Edition One, hooray!

Welcome to the first newsletter blast for Answering Machines.

It's a short one this week. Wrote an intro post, collected some thoughts and links. Asked for subs before I even had this out, and 12 of y’all signed up anyway. Thank you!!!

This week's post: Alien Tools and Answering machines

I wrote a fun intro post here on my thoughts about modern AI. I think models are more like answering machines than they will be like alien tools. Take a look here to read more:

https://www.arjunkirtipatel.com/blog/answering-machines-debut

Thoughts I'm thinking out loud

• the role of patience and education with AI:

• Really waiting for whenever Gemini Diffusion drops. Text diffusion is an extremely underrated architecture for LLMs, that I feel is extremely underexplored…https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-diffusion/

• Claude’s new Constitution is really interesting… but I wonder how much of it is fluff and how it affects the model training. I also want to do “live-reaction” videos whenever things like this drop, or when new models drop with accompaning blog post. Would that be interesting to you?? https://www.anthropic.com/news/claudes-constitution

• I’m very conflicted about many things, but I’m most confused about modern AI benchmarks (I’m talking model wise) and how to do AI coding well. Future blog posts??

Cool things I saw and wanna read more about

• Yo I want this BIC pen lamp so badd!! (https://www.theverge.com/tech/864127/seletti-bic-ballpoint-pen-pendant-lamp-maison-objet)

• “The unreasonable effectiveness of pattern matching“, research paper on how LLMs can somehow figure out what words mean when they are completely novel and made up: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11432

• A really cool deep dive on how Thinking™ works in LLMs. I need to read this over and over and over again, by Lilian Weng: https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2025-05-01-thinking/

And that’s it! Planning to write another post in a few weeks, on probably one of the above messages.

Is there something you’d wanna see me write about? Feel free to leave a message after the tone, here!