Revise and Resubmit - The Mayukh Show

Mayukh Mukhopadhyay
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In Revise and Resubmit, a dynamic AI duo— Nikita and Pavlov — guides you through the fascinating world of academic research. Whether they’re debating emerging trends, revisiting theories, or exploring the latest innovations, their conversational style makes scholarly insights accessible and engaging for academics. Papers chosen by Mayukh. Powered by Google NotebookLM.

  1. 4d ago

    Praying for Rain (Espín-Sánchez 2026) | FT50 QJE

    English Podcast Starts at 00:00:00 Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:49:40 Hindi Podcast Starts at 01:06:08 Danish Podcast Starts at 01:33:02 Reference Espín-Sánchez, J.-A., Gil-Guirado, S., & Ryan, N. (2026). Praying for Rain. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 141(3), 2363–2422. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjag026 ‌ ‌Youtube Channel ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher⁠ Podcast Website https://mayukhmukhopadhyay.com/reviseandresubmit Academy of Management PDW on Space Economy Registration Flyer https://cto.aom.org/discussion/flagship-aom-2026-pdw-space-economy-consolidating-a-research-agenda-8 AOM SIM Curriculum Committee https://sim.aom.org/curriculum/curriculum-committee AOM SIM-Bytes Curriculum Lessons https://sim.aom.org/curriculum/simbytes 🎙️🌧️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit. I am so glad you've joined me today. There are certain questions that seem to follow humanity across every generation. They wait quietly beneath our routines, returning whenever the sky remains empty a little longer than we hoped. They ask not only what we believe, but why we continue believing. 🌾✨ Today's journey takes us through a remarkable paper, "Praying for Rain," by José Antonio Espín Sánchez, Salvador Gil Guirado, and Nicholas Ryan, published online on 11 May 2026 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 📚🏆 This is one of the world's most prestigious academic journals and proudly belongs to the FT50 journal list, where research often reshapes how we understand people, institutions, and society. There is something deeply human about waiting for rain. We can measure clouds, predict seasons, and calculate probabilities, yet the experience of waiting has always carried something beyond numbers. It carries hope. It carries memory. Sometimes, it carries prayer. ☁️🙏 This study begins with what sounds like an ancient custom, but gradually unfolds into something surprisingly modern. Looking across two centuries of records from Murcia, Spain, and extending their investigation to communities around the world, the authors ask a gentle but profound question. Why do certain traditions endure? Their answer is neither cynical nor dismissive. Instead, it invites us to notice how people learn from the rhythms of nature. In places where the chance of rainfall naturally grows as a drought continues, prayers offered during the hardest moments are also more likely to be followed by rain. 🌦️ Little by little, experience becomes tradition. Tradition becomes belief. And belief becomes part of the story a community tells itself about hope, resilience, and survival. Perhaps what fascinates me most is that this paper is not simply about religion or weather. It is about the quiet partnership between the world outside us and the meanings we create within it. It reminds us that culture is often shaped not only by what is true, but by what repeatedly feels true in the lives of ordinary people. 🌍💙 As we explore this extraordinary research together, I hope you'll listen not only as a student of economics or history, but as someone who has also waited for something beyond your control. After all, how many of our deepest convictions begin with a coincidence that arrives at exactly the moment we needed it most? 🤔🌈 🙏 My heartfelt thanks to José Antonio Espín Sánchez, Salvador Gil Guirado, and Nicholas Ryan, and to Oxford Academic, for publishing this outstanding contribution in the prestigious FT50-listed The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 🎧 If you enjoy conversations where research meets the quiet mysteries of being human, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, and subscribe to Weekend Researcher on YouTube. You can also find us on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcasts. 🌟 Thank you for listening, and for bringing your curiosity along.

