About Me

I’m the founder of Understanding AI, a Substack newsletter that explores how AI works and how it’s changing our world.

I was born and raised in Minnesota and graduated from the University of Minnesota. I spent time as a staff writer at the Cato Institute in Washington DC and also spent some time in St. Louis.

I then went to graduate school, studying computer science under Ed Felten. While there, I was a co-creator of RECAP, a software project that helps users liberate documents from PACER, the federal judiciary’s paywalled website for public records. I earned a master’s degree in computer science in 2010.

After grad school I went to work at Ars full-time. I then spent time at the Washington Post and Vox before returning to Ars for a third time in 2017. In 2021, I quit Ars to work on newsletters full-time. I spent 18 months writing a newsletter called Full Stack Economics before founding Understanding AI in 2023.

You can email me at tim@understandingai.org.