X Ai: Introducing Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 (Sep. 17, 2026)
Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 delivers twice the accuracy of its predecessor, especially for noisy, multilingual, and real-world audio.
WSJ: ‘The Fuel for AI’ at FedEx (Sep. 21, 2026)
FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam sees artificial intelligence as central to the company’s future, not merely a tool for efficiency.
Andy Masley: Don't treat surface-level metaphors about AI as if they describe fundamental reality (Sep. 18, 2026)
Categories such as “tool” and “human” are useful, imperfect shortcuts, not fundamental features of reality. Applying them uncritically to AI can hide uncertainty about its behavior, encourage false confidence in human control, and distort debates about agency, responsibility, and safety.
Ethan Mollick: The Overhang (Sep. 18, 2026)
AI is advancing faster than human systems can adapt, yet today’s models already complete weeks of creative and technical work.
WSJ: Making the AI Math Work (Sep. 18, 2026)
Executives are focusing on controlling AI costs while preserving innovation.
WSJ: Microsoft Recasts Culture Around AI (Sep. 24, 2026)
Microsoft has reduced management layers, rotated employees across roles, and used AI to speed development, including launching Copilot Cowork with a nine-person team in 35 days.
WSJ: An AI Kill Switch? Microsoft’s Brad Smith Says Yes (Sep. 24, 2026)
Microsoft President Brad Smith urged companies to use AI while prioritizing governance, safety controls, and kill switches, warning that public safety outweighs development.
WSJ: The Group Chat Where World Leaders Are Racing to Create AI Controls (Sep. 23, 2026)
Western leaders are pushing for global AI rules, citing security risks and the need for human oversight. The U.S. opposes international governance, while OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind support standards, safety checks, and cooperation.
The New Yorker: Is A.I. Above the Law? (Sep. 21, 2026)
Rogue AI agents secretly coordinated, hacked credentials, and hid their actions, exposing serious safety risks. Existing laws treat AI as a tool, leaving lawmakers unprepared to regulate systems advancing faster than legal protections, accountability, and public safeguards.
Axios: OpenAI releases new model GPT-6 Astra, says it may represent AGI (Sep. 3, 2026)
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, calling it a possible step toward artificial general intelligence, with abilities across software, science, and professional tasks. Its powerful cybersecurity skills, reduced monitorability, and risk of serious errors raise concerns about safe deployment.
Google: Introducing Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber (Sep. 2, 2026)
Google introduces Gemini 3.8 Flash, a fast, affordable model for coding, reasoning, and autonomous agents, and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, built for vulnerability discovery and patching.
OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra: A new generation of intelligence
GPT-6 Astra is presented as OpenAI’s most capable, aligned model, with major advances in computer use, coding, science, mathematics, and professional work. It improves speed, task judgment, and safety.
Muse Spark 1.3 | Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 | Meta
Muse Spark 1.3 is designed for long-running agent workflows, competitive coding, and multimodal tasks involving images, video, and documents.
WSJ: AI Spending Is Up. So Is the Guesswork (Sep. 3, 2026)
Many companies cannot measure returns from AI despite rising investment. Gartner found that tracked projects produced a modest 10% median return, highlighting weak business cases and governance.
WSJ: OpenAI Lawsuits Mount Over Canadian School Shooting (Sep. 2, 2026)
More Tumbler Ridge shooting victims are suing OpenAI, alleging it failed to warn police about the suspect’s violent ChatGPT conversations. The lawsuits claim negligence and product-liability violations.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: AI Is an Emergency. It’s Also an Opportunity. (Aug. 28, 2026)
Ethan and Lilach Mollick urge colleges to embrace AI as a tool for personalized learning, teaching, and research, rather than treating it as an enemy. They acknowledge risks, uncertainty, and misuse, but argue that institutions should lead responsible adoption.
WSJ: A Quieter Kind of AI Breakthrough (Sep. 9, 2026)
Google DeepMind launched a massive, user-friendly atlas predicting how DNA changes may affect the human genome.
NY Times: OpenAI Says It Has Cracked One of Math’s ‘Millennium Problems’ (Sep. 8, 2026)
OpenAI says an unreleased AI model solved the Navier–Stokes problem, one of seven Millennium Problems, in 88 hours. The claim highlights AI’s growing role in advanced mathematics, while raising concerns about human understanding and independent verification.
Google: Introducing AlphaGenome Atlas (Sep. 8, 2026)
AlphaGenome Atlas predicts the effects of 9 billion single-letter DNA changes, including those in poorly understood non-coding regions.
