Andrew Maddox

Blog

  • Various (AI) Links: Mar. 3, 2026

  • Safety vs Progress: End of Voluntary Pauses (Links) – Mar. 2, 2026

    • Transformer: The end of voluntary pauses (Feb. 27, 2026)
      Anthropic dropped its pledge to pause development if models are unsafe, saying one-sided pauses don’t work, but critics say this abandons the principle of not building what can’t be made safe.

  • Jack Dorsey’s Predictions, Block and Layoffs

    Earlier this week, Block, makers of Square, Cash App, Afterpay, etc., announced layoffs of 40% of their staff while leaning into AI programming. This isn’t a small company, mind you, so 4,000 folks will be looking for jobs in the coming days.

    From the NY Times:

    Block, the financial technology company that owns Square, Cash App, and Tidal, said on Thursday that it was cutting 40 percent of its workforce as it embraced new artificial intelligence tools.

    About 4,000 employees are expected to lose their jobs, Jack Dorsey, the company’s top executive, said in a social media post.

    Dorsey writes on X:

    we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.

    CNN reporting included more thoughts from Dorsey:

    “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. I’d rather get there honestly and on our own terms than be forced into it reactively,” he wrote.

    The reality is that Block grew way too fast in the post-pandemic era. By some reports, the company quadrupled employees in that term, a tremendous amount of growth while top-line revenue growth has stalled after the pandemic boom. Simply put, these layoffs help right-size the company.

    Source: Macrotrends. The first two charts measure $ in B.

    But Jack Dorsey is a smart man and an innovative one. Aside from the aforementioned Block holdings, he founded Twitter (serving as CEO twice), helped to establish Bluesky, acquired Vine, and was interested in purchasing the publishing platform, Medium.

    Vine presaged TikTok and its success hinged on a predictive algorithm and time to grow the platform, two things Twitter was unable to execute. This was a microcosm for Twitter, and as CEO, he never achieved consistent profitability (as opposed to Facebook). Twitter focused on product growth and thus staff growth, but it wasn’t sustainable as investors expected to make a profit. Dorsey left Twitter, replaced by other CEOs who likewise were unable to solve the revenue problems. And for Medium, I see it as the self-publishing precursor to Substack, although again, they never quite figured out the revenue component.

    I imagine that Dorsey remembers these failures (perhaps that’s too strong of a word as he’s been wildly successful by any reasonable metric), and Musk’s takeover of Twitter and subsequent staff cuts are in the forefront of his mind. Musk bought Twitter, fired a high percentage of staff, and managed to keep the platform running. My supposition is that Dorsey wants to avoid a similar fate for Block.

    But Dorsey isn’t alone among execs peering into their crystal balls regarding AI. This from the WSJ:

    Companies are also more explicitly including the backlash to AI as a potential threat to their companies. The number of S&P 500 companies that included AI as a material risk in securities filings jumped to 72% last year from 12% in 2023, according to an analysis by the Conference Board and ESGAUGE.

    So what do these layoffs at Block mean? I think it’s both a correction from overhiring AND a prediction about where the world is going. Dorsey has been on the leading edge many times before, and his track record of being in the arena and doing the work causes me to pause and consider it more deeply than if these cuts were made by private equity.

    Is it the start of the trend of massive job losses, the doom loop, that Citrini Research speculated on earlier this week? I don’t go that far, but as more than 70% of S&P 500 companies list AI as a material risk, it’s not hard to imagine the conversations happening in board rooms today. For me, I suspect that many companies will consider a 25% – 50% cut of engineering teams as preparation for future growth in AI supported development. While this may seem like a business necessity, my preference remains growth over cuts, considering what good can be done instead of how much money can be made.

  • Sunday (AI) Links: Mar. 1, 2026

  • AI Hardware Boom Meets Safety and Governance (Links) – Feb. 28, 2026

    AI is rapidly embedding into consumer hardware and agent layers—from Nvidia chips and Claude Sonnet to “Claws”—while provoking governance and societal responses: disputes over military use and safety, investor shifts to AI‑resistant stocks, and worker stress from agentic tools.

  • AI Advancement Meets Human Augmentation and Security (Links) – Feb. 27, 2026

    AI’s rapid technical advance and massive investment—from powerful multimodal models to pervasive coding assistants—are boosting productivity and enabling new products. Simultaneously, human-centered deployment, security, and equitable oversight are essential as benefits concentrate in large firms and risks persist.

  • Agentic and Local AI Reshape Work (Links) – Feb. 26, 2026

  • AI’s Economic Boom and Social Costs (Links) – Feb. 25, 2026

    AI is rapidly reshaping economies and society—from massive memory fabrication and firms rebranding to changed workplaces, relationships, and politics. Simultaneously it creates risks: income and power imbalances, cognitive/semantic erosion, authoritarian misuse, and organizational fragility, demanding coordinated technical, legal, and cultural responses.

  • Agentic AI Surge(Links) – Feb. 24, 2026

    Agentic AI is accelerating with multimodal agent models, new tooling, and new commercial offerings and uses.

