To some, METR’s “time horizon plot” indicates that AI utopia—or apocalypse—is close at hand. The truth is more complicated.

Right now, molecules in the air are moving around you in chaotic and unpredictable ways. To make sense of such systems, physicists use a law known as the Boltzmann distribution, which, rather than ...

But, both of these would require large structural changes for a course that teaches hundreds of students a year — something that can’t really happen in the near term. What could happen now, though, is ...