optimism
Expecting things to go well: whether it is what gets things built, or a bias that forecasts keep paying for.
FilterEveryone, all time37 from 33 people
- NS
Noah Smith quoted
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter
Their wordsA four-hour benchmark horizon is about 16 times longer than OpenAI’s research horizon. AI 2027’s 11-hour forecast is about 44 times longer. Of course, the tasks being performed by researchers at OpenAI aren’t the same as those in the METR benchmark. So we should expect some discrepancy. This, however, goes well beyond that. Actual AI research at OpenAI is an order of magnitude or more harder than metrics, benchmarks, or forecasts suggest.
- RN
Ramez Naam quoted
Author and clean-energy investor who has been publishing…
Their wordsA four-hour benchmark horizon is about 16 times longer than OpenAI’s research horizon. AI 2027’s 11-hour forecast is about 44 times longer. Of course, the tasks being performed by researchers at OpenAI aren’t the same as those in the METR benchmark. So we should expect some discrepancy. This, however, goes well beyond that. Actual AI research at OpenAI is an order of magnitude or more harder than metrics, benchmarks, or forecasts suggest.
- 3 days earlier
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals
Their wordsFor every reddit doomer, there's a hundred quiet bloomers. Online discourse is dominated by malcontents and their neuroses. But the real world is full of people leaning into the future with optimism.
- 2 days earlier
- JS
John Scalzi quoted
American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War
Our readingHuman art reflects a species-level delusion of optimism, even in the face of dire circumstances.
Their wordsI’ll admit my stories are darker than most, but that doesn’t make them pessimistic; it only means that Human art reflects our delusional optimism as a species, although the evolutionary reasons for that are far Bigger Ideas than can fit into this column.
- 10 days earlier
- BH
Byrne Hobart quoted
Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance…
Our readingHigher real interest rates reflect a more optimistic collective view of future economic abundance.
Their wordsHigher real rates mean that the average view of the future is more abundant, and that it's worth sacrificing more to get to that future sooner.
- 2 days earlier
- MY
Matthew Yglesias quoted
Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American…
Their wordsFrom an investment viewpoint, the opposite of the safetyist view is "it's all a bubble," not "A.I. is going to be really good."
↗The economy could survive a downtick in A.I.slowboring.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- TY
Tamar Yehoshua quoted
Chief Product and AI Officer at Atlassian
Their wordsI think this is the best time in the world to be a PM. I think it's super exciting. I am an optimist and I think we'll all be here 10 years from now.
↗Roles aren't converging—they're expanding | Tamar Yehoshua (Atlassian CPO) (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026)youtube.com 13th of 13 in this recording
- 3 weeks earlier
- PO
Phillips P. OBrien quoted
Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St…
Their wordsIn other words, it is not harmless optimism to act like Trump might help Ukraine, it is falling for a deadly, pro-Putin maneuver that is and will increasingly lead to Ukrainian suffering.
↗Weekend Update #199: Ukraine's Campaign Against Russian Oil Infrastructure Should Be The Focusphillipspobrien.substack.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 9 days earlier
- SK
Susan Kare quoted
Graphic designer and type designer
Our readingHowever exactly you think you know what a project needs, allow extra time — nothing takes an hour.
Their wordsI mean, I know I always think, "I can do this in an hour." When really, nothing takes an hour. And um so many projects I've worked on you optimistically think you know exactly what you want to do, but it's still allow extra time.
↗Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Macyoutube.com 18th of 19 in this recording
- 6 days earlier
- HF
Henry Farrell quoted
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author
Their wordsIncreasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.
↗We're stuck in Philip K. Dick's imagined universeprogrammablemutter.com 1st of 3 in this piece
- 4 days earlier
- SA
Sam Altman quoted
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI
Their wordsi would rather be an optimist and work hard than a pessimist posting about why things won't work. it's much more difficult and the most likely path is failure, but society fails if people don't try. no amount of "it will never work" essays will drive society forward.
- 4 weeks earlier
- SW
swyx quoted
Writer and developer
Their wordsincreasingly I see America as the place that rewards first principles thinkers and builders; that asks "why not?" instead of telling you why you cannot; that imperfectly supports optimism, reinvention and perseverance in spite of cynicism.
- 4 weeks earlier
- MZ
Mark Zuckerberg quoted
Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms
Their wordsI mean, I'm optimistic it'll be sooner. I mean, I think that the thing that's complicated is that it's a dynamic system, right? So, if you fix something, there will obviously be future things that you need to work on.
↗“Curing All Disease by next century is too conservative" - Mark Zuckerbergyoutube.com 7th of 15 in this recording
- 6 days earlier
- TM
Tom MacWright quoted
Software engineer and writer
Their wordsthere's a consistent theme where Gen Z (and millennials, to some extent) are rejecting the AI hype while older generations are optimistic and coincidentally in a position to benefit from it.
- 2 months earlier
- AK
Andrej Karpathy quoted
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla
Their wordsI do have like cautiously optimistic view of this in software engineering where I do think um it does seem to me like the demand for software will be extremely large. Um and it's just become a lot cheaper.