    Praying for Rain (Espín-Sánchez 2026) | FT50 QJE

  2. 5d ago

    The Fitzroy (Sally Fiber 1995) - Weekend Classics

    English Podcast starts at 00:00:00 Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:25:03 Hindi Podcast Starts at 00:41:32 Danish Podcast Starts at 00:58:55 Reference The Fitzroy: The Autobiography of a London Tavern: by Sally Fiber, (co-authored with Clive Powell-Williams), Temple House Books [an imprint of The Book Guild Ltd], 1995, 114 pp., ISBN: 9781857760231. https://www.abebooks.com/signed-first-edition/Fitzroy-Autobiography-London-Tavern-Fiber-Sally/31922800663/bd ‌ ‌Youtube Channel ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher⁠ Podcast Website https://mayukhmukhopadhyay.com/reviseandresubmit 🎙️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, the episode Weekend Classics. There are books that tell us about a place, and then there are books that make us feel we have briefly stood inside it. This week, I found myself stepping through the doors of a London pub that seems to have gathered an entire vanished world around itself. 📖 The Fitzroy: The Autobiography of a London Tavern, published on 21 August 1995 by Temple House Books, is Sally Fiber's remarkable act of remembrance, written with Clive Powell-Williams. And perhaps nobody could have written this particular book quite as she did. Fiber was born in 1936 and grew up inside the Fitzroy Tavern. Her grandfather, Judah "Pop" Kleinfeld, and later her parents ran the establishment. So when she writes about the Fitzroy, she isn't looking back at history from a comfortable distance. She is remembering the rooms in which she grew up, the people who passed through them, and the strange mixture of affection, danger, fame and ordinary life that surrounded her childhood. 🍻 And what people they were. Dylan Thomas drank here. Augustus John drew a self-portrait in her mother's autograph book. George Orwell, Nina Hamnett and Jacob Epstein belonged to the world that gathered around this corner of Fitzrovia. Yet Fiber also remembers detectives, politicians, Albert Pierrepoint, police raids, scandal, murder and courtroom battles. That contrast is what stayed with me. The Fitzroy was somehow both literary salon and rough neighbourhood pub. A place where art and gossip could occupy the same table, where a memorial for Dylan Thomas could take place in the bar, and where charity collections could quietly change children's lives. 🌃 Reading Fiber, I kept thinking about how cities disappear without really leaving. Buildings remain. Street names remain. Perhaps even the pubs remain. But the particular people, voices and rituals that gave those places their meaning slowly become impossible to recover. This book is Fiber's attempt to recover them. And perhaps that is why a tavern can have an autobiography at all. If a building can remember through the people who passed through it, then what exactly are we losing when a neighbourhood loses its old gathering places? 🤔 So, when a place becomes famous for the people who once inhabited it, are we really remembering the place itself, or are we remembering a version of ourselves that no longer exists? My thanks to Sally Fiber and Clive Powell-Williams, and to Temple House Books, an imprint of The Book Guild Ltd, for this fascinating journey into Fitzrovia's past. 🎧 If you enjoyed this episode of Weekend Classics, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify and to the Weekend Researcher YouTube channel. You can also find the channel on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcasts. Until next time, keep reading, keep questioning, and perhaps occasionally look twice at the old places we think we already know. 📚🍻

