Caleb Watney
@calebwatney
co-founder @IFP // the US is the R&D lab for the world and we should act like it
We’re launching Right Of Way, a podcast about energy policy, energy politics, and above all the upcoming permitting reform fight. Hosted by me and @ppavnr, presented by @IFP and @JoinFAI. First episode dropping next week — stay tuned.
If @ppavnr and I hosted a limited series podcast all about the upcoming permitting / highway bill fight, would people listen?
o3 pro’s stab at it:
Interesting chart. Would love to see the equivalent for some European index. A version that went further back would also be neat.
NEW ESSAY: "Dispatches from India" A year ago I was living in New Delhi, India 🇮🇳. I traveled across 10 states and 30 cities+villages writing for The Economist, including a cover story on the economy Since then I’ve been chewing on how to capture what I learned It still…
pretraining is an elegant science, done by mathematicians who sit in cold rooms writing optimization theory on blackboards, engineers with total absorb of distributed systems of titanic scale posttraining is hair raising cowboy research where people drinking a lot of diet coke…
Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, out August 26 danwang.co/breakneck/
🚀 Applications are open for the 2026 Horizon Fellowship! Deadline: Aug 28 Join a community of 80+ alums and spend up to two years in DC working on emerging tech policy at agencies, congress, or think tanks. Learn more and apply here: horizonpublicservice.org/applications-o…
Aligning with my and @AidanRMackenzie’s recommendation, the new EO calls for agencies to use a percentage threshold for determining whether federal funding should trigger NEPA :) The OSTP team et al. are real legends who really took the time to dig into this stuff. Very pleased.
Every day is NEPA day but today will be even more NEPA than most
This week on Construction Physics: where are vacation homes in the US? construction-physics.com/p/where-are-va…
Financial Times found evidence of $1B worth of AI chips smuggled to China in the last 3 months. This includes Blackwell racks. > “It’s like a seafood market,” said one distributor, “There’s no shortage.”
Congrats @AdamMarblestone - federal policy is catching up! The FRO model is well suited to a world of AI-accelerated science.
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New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
About 1/5 of Americans live on the Northeast Corridor, from DC to Boston. It's an ideal stretch for high-speed rail, but could we build it? Amtrak says it'd cost more than $100 billion. What if Amtrak is wrong? statecraft.pub/p/how-cheaply-…
Good overview from @stuartbuck1 on the chaos in science funding right now asteriskmag.com/issues/11/the-…
“The largest cohort analysis of GLP-1 drugs, which looked at several million Veterans Affairs patients, found that they reduced the hazard ratio for literally every biological system that was assessed.”
New newsletter: We need to talk about how GLP-1 drugs seem to be good for practically everything—and what that means for the future of medicine and health Hundreds of studies have now shown that GLP-1s, such as Ozempic and Zepbound: - seem to curb alcohol, cocaine, and tobacco…
A lot of people are blaming AI for grads’ poor outcomes, but I find the evidence for this claim is surprisingly thin. Excited to release a new analysis w/ @employamerica on the labor market performance of recent college grads. 🧵