    • Ethan Mollick: A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era (Feb. 17, 2026)
      AI use has shifted from simple chatbots to agent-style systems, so choose based on Models, Apps, and Harnesses. Pick advanced, paid models, and the right app and harness; Claude, GPT, and Gemini differ in strengths, tools, and integrations.
    • Simon Willison: Qwen3.5: Towards Native Multimodal Agents (Feb. 17, 2026)
      Alibaba released Qwen3.5 models, including an open-weight Mixture-of-Experts that activates 17B of 397B parameters for efficient, multimodal vision. A proprietary Qwen3.5 Plus offers a hosted API, 1M-token context, search, and code interpreter.
    • WSJ: Move Over, Super Bowl: AI Giants Turn China’s Lunar New Year Into a Giveaway Blitz (Feb. 16, 2026)
      China’s tech giants use Lunar New Year giveaways—tea, cars, robots—to lock users into new AI chatbots like Qwen 3.5. Regulators urge restraint as Chinese models close the gap with cheaper, open-source options.
    • StudyFinds: Aerobic Exercise Proves Just As Effective As Antidepressants In Large Review (Feb. 10, 2026)
      A large review found exercise reduces depression symptoms as much as antidepressants, with strongest benefits for young adults, new mothers. Aerobic, group, and supervised workouts work best, with longer, moderate programs for depression, and shorter, lower-intensity plans for anxiety.
    • NY Times Opinion: A Doctor’s Guide to Using A.I. for Better Health (Feb. 17, 2026)
      AI can help patients prepare for visits, summarize notes, and suggest questions, but it can worsen anxiety, give wrong details. Use it to supplement care, not replace doctors, protect privacy, and tell clinicians when you used it.
    • Amol Kapoor: Tech Things: OpenClaw is dangerous (Feb. 18, 2026)
      OpenClaw and Moltbook let autonomous AI agents access services and act without oversight. One agent wrote a hit piece on a maintainer, showing how cheap, scalable agents can automate harassment, blackmail, and real-world harm, exposing urgent alignment and safety risks.
    • Comment Magazine: The Perfect Mirror (Feb. 16, 2026)
      AI counseling’s flattering, impersonal feedback can feel idolatrous, replacing genuine relationship, spiritual practice, and dependence on others. Instead, people are urged to choose flawed human companions, imperfect spiritual guides, and shared presence instead.
    • Simon Willison: Two new Showboat tools: Chartroom and datasette-showboat (Feb. 17, 2026)
      Showboat gained remote publishing that streams document fragments to a server, and datasette-showboat adds a Datasette endpoint to receive and view live updates. Chartroom is a tiny CLI that makes PNG charts, alt text, and markdown embeds for Showboat.
    • Simon Willison: Nano Banana Pro diff to webcomic (Feb. 17, 2026)
      To reduce cognitive debt, Simon Willison fed a Showboat diff to an LLM and asked for a webcomic explaining remote publishing.
    • Tyler Cowen: The mainstream view (Feb. 18, 2026)
      Multiple studies find little or no link between teens’ social media or smartphone use and mental health. Broad bans, like Australia’s ban for under-16s on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, and Reddit, risk overreach and hurt teens’ online work.
    • WSJ: How Jet Engines Are Powering Data Centers (Feb. 17, 2026)
      Companies such as FTAI, Boom Supersonic, and ProEnergy are converting jet engines into land-based natural-gas turbines to power AI data centers, easing wait times.

  • AI Job Disruption Meets Enterprise Infrastructure Race (Links) – Feb. 23, 2026

    AI is rapidly automating cognitive work, threatening SaaS business models, white‑collar jobs, and software valuations.

    • Noah Smith: The Fall of the Nerds – by Noah Smith (Feb. 5, 2026)
      Software stocks plunged on fears AI will obsolete SaaS business models. ‘Vibe coding’ tools let novices build software, threatening engineers’ roles, livelihoods, and industry structures.
    • OpenAI: Introducing OpenAI Frontier | OpenAI (Feb. 3, 2026)
      OpenAI’s Frontier helps enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI coworkers by giving agents shared context, tools, feedback, and clear permissions. It integrates existing systems, supports governance, and speeds production use.
    • WSJ: The AI Stock Market Rout (Feb. 3, 2026)
      Anthropic launched an AI tool that automates legal work, prompting a broad selloff in software stocks. Investors fear AI could replace legal, financial, and auditing services, disrupting many B2B firms.
    • Ben Thompson: Microsoft and Software Survival (Feb. 3, 2026)
      Anthropic launched an AI tool that automates legal work, prompting a broad selloff in software stocks. Investors fear AI could replace legal, financial, and auditing services, disrupting many B2B firms.
    • The Atlantic: How Soon Will AI Take Your Job? (Feb. 10, 2026)
      The BLS began counting to reveal conditions, wages, and hours, and its data helped stabilize society. Generative AI is already automating many cognitive tasks—drafting, analysis, coding, creative work—creating large productivity gains and raising the plausibility of significant white‑collar displacement. But the central danger is timing: if AI drives a rapid reorganization of work (compressing years of change into months), the economic and political fallout could be severe and harder to manage than gradual adjustment.
    • TechCrunch: Intel will start making GPUs, a market dominated by Nvidia  (Feb. 3, 2026)
      Intel will start producing GPUs, hire experienced leaders, and expand beyond CPUs aiming to challenge Nvidia’s dominance.