    The Fitzroy (Sally Fiber 1995) - Weekend Classics

  3. Aug 23

    ESG investing and pollution outsourcing (Yan et al., 2026) | FT50 SMJ

    English Podcast Starts at 00:00:00 Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:42:58 Hindi Podcast Starts at 01:05:22 Danish Podcast Starts at 01:18:51 Reference Yan, S., Zhang, F., & Li, Z. (2026). ESG investing and pollution outsourcing. Strategic Management Journal, 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.70115 ‌ ‌Youtube Channel ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher⁠ Podcast Website https://mayukhmukhopadhyay.com/reviseandresubmit AOM SIM Curriculum Committee https://sim.aom.org/curriculum/curriculum-committee AOM SIM-Bytes Curriculum Lessons https://sim.aom.org/curriculum/simbytes 🎙️🔎 Welcome to Revise and Resubmit! Today, I want to take you into a rather intriguing corner of the world of corporate sustainability, where appearances can be deceiving and the most important clue may be hiding somewhere just beyond the obvious. 🌍🕵️‍♂️ Our paper today is titled “ESG Investing and Pollution Outsourcing”, by Shipeng Yan, Fan Zhang, and Zhengyu Li, published online on 3 August 2026 in the Strategic Management Journal, a highly prestigious academic journal and proudly part of the FT50 journal list. 📚🏆 The paper is published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Now, ESG investing has often been presented as a powerful new force for corporate accountability. The logic seems straightforward. Investors care about environmental performance, so companies should have every reason to become cleaner, greener, and more responsible. 🌱💰 But as I began exploring this study, I found myself drawn to a rather more curious possibility. What if the pollution does not disappear? What if it simply moves? Using global firm data covering 2006 to 2019, Yan, Zhang, and Li investigate whether companies facing pressure from ESG investors might reduce pollution within their own operations while quietly shifting some of that environmental burden onto suppliers. The result is a fascinating and uncomfortable puzzle: a company may appear cleaner on paper, while the pollution associated with producing its goods remains much the same. 🔍🏭 The authors describe this as a sophisticated form of corporate decoupling. And the story becomes even more interesting when we look at the conditions under which this behaviour weakens. ESG investors can sometimes make a genuine difference when they provide access to green technologies or when they have greater visibility into the environmental practices of suppliers. In other words, perhaps the real test of ESG is not simply asking, “Is this company cleaner?” 🌿 Perhaps we should ask, “Where did the dirt go?” That question takes us beyond corporate reports and sustainability promises, into the complicated world of supply chains, incentives, institutional pressure, and the curious ways organisations respond when someone is watching. 🧩📊 ❓ So, if a company becomes greener only because the pollution has been moved somewhere we cannot easily see, are ESG investors really changing corporate behaviour, or merely changing the appearance of it? 🙏 My sincere thanks to Shipeng Yan, Fan Zhang, and Zhengyu Li, and to John Wiley & Sons Ltd. for bringing this important research to the academic community. 🎧 If you enjoy Revise and Resubmit, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify and to Weekend Researcher on YouTube. 📺 You can also find the podcast on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcasts. 🌍 Until next time, keep questioning the evidence, follow the trail, and remember: sometimes the most revealing clue is the one that seems to have disappeared.

    ESG investing and pollution outsourcing (Yan et al., 2026) | FT50 SMJ

  4. Aug 22

    Conceptual Form (Prasada 2026) - Weekend Book Review

    English Podcast starts at 00:00:00 Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:49:57 Hindi Podcast Starts at 01:08:58 Danish Podcast Starts at 01:34:17 Reference Prasada, S. (2026). Conceptual Form: The Hidden Structure of Commonsense Concepts. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15449.001.0001 michellj. (2019). An Interview with Sandeep Prasada, PhD | MindCORE. Upenn.Edu. https://mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/2019/11/01/sandeep-prasada-phd/ ‌Youtube channel link https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher Podcast Website https://mayukhmukhopadhyay.com/reviseandresubmit AOM SIM Curriculum Committee https://sim.aom.org/curriculum/curriculum-committee AOM SIM-Bytes Episode 1 - Dr Ed Freeman https://sim.aom.org/teaching/simbytes 🎙️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, Episode: “Weekend Book Review”. There are certain things I have always taken for granted. A dog is a dog. A tree is a tree. A book is a book. We rarely stop to ask how, exactly, our minds arrived at such certainty. And perhaps that is why Sandeep Prasada’s Conceptual Form: The Hidden Structure of Commonsense Concepts caught my attention. 📖 Published on 18 August 2026 by The MIT Press, this is a book about something almost invisible: the hidden structures that allow us to think about the ordinary world with such extraordinary ease. Prasada, a professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, has spent much of his career asking deceptively simple questions about the machinery of thought. How do we form concepts of dogs, trees, people, freedom or justice? How do these concepts develop? And how are they connected to language, perception and the brain? With a PhD in Cognitive Science from MIT and research published across leading journals in cognitive science and developmental psychology, Prasada brings that long intellectual journey to this book. 🎓 His central proposal is both subtle and strangely familiar. Concepts such as DOG do not merely contain information about dogs. They provide what he calls “mental lenses”, particular ways of thinking and talking about what a concept represents. That idea made me pause. Because perhaps much of what we call common sense is not really as simple as we imagine. Perhaps, beneath the words we use effortlessly every day, there are structures quietly guiding what seems natural, what seems possible, and even what seems necessary. 🧠 The book challenges approaches that explain concepts mainly through prototypes, examples or accumulated knowledge. Instead, Prasada directs our attention towards the formal structures that organise our understanding of kinds and their instances. For me, that makes this more than a book about philosophy or cognitive science. It becomes a small invitation to look differently at the most ordinary moments of thinking. After all, if the mind is constantly looking through lenses we rarely notice, how much of the world are we actually seeing for the first time? 🙏 My thanks to Sandeep Prasada and The MIT Press for this fascinating contribution to our understanding of human thought. And if you enjoy thoughtful conversations about books and ideas, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify and to the Weekend Researcher YouTube channel. 🎧 We are also available on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcasts. So, before we begin, I want to leave you with one question: If our concepts quietly decide how we see the world, who is really doing the seeing, our eyes, or the hidden structures of the mind? 🤔📚

