Field Notes · 2 Jul 2026
Best explained
Chollet explains why ARC-AGI-3 is harder than prior ARC benchmarks: agents must simultaneously explore an unknown environment and solve the game, creating a compounding interplay that neither pure search nor scale handles well.
By the numbers
Western European and US OEMs take 16 to 40 months to develop a new car from launch intent to manufacturing. Chinese OEMs do it in 18 to 24 months.
New today — Evidence added
On the Program Bench benchmark, all LLMs scored 0% because none passed all tests.
Thomas AhleSolving a single ARC-AGI game setup from scratch requires approximately 5,000 different permutations of training data.
François CholletNew today — Sharp calls
Etched's hardware delivers an order of magnitude more concurrency than NVIDIA's at the same level of interactivity.
Gavin UbertiThomas von Tschammer on AI-generated designs that outperform human intuition.
Thomas von TschammerNew today — Useful context
The verification loop for recognizing the value of Galois theory took approximately one hundred years, flowing through many different people's minds before the math community agreed it was good.
Grant SandersonTool watch
Strive is flagged alongside Strategy as a digital capital structure vehicle that risks morphing into an actively managed hedge fund unless it acquires operating businesses.
Worth quoting
“If you live in a state where there is an arbitrary power who can have you put to death, you are a slave.”Ada Palmer
“The moon's gravity on Earth is the same no matter what the phase of the moon is.”Neil deGrasse Tyson
“40 to 41% of employees saying they ship AI work that they couldn't explain if asked. This is bot f***.”Rebecca Hinds
“You're spending a trillion dollars a year and the revenue on AI talk about maybe 70 80 billion.”Rajiv Jain
“We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development.”Jason Calacanis
“You cannot sell Bitcoin. If you are selling Bitcoin, the whole system breaks.”Michael Saylor
“Consensus 2027 EPS change for AI infrastructure stocks. Insane. 42%.”Michael Zezas