and the theory that intelligence is simple learning algorithms applied at sufficient scale.
  • The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks · Andrej Karpathy's May 2015 tutorial-essay whose character-level LSTM experiments gave a generation of researchers their first look at neural text generation.
  • There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence · Eliezer Yudkowsky's October 2017 essay arguing that no clear, socially agreed signal of imminent AGI should be expected before the end, so waiting for one is a plan to wait forever.
  • What Failure Looks Like · Paul Christiano's March 2019 essay replacing the caricature of sudden AI takeover with two realistic failure modes: slow proxy collapse and influence-seeking systems.