Brad Carson
@bradrcarson
Father of Jack, husband of Julie. Former @DoD; @BattenUVa; President @utulsa. President of @americans4ri. An enthusiast, but w/ a gimlet eye on the log x-axis.
"In a mindless age, every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon." - M. McLuhan to E. Pound, letter, 1951.
Important: “Chinese military suppliers prefer Nvidia chips and use A.I. systems trained on U.S. chips. The stakes are not hard to grasp: We should not allow American troops and intelligence officers to be targeted by Chinese A.I. trained on Nvidia chips.” nytimes.com/2025/07/24/opi…
Sigh.
If you’re keeping track, the “hard cap” era of rev share/NIL lasted 22 days. Now the collectives can provide “soft cap” above the 20.5M as long as they have enough cover in their deals to meet “fair market value.” (Ie $5,000 for a transaction instead of $50,000)
Yes, definitely!
Chernobyl (2019) is one of the most gripping and meticulously crafted limited series of the century.
☹️
From 10Q: "However, if we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet important customer milestones for Intel 14A, we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14A and successor leading-edge nodes on a go-forward basis.…
Great article in @TheEconomist about the consequences for economic growth of AI. The best summary of the arguments that I've seen to date. economist.com/briefing/2025/…
We're live! Join us for a panel exploring President Trump's AI Action Plan. Panelists Brad Carson, Elham Tabassi, Samuel Hammond, and Stewart Baker dive into the Action Plan and the President's three AI EOs signed last night. x.com/i/broadcasts/1…
The FT is claiming that more than $1 billion worth of NVIDIA chips have made their way into China over the last three months, including Blackwells which they claim are 'widely available.' They report that the current market price for a rack of eight B200's is $489,000.
Class, today we discuss the AI Action Plan's analogy of the "AI race" with the "Space Race." Please discuss similarities and differences, and what we should draw from this. (Hint: your instructor finds it an apt metaphor, but with perhaps lessons the authors did not intend.)
Horizon does amazing work. Definitely apply, and for donors a high ROI gift.
We desperately need more people in government working on ensuring that AI goes well. I've heard great things about Horizon as a way into this kind of career path, check out their fellowship
We’ve updated our analysis of the trends of leading models. The takeaway? The amount of compute used to train frontier AI models has grown by 5x per year since 2020.
Another week, another member of Congress announcing their superintelligent AI timelines are 2028-2033:
Needed a locksmith today to unlock a U-Haul. He showed up in a very nice new Tesla. Thinking about my post-ASI future, gonna look into this skill. Seems like it come late in the automation revolution.
“Holden suspects that AI will dramatically change the global economy, but he’s undecided about whether the changes will be dramatically good or dramatically bad. In contrast, I’m skeptical that AI will do anything dramatic anytime soon.” betonit.ai/p/my-feast-or-…
You know, in the Army, they say you train and train and train and then wait for the 15 seconds that will define your entire life.
Big if true!
Congrats to the team at @MarathonFusion for identifying a plausible, scalable process for transmuting mercury into gold. This is something that drove Isaac Newton insane.
A strong and utterly persuasive letter from @RepMoolenaar against the Trump Administration's acquiescence in the sale of H20s to China. This really is an own-goal if you're serious about competition with PRC. But maybe we aren't serious about this.
Applications still open to become part of the compute team + other AI policy roles at RAND! The Technology and Security Policy Center (TASP) is likely the largest team of AI strategy experts the world has ever seen. Join us if you want to help us do the hard work!
Researchers for our Compute team (led by Lennart Heim): ML engineers, semiconductor experts, and excellent generalists to contribute to papers, technical analyses, briefings, etc. on compute governance & adjacent areas. heim.xyz/hiring/
Interesting suggestion from @teachingai in his newsletter today... Curious to hear other people's take.
A very impressive group of diverse but uniformly fascinating folks! Fun just to read their potted bios.
We’re thrilled to introduce our third cohort of 2025 Blog-Build Intensive Fellows!
Let's talk H20s. These are very advanced chips -- more advanced than H100s when it comes to inference speed. Way more advanced than the chips China has developed. Selling H20s to China solves their biggest bottleneck in AI development when the US is trying to lead on AI.