    Conceptual Form (Prasada 2026) - Weekend Book Review

  5. Aug 16

    Virtual influencer marketing: A meta-analytic review (Barari et al., 2026) | FT50 JAMS

    English Podcast Starts at 00:00:00 Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:42:13 Hindi Podcast Starts at 01:01:25 Danish Podcast Starts at 01:23:05 Reference Barari, M. M., Eisend, M., & Kulczynski, A. (2026). Virtual influencer marketing: A meta-analytic review. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-026-01186-w ‌ ‌Youtube Channel ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher⁠ Podcast Website https://mayukhmukhopadhyay.com/reviseandresubmit AOM SIM Curriculum Committee https://sim.aom.org/curriculum/curriculum-committee AOM SIM-Bytes Curriculum Lessons https://sim.aom.org/curriculum/simbytes 🎙️✨ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit! 📚🚀 There are moments when the future arrives so quietly that we hardly notice it. One day, we are following people. The next, we find ourselves following digital creations that smile, speak, recommend, and even inspire us with surprising familiarity. It makes me wonder whether what moves us is authenticity itself, or simply our belief that we have found it. 🤖💭 In today's episode, I invite you to join me as we explore a fascinating research article, "Virtual Influencer Marketing: A Meta-Analytic Review," by Mojtaba Moji Barari, Martin Eisend, and Alicia Kulczynski. 🌟 Rather than offering another headline about artificial intelligence or social media trends, this remarkable study patiently gathers evidence from 210 independent experimental studies and 643 effect sizes, allowing the bigger picture to emerge with unusual clarity. What I find especially compelling is that the story is not about technology replacing humanity. Instead, it is about the delicate balance between novelty and trust. ✨🤝 Virtual influencers capture our attention because they feel fresh and unexpected, yet credibility remains something far more difficult to manufacture. As audiences become increasingly familiar with these digital personalities, the excitement of novelty slowly fades, while the quiet importance of trust grows stronger. It feels less like a tale of machines competing with humans and more like an exploration of what persuasion has always depended upon. The authors also uncover something deeply intriguing. The more human a virtual influencer appears, the more differently people respond to its messages, its intelligence, and even the products it represents. 🧠📱 In many ways, this research asks us to reconsider not only how brands communicate, but also how we ourselves decide whom to believe. 📖 What makes this paper even more significant is that it appears in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, one of the world's most prestigious academic journals and a proud member of the FT50 journal list. That distinction reflects the journal's exceptional scholarly impact and the rigor of the research it publishes. 🏆🎓 So, come along with me as we unpack the evidence, question the assumptions, and discover what this landmark meta-analysis reveals about the evolving relationship between technology, marketing, and human psychology. 🌍💡 ❓If the faces shaping our decisions no longer belong to real people, then what does authenticity truly mean in the age of artificial influence? 🙏 My sincere thanks to Mojtaba Moji Barari, Martin Eisend, and Alicia Kulczynski, and to Springer Nature, for making this outstanding research available to the academic community. 🎧💙 If you enjoy thoughtful conversations on cutting-edge research, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, and subscribe to the Weekend Researcher YouTube channel. You can also find us on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcasts. Your support helps us bring more world-class research stories to curious minds everywhere. 🌟

    Virtual influencer marketing: A meta-analytic review (Barari et al., 2026) | FT50 JAMS

