What Is Import AI and What Kind of Content Does It Publish?

Updated

Import AI is a newsletter about AI research written by Jack Clark and published at jack-clark.net. Each issue summarizes recent AI research and developments — often drawing on arXiv — with Clark's commentary layered on top. It is aimed at readers who want a regular digest of AI research news rather than a general technology feed. Issues are numbered and dated, and the newsletter asks readers to subscribe to support it.

Who writes it and how it is structured

The newsletter is authored by Jack Clark, and the site describes it as "a newsletter about AI research" that "runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers." Issues carry a sequential number and a date in the title — for example, "Import AI 476: Creativity and RSI; worse-than-China open weight models; AI goes to space" — followed by a welcome note and then a series of research items.

Each item typically follows a recognizable pattern:

  • A headline finding stated in plain language
  • A summary of the paper or release, including who built it and what it measures
  • Specific results, often with numbers and category breakdowns
  • A "Why this matters" section that places the work in a broader context

That last section is where much of the newsletter's value sits: it connects a single benchmark or model release to larger questions about how AI systems are developing.

What a typical issue covers

The content is research-first but not limited to academic papers. A single issue can move from a new benchmark to open-weight model comparisons to speculative applications. In issue 476, for instance, the lead item covers "Humanity's Sixth Sense" (HSS), a benchmark built by AI startups Elorian and Scale AI that "measures how a model interprets and reasons through information a visual scene implies but doesn't explicitly show."

The item illustrates the newsletter's typical depth. It describes the benchmark's composition — 522 questions covering 288 images and 234 short video clips, totaling 17.6 hours of video — and organizes the questions into four categories:

Category What it tests
Temporal & causal dynamics "What happened before the scene, and what happens next."
Physical & spatial logic "What fits, what's in reach, and what someone else can see from where they are standing."
Social understanding "Intent, attention, belonging."
Abstract & contextual inference "The patterns and rules a scene implies."

It then reports results against a human baseline: people scored an aggregate pass@1 of 93.1 (image 94.1, video 91.9, time 97, space 94.9), while the best-scoring AI system, GPT 6 Astra, reached 53.6 (image 55.6, video 51.1, time 58.2, space 53.6). Chinese open-weight models scored lower, with GLM-5.3-flash at 26.8 and Kimi K3 at 25.5. The item also names the two most common failure modes — "missing a detail that decides the answer (21% of failures)" and "misidentifying an object, person, or role (20%)" — before moving into interpretation.

How to read it and what to expect

The newsletter is best treated as a curated briefing, not a tutorial or a primary source. It points you toward papers and releases and gives you the headline numbers and the author's read on why they matter; the underlying work is where you go for methodology and caveats.

A few practical notes for new readers:

  • Expect interpretation alongside summary. The "Why this matters" framing is editorial. In the HSS item, Clark reframes the benchmark as a test of whether world models are emergent, noting that "many people have claimed that true visual reasoning will rely on developing spatially aware 2D" systems — a claim the results complicate.
  • Expect numbers you can check. Results are reported with specific scores and category splits, which makes it easy to trace back to the source paper.
  • Expect a mix of maturity levels. A single issue can pair a rigorous benchmark with more speculative topics, as the issue 476 title suggests with its references to creativity, recursive self-improvement, and AI in space.

Access and subscription

The newsletter is available at jack-clark.net, and the site includes a "Subscribe now" link pointing to importai.substack.com/subscribe. The page evidence shows a subscription prompt but does not state pricing or whether any content is gated, so check the subscribe page directly for current terms before assuming free access to everything.

If you want a recurring, opinionated digest of AI research with enough detail to follow up on the primary sources, Import AI fits that use case. If you need exhaustive coverage of the field or hands-on technical guidance, use it as a pointer to the papers rather than as the endpoint.