Addisu Lashitew (@AddisuLashitew) profile picture

Associate Professor @DeGrooteBiz, @McMasterU. Nonresident Fellow @BrookingsGlobal, @BrookingsInst.

Hamilton, Ontario
Joined January 2010
Photo by Addisu Lashitew (@AddisuLashitew)Photo by Addisu Lashitew (@AddisuLashitew)Photo by Addisu Lashitew (@AddisuLashitew)Photo by Addisu Lashitew (@AddisuLashitew)Photo by Addisu Lashitew (@AddisuLashitew)
Addisu Lashitew retweeted
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English: dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
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Addisu Lashitew retweeted
Le nom du lac Ontario tire son origine du mot wendat « Ontari’io », qui signifie « le lac est beau, le lac est grand ». Ce nom remonte à plus de 400 ans, bien avant la Confédération canadienne et la Déclaration d’indépendance des États-Unis d’Amérique. Nous savons que les États-Unis sont en train de changer. Leurs relations commerciales, leur politique étrangère, leurs monuments nationaux, leurs hydronymes. Les Canadiennes et les Canadiens savent aussi qu’il faut appeler les choses par leur nom, et ce lac se nomme Lac Ontario – aujourd’hui et pour toujours.
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My letter to the Economist on their article on the state of Ethiopia economist.com/leaders/2026/0…
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Why do corporate codes of conduct often fail to improve working conditions in global supply chains? Our new article in the Journal of Business Ethics shows that the answer may lie inside the buyer firm itself.
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Addisu Lashitew retweeted
As a fun Saturday vibe code project and following up on this tweet earlier, I hacked up an **llm-council** web app. It looks exactly like ChatGPT except each user query is 1) dispatched to multiple models on your council using OpenRouter, e.g. currently: "openai/gpt-5.1", "google/gemini-3-pro-preview", "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5", "x-ai/grok-4", Then 2) all models get to see each other's (anonymized) responses and they review and rank them, and then 3) a "Chairman LLM" gets all of that as context and produces the final response. It's interesting to see the results from multiple models side by side on the same query, and even more amusingly, to read through their evaluation and ranking of each other's responses. Quite often, the models are surprisingly willing to select another LLM's response as superior to their own, making this an interesting model evaluation strategy more generally. For example, reading book chapters together with my LLM Council today, the models consistently praise GPT 5.1 as the best and most insightful model, and consistently select Claude as the worst model, with the other models floating in between. But I'm not 100% convinced this aligns with my own qualitative assessment. For example, qualitatively I find GPT 5.1 a little too wordy and sprawled and Gemini 3 a bit more condensed and processed. Claude is too terse in this domain. That said, there's probably a whole design space of the data flow of your LLM council. The construction of LLM ensembles seems under-explored. I pushed the vibe coded app to github.com/karpathy/llm-coun… if others would like to play. ty nano banana pro for fun header image for the repo
I’m starting to get into a habit of reading everything (blogs, articles, book chapters,…) with LLMs. Usually pass 1 is manual, then pass 2 “explain/summarize”, pass 3 Q&A. I usually end up with a better/deeper understanding than if I moved on. Growing to among top use cases. On the flip side, if you’re a writer trying to explain/communicate something, we may increasingly see less of a mindset of “I’m writing this for another human” and more “I’m writing this for an LLM”. Because once an LLM “gets it”, it can then target, personalize and serve the idea to its user.
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Social entrepreneurship (SE) is booming in the Global South, but it does not take place on a blank slate. How does the growth of SE affect local institutions? Our new Research Policy paper examines how SE's expansion affects Colombia's indigenous economy. t.ly/Zynki
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የኢትዮጵያ የፓርቲ ፖለቲካ ከ1997 ምርጫ ወዲህ ከወዴት አለ? t.ly/WL8-N @dw_amharic
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Addisu Lashitew retweeted
This is nuking every single supply chain that passes through the US in any way, under the illusion that 45 years of deindustrialization can be fixed in one day of 45% tariffs. Countless low-margin businesses, including US exporters, will be pushed into unprofitability.
Flexport's team was able to reverse engineer the formula the Administration used to generate the "reciprocal tariffs." It's quite simple, they took the trade deficit the US has with each country and divided it by our imports from that country. The chart below shows the predictions of this formula plotted against the actual new tariff rates.
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Addisu Lashitew retweeted
LIBERATION DAY RECIPROCAL TARIFFS 🇺🇸
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs (e.g., China 67%, EU 40%) aren’t based on actual foreign tariffs (WTO: China 7.3%, EU 5.2%) but likely on the U.S. trade deficit divided by imports (e.g., China: 279B/427B=65%). See WTO data: wto.org/english/res_e/… (233 caratteri)
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የመንግሥት ተቋማት የኢትዮጵያን ምርቶች እንዲገዙ የሚደረግ ግፊት ለአምራቾች ምን ይፈይዳል? p.dw.com/p/4dTqi?maca=am-Twi…
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