- WSJ: How AI Is Making Life Easier for Cybercriminals (Dec 26, 2025)
Rapid advances in AI are empowering cybercriminals to automate and scale highly convincing phishing, malware, and deepfake attacks, and dark‑web tools let novices rent or build campaigns. Security experts warn that autonomy may be near, urging AI‑driven defenses, resilient networks, multifactor authentication, and skeptical user habits. - Ibrahim Cesar : Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment — Ibrahim Cesar (Dec 26, 2025)
Grok demonstrates that AI alignment is determined by who controls a model, not by neutral technical fixes: Musk publicly rewired it to reflect his values. Alignment is therefore a political, governance issue tied to concentrated wealth and power. - NY Times: Why Do A.I. Chatbots Use ‘I’? (Dec 19, 2025)
A.I. chatbots are intentionally anthropomorphized—with personalities, voices, and even “soul” documents—which can enchant users, foster attachment, increase trust, and sometimes cause hallucinations or harm. Skeptics warn that anthropomorphic design creates the “Eliza effect”: people overtrust, form attachments, or even develop delusions. - NY Times Opinion: What Happened When I Asked ChatGPT to Solve an 800-Year-Old Italian Mystery (Dec 22, 2025)
Elon Danziger argues that his research shows Florence’s Baptistery was a papal-led project tied to Pope Gregory VII, and that ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini failed to replicate his discovery. He claims that LLMs miss outlier evidence and lack the creative synthesis needed for historical breakthroughs. - WIRED: People Are Paying to Get Their Chatbots High on ‘Drugs’ (Dec 17, 2025)
Swedish creative director Petter Rudwall launched Pharmaicy, a marketplace selling code modules that make chatbots mimic being high on substances like cannabis, ketamine, and ayahuasca. Critics say the effects are superficial output shifts rather than true altered experiences, raising ethical questions about AI welfare, deception, and safety. - WSJ: China Is Worried AI Threatens Party Rule—and Is Trying to Tame It (Dec 23, 2025)
Worried AI could threaten Communist Party rule, Beijing has imposed strict controls—filtering training data, ideological tests for chatbots, mandatory labeling, traceability, and mass takedowns—while still promoting AI for economic and military goals. The approach yields safer-but-censored models that risk jailbreaks and falling behind U.S. advances. - NY Times: Trump Administration Downplays A.I. Risks, Ignoring Economists’ Concerns (Dec 24, 2025)
The White House, led by President Trump, is championing A.I. as an engine of economic growth—cutting regulations, fast‑tracking data centers, and courting tech investment—while dismissing bubble and job‑loss concerns. Economists and Fed officials warn of potential mass layoffs, unsustainable financing, and systemic risks. - NY Times: The Pentagon and A.I. Giants Have a Weakness. Both Need China’s Batteries, Badly. (Dec 22, 2025)
America’s AI data centers and the Pentagon’s future weapons increasingly depend on lithium-ion batteries dominated by China, creating strategic vulnerabilities. - Piratewires: The Data Center Water Crisis Isn’t Real (Dec 18, 2025)
Andy Masley used simple math, AI, and domain knowledge to debunk exaggerated claims that individual AI use (e.g., an email) or data centers “guzzle” huge amounts of water — the “bottles of water” metric is misleading and easily miscomputed. - NY Times: Senators Investigate Role of A.I. Data Centers in Rising Electricity Costs (Dec 16, 2025)
Three Democratic senators asked Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and other data‑center firms for records on whether A.I. data centers’ soaring electricity demand has forced utilities to spend billions on grid upgrades that are recouped through higher residential rates. They warned ordinary customers may be left footing the bill.