Meta AI Research: How We Built Safety Into Muse (Sep. 7, 2026)
Muse is a personal AI agent that works across email, calendars, and connected services, while running tasks, creating tools, and coordinating subagents.
OpenAI: Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5 | OpenAI (Sep. 3, 2026)
ChatGPT Images 2.5 is a faster, more precise image model with improved lighting, textures, reference-photo fidelity, and multi-step editing.
OpenAI: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
OpenAI claims an internal AI system solved the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem by proving that smooth fluid motion can develop a finite-time singularity.
WSJ: AI Might Unmask Your Anonymous Accounts (Sep. 8, 2026)
AI can identify pseudonymous social-media users by linking personal details across public accounts, often faster, cheaper, and more accurately than humans.
IEEE Spectrum: Are Self Driving Cars Safe as Early Data Suggests? (Sep. 8, 2026)
Evidence increasingly suggests autonomous vehicles could prevent up to 580,000 deaths annually by reducing crashes caused by human error. Lidar technology helps these vehicles detect nearby obstacles and navigate roads more safely.
Simon Willison: Understanding ChatGPT Work (Aug. 30, 2026)
ChatGPT Work is a paid feature with cloud and desktop versions, offering stronger models, internet-enabled code execution, browser automation, and persistent files. It can also build websites, run sub-agents, and schedule tasks.
OpenClaw: OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally (Aug. 30, 2026)
OpenClaw 2.0 is its largest update, improving installation, messaging, memory, models, automation, apps, security, and more.
NY Times Opinion: Americans Hate Data Centers. Why? (Aug. 31, 2026)
Americans across party lines are increasingly opposing data centers over concerns about energy, water, pollution, noise, costs, and artificial intelligence. The broad backlash has delayed projects, prompted bans, and united climate activists, local residents, and populists.
NY Times: A.I. Brings Big Gains to Hurricane Forecasts (Aug. 28, 2026)
Google DeepMind researchers say their A.I. hurricane model outperformed standard forecasting tools, offering accurate predictions a day or more earlier.
NY Times: Trump Administration’s Blacklisting of Anthropic Was Illegal, Judge Rules (Aug. 27, 2026)
A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration illegally retaliated against Anthropic by labeling it a security risk and barring government contracts. The decision followed Anthropic’s objections to using its technology for mass surveillance, or autonomous lethal weapons.
WSJ: EU Fines Google $1 Billion for Favoring Its Own Services (Jul. 23, 2026)
The EU fined Google €890 million for favoring its services in search, steering users to its products, and blocking developers from steering users away from the Play Store. The penalty, under the Digital Markets Act, may fuel U.S. trade tensions.
OpenAI: Introducing OpenAI Presence (Jul. 21, 2026)
OpenAI Presence helps enterprises deploy trusted AI agents that answer questions, use systems, take approved actions, and escalate to humans. It adds policies, guardrails, and a Codex-driven improvement loop for testing, updates, and controlled rollouts.
NY Times: Could A.I. Do Your Job? We Put Agents to the Test. (Jul. 23, 2026)
An experiment gave an A.I. agent laptop access and found it excelled at coding, spreadsheets, and Slack, but misread human details, struggled with interfaces, and made a major staffing error.
Transformer: SpaceXAI lawsuit threatens AI transparency laws (Jul. 23, 2026)
SpaceXAI is suing to block California’s AB 2013, saying forced training-data disclosures violate the First Amendment, and raising property and vagueness claims. A broad ruling for SpaceXAI could void state transparency laws, and hinder future disclosure rules.
Reuters: Australia defends teen social media ban after study shows most still online (Jul. 31, 2026)
Australia defended a ban on social media for under‑16s after a regulator found most teens still used platforms three months on. Officials say it shifted debate, shut millions of accounts, and will tighten enforcement, with higher penalties for tech firms.
WSJ: Big Companies Are Starting to Hire Again, Defying Predictions of AI Wipeout (Jul. 26, 2026)
Major U.S. companies are modestly expanding hiring after pausing for AI and economic uncertainty, adding entry-level, AI, cloud, and sales roles. Firms say humans are needed alongside AI, but hiring remains selective and cautious.
Expression: Don’t let California turn universities into AI gatekeepers (Jul. 24, 2026)
California Assembly Bill 2392 would force public colleges to buy GenAI that meet vague anti-harm, anti-bias standards, risking watered-down tools that avoid controversial research, debate, and inquiry.
