Who's Who of AI

Henry Farrell

236 trust commentator @himself.bsky.social · 37,100 followers
AI research
Why they matter

Commentator with public evidence across AI research.

AI signals
3
past 30d
Sources
2
distinct domains
Discussions
17
past 30d
Latest signal
10d ago
View every signal from Henry Farrell →
Professor of democracy and international affairs. http://www.henryfarrell.net and newsletter at http://www.programmablemutter.com. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt, Penguin). https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250840554.
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Articles & links

"At last we have created the Corporation That Eliminates Middle Managers from classic management text Don't Eliminate the Middle Managers!" www.programmablemutter.com/p/ai-isnt-ma...

programmablemutter.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince laid off more than 20% of his workforce while citing Peter Drucker's 1954 management framework to explain the cuts.
  • Prince labeled laid-off workers 'measurers' — a Drucker category he applied to middle management, finance, legal, and internal auditing.
  • Henry Farrell argues Prince inverted Drucker's intent: Drucker used measurement to develop managers, not to identify who to eliminate.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 187 ↻ 63 ↩ 1 · 7 from the directory shared this · 63d ago

This, by @melaniemitchell.bsky.social is a strong, subtle overview of where we are at yalereview.org/article/mela...

Melanie Mitchell: The Dangerous Unknowns at the Heart of LLMs yalereview.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • AI systems excel on some tasks while failing surprisingly on similar ones, a pattern Mitchell calls 'jagged intelligence.'
  • Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI cofounder, is quoted saying LLMs 'generalize dramatically worse than people' in a way that is 'very fundamental.'
  • Mitchell says AI researchers, herself included, are still struggling to design effective evaluation methods for LLMs' uneven capabilities.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 17 ↻ 5 ↩ 3 · 5 from the directory shared this · 49d ago
↻ Henry Farrell reposted
@hilzoy.bsky.social

Very interesting. It’s always true that when you give a ruler flexibility to deal with unforeseen problems, you rely on the assumption that that ruler will not abuse that discretion. If we’re going to elect people like Trump, we have to remove all that flexibility.

programmablemutter.com View on Bluesky →

and this with Cosma is in part about how the two ideas fit together knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...

AI as Social Technology knightcolumbia.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • Farrell and Shalizi argue AI models are social technologies comparable to markets and bureaucracies, not autonomous intelligent agents.
  • All such systems generate lossy, incomplete, and uninvertible representations of reality, creating power effects that benefit some groups over others.
  • The social-technology framing shifts focus from AGI speculation to questions about power, lossiness, and who bears the cost of AI's simplifications.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 25 ↻ 3 ↩ 0 · 5 from the directory shared this · 45d ago
↻ Henry Farrell reposted
@gwbstr.com

Glad to share some thoughts in this important NYT piece. For various uses and risks, adversarial and otherwise, open Chinese models are functionally at par with US leaders. Only in narrow areas does a perceived current “US lead” now matter. 1/ www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/b...

nytimes.com View on Bluesky →

It's bad enough having to do garbage pick up in the first place, but when the same rubbish has been dumped on the street three times in a row ...

programmablemutter.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 56 ↻ 8 ↩ 1 · 11d ago

"the Amodei and Biden administration position that you could have your cake and eat it too, depended on a semi-explicit consensus on what US national security was, and how sweeping powers with ambiguous constraints could or could not be used to pursue it. That consensus has no…

programmablemutter.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 27 ↻ 5 ↩ 0 · 34d ago
↻ Henry Farrell reposted
@joshksky.bsky.social

"Oh happy marketplace of ideas, where the Scaife Foundation and Amazon Flex workers alike can try their luck, and hope for accidental success in influencing federal judges!" Very good @himself.bsky.social repost today, helpful if you too have That Friend Who Keeps Sending You …

programmablemutter.com View on Bluesky →
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