Jacob Trefethen's blog

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Latest — Sep 6, 2026

Footnotes to 2.5 years

Success for each technology was defined as “100,000 people have taken it” by February 2nd, 2029. That’s because new technologies don’t matter unless people actually use and benefit from them. The exception was row #9 – programmable drugs before a future pandemic – because I hope 0 people ever

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Halfway to 5 years

I started this blog in February 2024, with a post about February 2029. Reviewing at the halfway point: nine of the ten technologies I wrote about are still unavailable, and we're not close on most of them. Taking the first three rows only: since February 2024, more than

Hiring scientists to give away money

At Open Philanthropy, we have given away $600 million in biomedical research since 2016. That funding has supported the work of thousands of scientists across hundreds of universities, nonprofits, and companies around the world. Science is hard to predict. Most hard problems are hard for a reason, and we'

AI could help lead to an Alzheimer’s cure

Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” starts with piano keys, church bells, violins soaring through the first verse. Then a drum roll, and Lana belts out: Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful? Will you still love me when I got nothing but

AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer’s cure

I work on funding science for the sake of medical progress, but only 10% of our science funding at Open Philanthropy is related to AI. The whole premise of Open Philanthropy is we try to allocate money across causes to get as much bang for buck as possible. That leads

What does AI progress mean for medical progress?

Rapid AI progress does not automatically mean rapid medical progress. If the point of AI progress is human flourishing, we must make other complementary investments too. Even with extremely powerful AI, people will still get cancer and Alzheimer’s – unless those investments are made, and unless broken “real world” systems

Lenacapavir and Thom Gunn

I assume many people working in medical research fantasise about talking to Saloni Dattani. I assume that because I did, after reading Saloni's writing and listening to her interviews. Now, I thought, there is someone who focuses on issues that matter and pays attention to the details! Someone

Science writing from the last two years that stuck with me

This list consists of writing that ticked two boxes: 1) did I think about the article again more than a week after reading it?, and 2) was it written for a popular audience? So, academic papers, including review papers, don't count. Books are out too. Blog posts, magazine

A Quantitative Approach to Vaccine Funding

It is always easiest to insult your own work, so let me tell you what's wrong with the piece Rafael Dib and I just published on vaccine R&D. Our analysis is driven by a practical question: how should Open Philanthropy spend money on science if we

Generosity

Why should we have to pay for projects in foreign countries with our tax dollars? Well, we don't have to. It is a decision. At the moment the decision costs $15 per month each, $200 per year. The United States represents around 25% of global GDP, with around