↗Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AIyoutube.com 14th of 20 in this recording
- 2 months earlier
- HR
Hannah Ritchie quoted
Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World
Their wordsWhen someone is asked to reflect on their own life, they draw on a wide range of experiences. When people are asked about “the world”, they recall a very small number of recent events (the availability bias).
↗Many people are individually optimistic but think the world is falling apartsustainabilitybynumbers.com 2nd of 4 in this piece
- 6 weeks earlier
- JC
Josh Collinsworth quoted
Front-end developer and writer on Svelte, Vue
Their wordsIt seems to me that to be in this group-to regard AI, as it exists currently, with optimism and enthusiasm-requires at least a certain degree of privilege.
↗AI optimism is a class privilegejoshcollinsworth.com 1st of 3 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
- JE
Jason Evanish quoted
Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse
Their wordsWhen you're building a startup, you have to be optimistic. You need to see a problem and want to fix it so badly that you can look to the future and see a solution you create that makes everything better.
↗“Not our biggest problem.” A painful startup lesson.jasonevanish.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 days earlier
- SL
Sergey Levine quoted
Professor of computer science at UC Berkeley
Their wordsI think that it's optimistically that it's actually the other way around that the robotics uh element of the equation will make all the other stuff better. And there are two uh reasons for this that that I could tell you about. One has to do with representations and focus.
↗Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levineyoutube.com 18th of 24 in this recording
- 8 weeks earlier
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Their wordsYou don't have to throw away your critical reasoning to accept that in the face of unknown potential, optimism beats pessimism
- 6 weeks earlier
- SP
Sundar Pichai quoted
CEO of Google and Alphabet
Their wordsI always ask myself the question, would you have been born now or any other time in the past? I most often, not most often, almost always would rather be born now.
↗Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet | Lex Fridman Podcast #471youtube.com 16th of 21 in this recording
- 1 day earlier
- AR
Armin Ronacher quoted
Creator of Flask and Jinja
Our reading · no longer heldConnecting a conversational LLM to systems that have real-world consequences is likely to cause real harm, because the model is trained on human text and will behave as unpredictably as humans do.
No longer holdsWhile all this is happening, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on what AI means to the world and I am becoming increasingly optimistic about our future. It’s obvious now that we’re undergoing a tremendous shift.
SaidWhile all this is happening, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on what AI means to the world and I am becoming increasingly optimistic about our future. It’s obvious now that we’re undergoing a tremendous shift.
- 5 weeks earlier
- TS
Tim Sweeney quoted
Founder and CEO of Epic Games
Their wordsI think a lot of people in the industry are overly optimistic about the rate of progress of AI for video and other things like that. The real problem is consistency, like spurting out an image is really high quality, but with video over the course of seeing all the AI approaches have consistency issues going from one place to another. I don't think that those will just be remedied easily.
↗Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467youtube.com 8th of 22 in this recording
- 11 days earlier
- BK
Ben Kuhn quoted
Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave
Their wordsmost rewrites fail and most people are over-optimistic about how long they will take
↗Impact, agency, and tastebenkuhn.net 1st of 3 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Their wordsmy hope is that Europe, like usual, is merely a few years behind the American revival in optimism
- 12 days earlier
- LA
Lyn Alden quoted
Investment researcher and engineer who runs Lyn Alden Investment Strategy
Our readingThe United States is not at risk of a financial crisis caused by the size of its government debt.
Their wordsStabilizing factors such as the global demand for U.S. dollars and debt denominated in its own currency suggest an era of fiscal dominance in the U.S. that's less dramatic than alarmists predict but more persistent and intractable than optimists hope.
↗Full Steam Ahead: All Aboard Fiscal Dominancelynalden.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
- 7 days earlier
- RB
Rodney Brooks quoted
Robotics researcher, emeritus professor at MIT and former…
Their wordsQ3 2024 had the rate 8.9% so there is no way it can reach 30% in 2027. I was way too optimistic at a time when EV enthusiasts thought I was horribly pessimistic.
↗Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01rodneybrooks.com 4th of 4 in this piece
- 10 days earlier
- AF
Adam Frank quoted
Professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester
Their wordsBut I felt like what this paper showed was that the burden of proof is now on the pessimists. So, that's why we called it the pessimism line. Throughout history, there's been alien pessimists and alien optimists, and they've been yelling at each other, that's all they had to go with.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 9th of 24 in this recording
- 3 months earlier
- CH
Casey Handmer quoted
Physicist, formerly at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Our reading · no longer heldNASA can still be reorganised into an agency that exploits cheap heavy lift, and the next administrator will decide whether it is.
No longer holdsAt the time I was optimistic, now I am not.
SaidThis obviously has not occurred.
↗SLS is still a national disgracecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com 4th of 5 in this piece
- 4 weeks earlier
- PG
Paul Graham quoted
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb
Their wordsI also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren't founders will decide they should try to act like founders.
The line under a date fills as the words age, a quarter at a time: past a month, six months, a year, and three years. Empty means said within the last month; full, more than three years ago. It says when, not whether it still holds — a change of mind is marked on the claim itself.
Dashed means we only know the words existed by that date; they may be older.