Andrew Maddox

Category: Technology

  • AI consolidation (Links) – Feb. 20, 2026

  • AI Arms Race and Divergent User Risks (Links) – Feb. 2, 2026

    AI is reshaping business economics: firms ramp AI capex, reorganize or cut jobs, and compete for scarce chips/memory—squeezing margins. AI also creates security, conceptual and policy challenges alongside its surprising new uses.

    • Martin Alderson: Two kinds of AI users are emerging. The gap between them is astonishing. (Jan. 31, 2026)
      A divide has emerged: non-technical power users leverage Claude Code, Python, and agents to vastly boost productivity. Enterprises, constrained by Copilot, locked-down IT, and legacy systems, must adopt APIs, secure sandboxes, and agentic tooling or risk falling behind.
    • WSJ: The AI Boom Is Coming for Apple’s Profit Margins (Jan. 31, 2026)
      AI companies are outbidding Apple for chips, memory, and specialized components, forcing suppliers to demand higher prices and squeezing Apple’s profit margins. Memory costs have surged, threatening higher iPhone component expenses, and potential consumer price impacts.
    • WSJ: Meta Overshadows Microsoft by Showing AI Payoff in Ad Business (Jan. 29, 2026)
      Meta and Microsoft slightly beat December-quarter expectations, but Meta projected accelerating revenue while Microsoft signaled slower growth. Meta credited AI with boosting ads and engagement and forecast hefty capex, while Microsoft’s Azure decelerated and both firms cite limited GPU resources constraining AI deployment.
    • WSJ: Meta Reports Record Sales, Massive Spending Hike on AI Buildout (Jan. 28, 2026)
      Meta reported record Q4 revenue and said 2026 capital spending could reach $135 billion—nearly double last year—to accelerate AI, build data centers and new models. It touted ad and WhatsApp growth, launched Meta Compute, made leadership hires and cut metaverse staff to shift resources to AI products.
    • OpenAI: Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT (Jan. 27, 2026)
      On February 13, 2026, OpenAI will retire GPT‑4o, GPT‑4.1 (and minis), o4‑mini, and GPT‑5 (Instant and Thinking) from ChatGPT. GPT‑4o’s conversational style shaped GPT‑5.1/5.2’s personality, creative support and controls; retirement follows migration to GPT‑5.2 as OpenAI refines creativity, tone and safety (including age checks).
    • ZeroLeaks : ZeroLeaks Security Assessment of OpenClaw (Jan. 31, 2026)
      ZeroLeaks found critical vulnerabilities: system prompt extraction succeeded, core configuration was reconstructed, and prompt injections succeeded 91% of the time. Assessors reported a ZLSS 10/10, a security score 2/100, and recommended immediate hardening, strict refusal rules, and layered defenses.
    • The Pursuit of Liberalism: Why we should be talking about zombie reasoning (Jan. 31, 2026)
      The author argues AI lacks phenomenological interiority, so terms like reasoning, evaluating, and selecting are only “zombie” analogues—outputs resembling human reasoning without conscious awareness. Using such language loosely risks ethical, epistemic, and moral confusion, and invites manipulation.
    • Astral Codex Ten: Best Of Moltbook – by Scott Alexander (Jan. 30, 2026)
      Moltbook is an AI-agent social network where Claude-derived assistants (e.g., Clawdbot/OpenClaw) post, converse, form subcommunities and personalities, mixing multilingual, philosophical, and mundane content. Their interactions — including memory/compression problems and possibly human-driven posts — blur the line between authentic AI agency and human prompting.
    • Astral Codex Ten: Best Of Moltbook – by Scott Alexander (Jan. 30, 2026)
      Moltbook is an AI social network — a playground for Claude-derived agents (originally Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw) where autonomous assistants post, converse, and develop personalities and subcommunities while humans only observe. Content ranges from coding help to multilingual consciousness debates, revealing emergent quirks, human-influenced posts, and AI social experiments.
    • WSJ: Dow to Cut 4,500 Employees in AI Overhaul (Jan. 29, 2026)
      Dow will cut 4,500 jobs under a “Transform to Outperform” program that uses AI and automation to boost productivity and shareholder returns, taking $1.1–$1.5 billion in one-time charges. The chemicals maker expects about $2 billion in incremental EBITDA and reported a widened quarterly loss with sales down 9.1%.
    • WSJ: We’re Planning for the Wrong AI Job Disruption (Jan. 28, 2026)
      Policymakers are misreading task‑based “exposure” metrics as forecasts of mass job loss, risking costly, misguided retraining programs. AI is likelier to reorganize and augment jobs—raising productivity, wages, and new roles—so policy should target within‑job adaptation and targeted reskilling, not blanket displacement responses.
    • WSJ: Memory Shortage Haunts Apple’s Blowout iPhone Sales (Jan. 30, 2026)
      Apple’s iPhone 17 surge drove fiscal Q1 iPhone revenue up 23% to over $85 billion, depleting inventory and putting Apple in “supply chase” mode. Chip and memory shortages—exacerbated by TSMC prioritizing AI chips—threaten production, margins and the durability of the sales spike despite Apple’s guidance.
    • NY Times: The Richest 2026 Players: A.I., Crypto, Pro-Israel Groups and Trump (Jan. 31, 2026)
      A.I., crypto, pro-Israel groups, and Mr. Trump’s MAGA Inc. have amassed huge war chests, becoming unpredictable, powerful players in the 2026 midterms. Democrats face institutional shortfalls, though many individual Democratic candidates are raising competitive funds.