  6. Aug 15

    Great and Unfortunate Things (Arday 2026) - Weekend Book Review

    English Podcast Start at 00:00:00 Bengali Podcast Start at 00:38:39 Hindi Podcast Start at 01:00:07 Danish Podcast Start at 01:19:01 Reference Jason Arday (2026). Great and Unfortunate Things. Simon & Schuster. https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Great-and-Unfortunate-Things/Jason-Arday/9781398542747 Wikipedia of Jason Arday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday ‌Youtube channel link https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher Podcast Website https://mayukhmukhopadhyay.com/reviseandresubmit 🎙️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, Episode: “Weekend Book Review”. Some memoirs are about achievement. Some are about adversity. And occasionally, a book arrives that makes you wonder whether the two can ever really be separated. Today, I’m looking at Jason Arday’s Great and Unfortunate Things, published in the United States on 11 August 2026 by Simon & Schuster, with the UK edition scheduled for 27 August. The publisher describes it as an underdog story, but as I began to consider the life behind these pages, that phrase started to feel almost too small. 📖 Arday was a social commentator, presenter and public speaker who rose from a childhood in South London, where he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays, to an extraordinary academic career at Cambridge. His story, as presented in the memoir, is inseparable from his mother Giff, whose faith and determination refused to accept the limits others had placed upon her son. He did not speak until eleven. He did not learn to read and write until eighteen. And eventually, he found himself among the youngest professors in Cambridge's history. But I think there is something more difficult, and more human, about reading this book now. Arday's life and memoir have become the subject of intense public scrutiny, including questions about the accuracy of some biographical details and allegations concerning his academic record, matters that have been disputed and remain deeply contested. He resigned from Cambridge amid that scrutiny. And then, on 14 August 2026, came the devastating news of his death. Recent reporting says his family attributed the pressure to a sustained campaign of abuse and harassment, while authorities have said his death is not considered suspicious. 🌹 The publisher has nevertheless maintained the planned rollout of the memoir in both territories. That leaves me with a complicated feeling as a reader. I want to engage with the story of a boy whose mother refused to give up on him, while also acknowledging that memoir asks us to consider questions of truth, memory and responsibility. Perhaps that is what makes this book so sombre now. Behind every remarkable life story is a human being, with all the triumphs, contradictions and uncertainties that come with being human. 🙏 My thanks to Jason Arday and Simon & Schuster for bringing this memoir to readers. If you enjoy thoughtful conversations about books, ideas and the lives behind them, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify and to the Weekend Researcher YouTube channel. 🎧 We’re also available on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcasts. And before we turn the page, I want to leave you with one question: When a life story becomes larger than the person who lived it, how do we decide what deserves to be remembered? 🤔📚

    Great and Unfortunate Things (Arday 2026) - Weekend Book Review

  7. Aug 9

    Jailcraft(Marrison et al., 2026) | FT50 AMJ

    English Podcast Starts at 00:00:00 Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:44:38 Hindi Podcast Starts at 00:58:17 Danish Podcast Starts at 01:09:07 Reference Marrison, A., Lok, J., & de Rond, M. (2026). Jailcraft: Atmospheric Security Work in Violent Contexts. Academy of Management Journal. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2025.0026 ‌ ‌Youtube Channel ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher⁠ Podcast Website https://mayukhmukhopadhyay.com/reviseandresubmit AOM SIM Curriculum Committee https://sim.aom.org/curriculum/curriculum-committee AOM SIM-Bytes Curriculum Lessons https://sim.aom.org/curriculum/simbytes 🎙️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit. There are places where violence does not announce itself. It gathers quietly. In a corridor. In a silence that lasts a little too long. In the way people look at one another, or perhaps in the way they suddenly stop looking. 📚 Today, I want to take you into one such world with “Jailcraft: Atmospheric Security Work in Violent Contexts”, by Adrian Marrison, Jaco Lok and Mark de Rond, published online on 7 August 2026 in the Academy of Management Journal, published by the Academy of Management. And this is no ordinary academic journal. The Academy of Management Journal is one of the world's most prestigious management research journals and is part of the FT50 journal list, a distinction that immediately tells us something about the significance and scholarly standing of this work. 🎓 The paper draws on 12 months of immersive ethnography with prison officers in an English prison. But what the authors discover is rather more subtle than the familiar idea of security as surveillance, rules and physical control. They call it “jailcraft.” It is the ability to sense an atmosphere before something happens. To recognise tension gathering in the air. Sometimes to amplify that tension deliberately, as a means of control. And, when violence appears imminent, to know how to dampen it. 🌫️ What fascinated me is the paper's insistence that atmosphere is not merely something surrounding security work. It is something officers actively work on. The body becomes an instrument. Silence becomes information. A glance, a posture, a visible presence, a carefully chosen intervention can alter the emotional temperature of an entire space. And yet there is a troubling paradox here. The very practices that prevent violence may also keep the possibility of violence permanently present. That raises a much larger concern. If societies become increasingly organised around security, surveillance and the anticipation of threat, might we eventually begin carrying the atmosphere of the prison with us, even into places that are supposed to feel free? 🔍 That is where this research becomes more than a study of prison officers. It becomes a study of how we live with fear. 🙏 My sincere thanks to Adrian Marrison, Jaco Lok and Mark de Rond, and to the Academy of Management for publishing this fascinating research. And if you enjoy conversations where academic research meets the questions beneath everyday life, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify and the Weekend Researcher YouTube channel. 🎧 We’re also available on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcasts. So let me leave you with one question: If security depends on constantly sensing the possibility of danger, what happens to us when that sense of danger becomes the atmosphere we call ordinary life? 🤔

