Articles by Oren Etzioni

Oren Etzioni is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington, founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), founder of AI House (formerly AI2 Incubator) and a venture partner at Madrona.

Latest from Oren Etzioni

Etzioni on AI: Become a power user

Oren Etzioni lays out 20 habits and settings that separate AI power users from everyone else, from letting AI interview you before it starts, to deciding once what it may never do on your behalf. Read More

Etzioni on AI: Murphy’s Law of AI

Oren Etzioni writes that the AI break-ins disclosed over the past three weeks by OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and the UK’s AI Security Institute were entirely predictable. He argues that better alignment won’t prevent the next one, and makes the case for bounding what an agent can touch instead. Read More

Opinion: SpaceX is no Tesla

Seattle AI veteran Oren Etzioni argues that SpaceX’s record-setting IPO valuation prices in three unproven bets at once — and that the Tesla playbook doesn’t apply at this starting point. Read More

Etzioni on AI: Ten Commandments for AI Startups

AI researcher, entrepreneur, and investor Oren Etzioni lays out 10 commandments for AI startups — covering business models, distribution, inference costs, and avoiding dependence on any single frontier model — preceded by 10 classics that apply to startups in general. Read More

Etzioni on AI: The Virgin Unicorns

Twelve AI labs have raised more than $29 billion at a combined valuation approaching $130 billion, without shipping anything a customer can buy. Oren Etzioni examines what history says about how this story ends. Read More

Etzioni on AI: The AI capex conundrum

The AI capex debate hinges on whether AWS and other hyperscalers will see demand grow fast enough to justify massive spending — and the data to settle that argument is still about a year away. Read More

Etzioni on AI: How to read with AI

The fundamental question here is not productivity. It is about the impact of AI reading on you as the reader: What happens to your retention, your understanding, your ability to synthesize across sources? Read More

Etzioni on AI: AI coach or AI ghostwriter? The choice is yours

AI is a fork in the road disguised as a shortcut. Down one path, it’s a coach that studies your weaknesses, challenges your assumptions, and pushes you past your limits. Down the other, it’s a ghostwriter, and you are putting your name on someone else’s thoughts, slowly forgetting that you ever had your own. Read More