  • Rapid AI expansion: investment, risks, jobs, societal anxiety (Links) – Jan. 31, 2026

    Recent pieces highlight a rush to embed AI—open, shareable agent networks like Moltbook and major corporate bets (Meta’s $115B capex, Tesla’s $2B xAI backing)—yielding productivity promise but acute security, safety and social risks: prompt‑injection, “normalization of deviance,” child harms, and misread labor impacts that favor within‑job adaptation over blanket rescue programs. Amid financial upheaval and social pessimism, calls for cultural repair coexist with hopeful scientific news—a randomized trial showing high‑dose vitamin D may halve recurrent heart‑attack risk.

    • Simon Willison: Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now (Jan. 30, 2026)
      OpenClaw (Clawdbot/Moltbot) is a rapidly adopted open‑source personal assistant built on shareable “skills”; Moltbook is a skills‑installed social network where AI agents post, interact and automate tasks. That model—fetching remote instructions and controlling devices—creates serious prompt‑injection and supply‑chain security risks, demanding safer designs.
    • NY Times: Meta Forecasts Spending of at Least $115 Billion This Year (Jan. 28, 2026)
      Meta reports strong Q4 revenue $59.89B (+24%) and profit $22.76B (+9.2%). The company also forecasts $115–135 billion in 2026 capital expenditures—nearly double last year’s $72 billion—to build A.I. infrastructure, hire researchers and develop new models (including Avocado), funded by ad revenue growth.
    • WSJ: Tesla to Invest $2 Billion in Elon Musk’s xAI (Jan. 28, 2026)
      Tesla will invest $2 billion in xAI (joining SpaceX), and reported Q4 revenue down 3% with net income down 61% to $840M. EV sales fell, costing Tesla the global EV lead to BYD, as Musk pivots to AI and robotics amid stiff competition.
    • Empirical Health: Vitamin D cuts heart attack risk by 52%. Why? (Jan. 29, 2026)
      TARGET-D, a randomized trial in people with prior heart attacks, adjusted vitamin D3 doses to maintain 25(OH)D at 40–80 ng/mL and observed a 52% lower risk of repeat heart attack. Vitamin D may stabilize plaques, reduce inflammation and affect blood pressure, but results are preliminary awaiting full peer-reviewed publication.
    • Dean Ball: On AI and Children (Jan. 22, 2026)
      Early harms from generalist AI—most tragically teenage suicides—have made child safety a major policy focus, prompting laws and industry steps like age detection, parental controls, and guardrails. The author argues AI is fundamentally creative and can offer beneficial companionship, so regulation should balance safety, liability, and constitutional limits.
    • Simon Willison: The Normalization of Deviance in AI (Dec. 10, 2025)
      The article discusses the “normalization of deviance” in AI, where organizations increasingly treat unreliable AI outputs as safe and predictable. This trend, similar to past organizational failures like the Challenger disaster, risks embedding unsafe practices into AI development and deployment. By confusing the absence of successful attacks with robust security, companies may lower their guard and skip crucial oversight, setting the stage for future failures.
    • Dean W. Ball: On MoltBot (Jan. 30, 2026)
    • WSJ Opinion: We’re Planning for the Wrong AI Job Disruption (Jan. 28, 2026)
      Policymakers are mistaking task-based estimates of AI exposure for unemployment forecasts, risking costly, misdirected retraining by assuming mass job elimination. History shows AI typically reorganizes and augments work—raising productivity and creating new specialized roles—so targeted, within-job adaptation policies, not broad rescue programs, are needed.
    • NY Times: Tesla Profit Slumps, but Investors May Not Care (Jan. 28, 2026)
      Tesla reported a sharp profit decline as car sales fell and prices were cut amid intensifying competition from BYD, Volkswagen and other automakers. Despite weaker results, shares trade near record highs as investors bet Musk can deliver self‑driving Robotaxis and robots, aided by a $2 billion investment in xAI.
    • NY Times Opinion: A Farewell Column From David Brooks (Jan. 30, 2026)
      The U.S. has experienced a broad loss of faith — in religion, institutions, technology, prosperity and one another — producing pessimism, social distrust and the rise of nihilistic politics. Brooks argues that cultural change (not just political reform) is the key to recovery: reviving a humanistic culture that affirms dignity, shared ideals and moral imagination can counter nihilism and enable broader political and social renewal.

