Thinking Time

In search of the next big idea

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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At a TED event last October, OpenAI research scientist Noam Brown said something remarkable.

Back in 2017, he explained, he’d conducted a test. It involved getting AIs to play poker. He discovered that allowing his AI just 20 seconds more time to think led to a performance boost equal to that found if he scaled the model by 100,000 times and trained it for 100,000 times longer.

Twenty seconds, or a 100,000x increase in both size and duration of training. That was the power of thinking time.

This finding is deeply relevant to what’s happening in AI today.

As I said in my first postcard of the year, it now seems that AGI is imminent. That was not clear six months ago. But there have been significant developments since. And at the heart of them has been the unexpected power of the reasoning techniques that developers are applying to frontier models. It turns out that these techniques — including simply giving the models more time to think — are causing huge leaps forward in capability.

OpenAI’s new o3 reasoning model crushed recognised benchmarks primarily by taking more time to think.

That finding is hugely consequential. It may be the insight that leads us to superintelligence. But this phrase, thinking time, also sent me off down a more personal rabbit hole.

I divide my days, roughly speaking, into on-days and off-days. During an on-day, I’m busy. Maybe I’m writing something on a deadline. Or I’m working with clients, or giving a talk.

On off-days, I’m not doing those things. Instead, I’ll catch up on emails. I’ll plan. And on a real off-day, maybe I’ll just float around. Go for a walk. Make some notes. Eh, I’ll think, in the evening, I haven’t achieved much today.

But is that really true?

During an off-day back in 2022, I first stumbled my way towards the idea that our future will be marked by a battle between accelerationists and decelerationists. It was a day in which I sat around, let my thoughts wander, and scribbled down some ideas. I can see that day in my Roam database. This is the first evidence I can find of the idea that eventually became the creatures and machines framework:

I’ve been developing and writing about this idea ever since.

So was that day in 2022 one in which I didn’t do much? Or was it the most important working day I’ve had in the last three years?

Since the pandemic, I’ve been pushing hard. I’ve taken on lots of projects. I’ve written way more than I ever have before; many hundreds of thousands of words. I’ve hit send on plenty of these newsletters at 1am.

And that’s all good with me. These are incredible times we’re living through. It’s a privilege to witness it all, to try to understand it, to write about it. I’m happy to be obsessed. Now is not the time to stop pushing.

But somewhere along the way, being busy became synonymous, for me, with things going well. I’m sure you can relate.

That idea makes sense — up to a point. If you’re an independent researcher on emerging technologies, then producing lots of work, and having lots of projects going, is a reasonable indicator that all is as it should be.

But it’s pretty obvious, really, that busy is not the ultimate metric here. It’s not the end game. After all, sheer quantity of work is not the aim. Rather, I’m searching for depth. And originality.

There is already an abundance of writing on technology. And in the new world we’re building, there will be a tsunami of AI-generated writing on everything. If you are only adding to it, you’re not doing much.

What I’m questing after, instead, is an idea with power. That new framework that helps us see a relationship we’d previously missed. The essay that says something new about our experience in this moment.

That work doesn’t come from busyness. It comes from open thought. From long walks. From space to breathe.

Now is not the time to stop pushing. But maybe I need to redefine, a little, what pushing looks like. I think it turns out that amid the acceleration we’re living through — in what may be the last days of the Before Times — the most important variable of all is thinking time.

If I’m to do my best work, I need to find more of it.

I’ll be back next week; until then, be well,

David.

This was #5 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title artwork is Solitude (c.1762) by the Welsh landscape painter Richard Wilson.