Christopher Mims 🤌
@mims
WSJ tech columnist and author of Arriving Today, about the insane, around-the-world journey all the stuff you ordered takes on its way to your front door.
Silicon Valley is going to war -- and young techies who previously objected to being a part of the defense industry are piling in. In the latest episode of The Wall Street Journal's new interview podcast Bold Names, we talked to the CEO of Booz Allen about a lot of things --…
David Autor and Gordon Hanson in NYT op-ed: “We Warned About the First China Shock. The Next One Will Be Worse.” nytimes.com/2025/07/14/opi…
reading it now, it is very good
Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, out August 26 danwang.co/breakneck/
history is full of hyper-productive short sleepers -- for many, an inherited trait -- but I had no idea Demis Hassabis was one
DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis on how he set up his life to maximize deep thinking with two full workdays in a 24-hour period:
The global economy is sailing through this year’s historic increase in tariffs, displaying an unexpected trait: resilience, via @WSJ wsj.com/economy/trade/…
Monday night’s one hour rainfall in NYC ranked 2nd…Only behind Ida. That this happened without a tropical system is significant and shows our new reality. The top 3 wettest one hour rainfalls for NYC in the past 156 years have all happened in the past four years.
Some news: I’m on book leave for the next few months, writing about my year of letting AI and robots run my life. So no WSJ columns / videos for now BUT I’ve launched a 🆕 personal newsletter to share my book-writing adventures. And the fine people at @beehiiv made it look…
Studying cancer at the moment and life saving treatment after treatment has occurred because of grants and federal dollars. It has barely come from private enterprise. Brain drain is one thing but millions of Americans are alive today because of this research.
Since WWII, America has led the world -- economically and in so many other ways -- in no small part because of its willingness to spend on basic research and its ability to attract the world's best and brightest. That is changing -- fast. My deep dive on the topic:
Scoop - Google is paying $2.4 billion to license Windsurf's technology and hire key employees. OpenAI had offered $3 billion but talks stalled after disagreements with Microsoft over IP sharing w/ @KatherineBlunt wsj.com/tech/ai/google…
Amazon is building an AI data center in Indiana that will consume as much energy as *1 million homes*, is "so large that it can be viewed completely only from high in the sky," part of "a race to build data centers so large they'd've been considered absurd just a few years ago."
People warned that indiscriminate job cuts at the NWS would put lives in danger, and that appears to be exactly what happened.
My plan to revive American manufacturing is to: raise the price of inputs like steel, aluminum & copper; create shortages of rare earths; invite retaliatory tariffs; cut R&D; raise borrowing costs by blowing out the budget; and to cover it all in a thick cloud of uncertainty.
What are @chefjoseandres biggest life & business lessons? On a bonus episode of the Bold Names podcast the @WCKitchen founder talks about food, diplomacy and making paella for the @Space_Station w/ @timkhiggins and @mims. 🎧 Listen: link.chtbl.com/WSJBoldNames
How Clorox is using generative AI for ad creation, brainstorming new products, and analyzing consumer reviews, as part of a five-year, $580M digital overhaul (@mims / Wall Street Journal) wsj.com/tech/ai/clorox… techmeme.com/250705/p20#a25…
It’s a strange new substance: soft wood transformed at the molecular level to be stronger than steel yet one-sixth the weight, writes Christopher @Mims. Its name? Superwood. on.wsj.com/3TVn5VQ
Life in 1776: - heat is such a luxury that Thomas Jefferson can’t write in deep winter bc his ink freezes (one reason perhaps why Independence Day is in July) - nighttime darkness is such a burden that George Washington reportedly spent $15k in today’s dollars on candles every…
Fascinating. On why sycophantic AI is (perhaps) inevitable -- because on average we prefer it.
A few people have asked me if a technical fix for AI model sycophancy is on the cards. In fact, a technical fix for sycophancy is trivial. In many cases all it would take is a tweak to the system prompt. The reason companies are struggling to get this right is not technical.…