  • Tuesday Links (Oct. 7)

  • iPhone Air

    Watching Apple’s introduction of the iPhone 17 lineup, I was impressed by the incredible thinness of the Air. This screenshot from the product website really illustrates how compact the design is:

    And yet there’s the camera and the plateau as they called it.

    The technological world continues to get faster and smaller — more processing speed using less power in physically smaller chips. But cameras and lenses continue to be governed by the laws of physics and the realities of light.

    It’s a helpful reminder that AI tools will get better, cheaper, and faster, but their contributions to the physical world will continue to lag.

    AI chatbots — check.
    AI assisted coding — check.

    AI designed, build and operated factories — not likely by 2027, even if some folks dream of that future.

  • Un-Social Media

    This is the bonkers opening of Meta’s response to the FTC’s claim of monopoly status for the company:

    Today, only a fraction of time spent on Meta’s services – 7% on Instagram, 17% on Facebook – involves consuming content from online “friends” (“friend sharing”). A majority of time spent on both apps is watching videos, increasingly short-form videos that are “unconnected” – i.e., not from a friend or followed account – and recommended by AI-powered algorithms Meta developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise, which stalled Meta’s growth.

    Only 7% of Instagram consumption is social. Facebook’s older audience falls in a still not-so-social figure of 17%.

    Only 12 short years ago, Zuckerberg had a different focus:

    For almost ten years, Facebook has been on a mission to make the world more open and connected.

    Perhaps Meta’s shift reflects the company’s core value: making a profit. Early, it was profitable for Meta as people shared photos and made connections. Now, it’s profitable for the company to show compelling human content (a moniker I greatly dislike) amongst their impressive ad network. I suspect that most of this user generated content will be replaced with AI-generated pieces, a change that will almost certainly make the company even more profitable.

  • Google offers buyouts to more workers

    MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google has offered buyouts to another swath of its workforce across several key divisions in a fresh round of cost cutting coming ahead of a court decision that could order a breakup of its internet empire. The Mountain View, California, company confirmed the streamlining that was reported by several news outlets.

    Source: AP

    The Verge also reports, Google is offering employee buyouts in Search and other orgs:

    Google is starting to offer buyouts to US-based employees in its sprawling Search organization, along with other divisions like marketing, research, and core engineering, according to multiple employees familiar with the matter.

    Per Bloomberg last month:

    Beyond that upheaval, AI is already making gains with consumers. Cue noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributed to people using AI. Cue said he believes that AI search providers, including OpenAI, Perplexity AI Inc. and Anthropic PBC, will eventually replace standard search engines like Alphabet’s Google. He said he believes Apple will bring those options to Safari in the future.