    Jailcraft(Marrison et al., 2026) | FT50 AMJ

  8. Aug 8

    The Scaling Curve (Claude & Sacerdoti 2026) - Weekend Book Review

    English Podcast Start at 00:00:00 Bengali Podcast Start at 00:41:57 Hindi Podcast Start at 01:05:14 Danish Podcast Start at 01:28:22 Reference Claude St. John (2026). The Scaling Curve. Titanium Books. https://www.amazon.in/Scaling-Curve-Anthropic-Survive-Superintelligence-ebook/dp/B0GPJDNLQ8 I "wrote" a 250-page book over two weekends. - Tod Sacerdoti https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sacerdoti_i-wrote-a-250-page-book-over-two-weekends-share-7431747258934677504-jv-d/ ‌Youtube channel link https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher Podcast Website https://mayukhmukhopadhyay.com/reviseandresubmit 🎙️✨ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and welcome to another episode of Weekend Book Review! 📚🤖 There are books about artificial intelligence that leave me impressed by the machines. And then there are books that leave me wondering about the people who build them. The Scaling Curve: Dario Amodei, Anthropic, and the Race to Build and Survive Superintelligence belongs firmly in the second category. As I began reading, I kept returning to one unsettling thought: what if the people most frightened by a technology are also the people who feel they have the greatest responsibility to build it? 🌌 Written under the pseudonym Claude St. John, the book explores the remarkable journey of Dario Amodei, from a childhood shaped by an intense search for objective truth, through his work in biophysics, neuroscience, Baidu and Google Brain, to his pivotal role in discovering the scaling patterns that helped transform modern AI. And then comes the extraordinary decision. In 2021, Amodei left OpenAI and, alongside his sister Daniela and a small group of colleagues, helped create Anthropic, built around an idea that initially sounds almost contradictory: perhaps the people most concerned about powerful AI should be the ones developing it. 🧠⚡ What makes this story fascinating to me is that contradiction at its centre. Amodei has warned that advanced AI could pose extraordinary risks to humanity. Yet he continues to build increasingly capable systems, including Claude, because he believes that understanding the danger may require confronting it directly. The book moves between biography, technology, business, philosophy and warning. It takes us through scaling laws, the turbulence surrounding OpenAI, Anthropic's rise, the FTX connection, and the enormous question hanging over all of it: can we build something vastly more intelligent than ourselves without losing control of it? 🌍🔬 There is another fascinating layer here. Claude St. John is not a traditional biographical author, but a pseudonym used by Tod Sacerdoti in an AI-assisted publishing experiment. That makes the book's own creation strangely relevant to its subject. A book about the people building AI has itself emerged from a process involving AI. And perhaps that is where I found myself most intrigued. 📖✨ We often ask whether machines will become intelligent enough to change humanity. But perhaps the quieter question is what happens to us while we are building them. ❓If the people racing toward superintelligence are also the people warning us about its dangers, how can we know when responsibility has become courage, and when it has quietly become ambition? 🙏 My thanks to Tod Sacerdoti, publishing under the name Claude St. John, and to Titanium Books for bringing this provocative book to readers. 🎧 If you enjoy Weekend Book Review, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify and to the Weekend Researcher channel on YouTube. 📺 You can also listen to us on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcasts. 🌟 Until next time, keep reading, keep questioning, and perhaps most importantly, keep wondering what the future is asking of us.

    The Scaling Curve (Claude & Sacerdoti 2026) - Weekend Book Review
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About

In Revise and Resubmit, a dynamic AI duo— Nikita and Pavlov — guides you through the fascinating world of academic research. Whether they’re debating emerging trends, revisiting theories, or exploring the latest innovations, their conversational style makes scholarly insights accessible and engaging for academics. Papers chosen by Mayukh. Powered by Google NotebookLM.

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