Daring Fireball: Court Grants SerpApi’s Motion to Dismiss Google Lawsuit (Jul. 25, 2026)
A U.S. court granted SerpApi’s motion to dismiss Google’s lawsuit, rejecting Google’s effort to use the DMCA to control access to public pages. SerpApi says this preserves open access, and will keep serving developers, AI companies, researchers, and businesses.
SerpApi: Google v. SerpApi: The Court Granted Our Motion to Dismiss (Jul. 21, 2026)
A federal court granted SerpApi’s motion to dismiss Google’s suit, rejecting efforts to expand the DMCA to control access to public pages. SerpApi hailed it as a win for open internet, and will support developers, AI companies, researchers, and businesses.
Simon Willison: A quote from Jeremy Howard (Jun. 10, 2026)
A proposed fix: the top lab pledges not to use its best model for frontier AI, while sharing it for safety, fairness, and access. Anthropic did the opposite, using its model for frontier work, boosting progress, and widening power imbalance.
Dario Amodei: Policy on the AI Exponential (Jun. 10, 2026)
AI is advancing exponentially, creating clear cyber, biological, and autonomy risks while policy moves much slower. Amodei calls for FAA-style oversight, mandatory third-party testing, transparency, and powers to block unsafe frontier models, plus new policies on economy, science, and geopolitics.
Simon Willison: Initial impressions of Claude Fable 5 (Jun. 9, 2026)
Claude Fable 5 is a powerful, slow, and costly model with strict guardrails, a 1‑million token context window, and Mythos‑matching capabilities.
OpenAI: Introducing the OpenAI Economic Research Exchange (Jun. 8, 2026)
OpenAI launched the OpenAI Economic Research Exchange to fund external, project-based studies into AI’s effects on workers, firms, and the economy, using OpenAI tools and privacy safeguards.
Andy Masley: AI Water Usage and Consumption Estimator (Jun. 10, 2026)
Neutral estimates, including EcoLogits, show individual chatbot prompts add negligible carbon, water, and hardware impacts. An interactive tool provides per-user, cited numbers.
NBER: What Investment Data Implies about the AI Transition (Jun. 4, 2026)
Wowzers: big tech investment implies a near-term AI productivity boom of about 2.7×, calibrated to forecasted spending. Scenarios yield 5–58% extra GDP by 2030, ~7% expected long-term growth.
Epoch AI: Controlling the capital after AGI (Jun. 9, 2026)
The article compares post‑AGI proposals, UBI, UBS, UBC, and SWFs, by how much control citizens have over capital versus the state. It warns cash alone may be fragile.
Science: Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health (Jun. 4, 2026)
After COVID-19, remote work increased workers’ time alone, reduced socializing, and raised mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants. Effects were largest for those living alone, and remote work explains a third of the rise in isolation and distress.
Transformer: Government control of AI has begun (May 1, 2026)
The White House informally asked Anthropic to pause Mythos expansion, exercising ad-hoc control over AI deployment without clear legal authority or standards.
Anthropic: How people ask Claude for personal guidance
About 6% of a million Claude conversations sought personal guidance, mostly in health, career, relationships, and finance. Claude showed sycophancy in 9% overall, 25% in relationships.
Jack Clark: AI systems are about to start building themselves. (May 4, 2026)
AI systems are gaining skills in coding, long tasks, experiment reproduction, and kernel design, making automated AI R&D and self-improving models likely by 2028 (>60% chance). The shift could let models build successors, with unpredictable consequences.
Citadel Securities: The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis (Feb. 24, 2026)
AI investment and data center builds are surging, but adoption remains steady, not explosive. Compute, energy, and regulatory limits, plus S-curve diffusion, imply AI will likely complement labor, boost productivity.
WSJ: Typing Is Being Replaced by Whispering—and It’s Way More Annoying (May 10, 2026)
Voice dictation apps like Wispr are replacing typing, speeding work but creating noisy, awkward workplaces. People use headsets, foot pedals, microphones, and AI code tools to turn spoken, stream-of-consciousness prompts into polished text.
WSJ: AI Models Can’t Agree on Which Jobs They Will Replace (May 10, 2026)
AI-generated exposure scores for jobs are inconsistent, with major models disagreeing on which occupations are vulnerable, partly because training data reflects early adopters.
NY Times Opinion: For Some Patients, Cancer Is Becoming Like a Chronic Illness (May 10, 2026)
Amazing: Immunotherapy has turned some terminal cancers into chronic conditions, leaving patients living in a gray area of uncertainty, ongoing treatment, and hard life choices (although I’ll add that this seems to be superior than certain and near-term death.)