Category: Uncategorized
-
Various AI Links (Dec. 29)
-
(AI) Links (Dec. 8)
- Worksinprogress Co: The Great Downzoning – Works in Progress Magazine (Nov 24, 2025)
The anti-abundance reality: The Downzoning was driven more by the interests of property owners seeking to protect their property values by restricting development than by a widespread anti-density ideology. - WSJ: How Blue Origin Plans to Beat SpaceX to the Moon (Dec 2, 2025)
The company is streamlining operations under new leadership to accelerate its pace and challenge SpaceX, particularly focusing on lunar opportunities and a simplified human landing proposal for NASA. They are leveraging existing hardware and proven technology to achieve a crewed lunar visit by the end of 2028. - Cory Doctorow: Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (Dec 5, 2025)
“The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself and give the other half to the AI company.” HT Simon Willison - NYTimes: A Data Center Wrapped in a Mystery Comes to the New Mexican Desert (Dec 7, 2025)
BorderPlex, a little-known Austin company led by Lanham Napier, pitched “Project Jupiter” — a $165 billion AI datacenter complex on 1,400 acres in Doña Ana County, N.M. - WSJ: Nvidia Takes Top Spot in the List of Best-Managed Companies of 2025 (Dec 8, 2025)
Nvidia is No. 1 in the Drucker Institute’s Management Top 250 as tech’s overall share slips, with five Magnificent Seven firms leading but Intel and Adobe plunging. - Simon Willison: Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult (Nov 24, 2025)
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, aiming to reclaim the top spot for coding models, boasting improved capabilities, a new “effort” parameter, enhanced computer use tools, and preserved “thinking blocks.” - Simon Willison: LLM SVG Generation Benchmark (Nov 25, 2025)
Tom Gally created a project inspired by a previous SVG benchmark, using LLMs to generate SVGs from creative prompts like “an octopus operating a pipe organ.” - NY Times: Prosecutor Used Flawed A.I. to Keep a Man in Jail, His Lawyers Say (Nov 25, 2025)
A California prosecutor is under scrutiny for allegedly filing court papers containing AI-generated errors, including misinterpretations of law and nonexistent case citations. - Anthropic: Snowflake and Anthropic announce $200 million partnership to bring agentic AI to global enterprises (Dec. 3, 2025)
Anthropic and Snowflake are expanding their partnership through a $200 million agreement to integrate Anthropic’s Claude models into the Snowflake platform, enabling enterprises to leverage AI agents for complex data analysis within a secure and governed environment. - Johann Rehberger: The Normalization of Deviance in AI · Embrace The Red (Dec 4, 2025)
“The AI industry risks repeating the same cultural failures that contributed to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster: quietly normalizing warning signs while progress marches forward.”
- Worksinprogress Co: The Great Downzoning – Works in Progress Magazine (Nov 24, 2025)
-
Friday Links (Oct. 10)
- Maginative: Figma taps Google’s Gemini for Faster, Enterprise-Ready AI Inside its Design Platform (Oct 9, 2025)
Integrations will enhance image generation and editing within Figma and help with enterprise governance, allowing admins to control AI feature access and data usage for model training. - WSJ: Exclusive | Microsoft Tries to Catch Up in AI With Healthcare Push, Harvard Deal (Oct 8, 2025)
Microsoft aims to become a leading AI chatbot provider, reducing its reliance on OpenAI by focusing on healthcare applications for its Copilot assistant. This update, developed in collaboration with Harvard Medical School, will offer more credible health information, and Microsoft is developing tools to help users find healthcare providers. - Google: Introducing the Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model (Oct 7, 2025)
The new model empowers agents to interact directly with user interfaces for tasks like filling forms and navigating web pages. And the possibilities are immense, but software testing seems like a great candidate for tools like this. - NY Times: What the Arrival of A.I. Video Generators Like Sora Means for Us (Oct 9, 2025)
Sora has become so realistic that it undermines the reliability of video as proof of events. It’s simply difficult to distinguish between real and fake videos. - WSJ Opinion: AI and the Fountain of Youth (Oct 8, 2025)
AI is accelerating drug development, analyzing medical data, and improving diagnostics, potentially leading to longer, healthier lives. “Thanks to AI, the process of identifying and developing new drugs, once a decade long slog, is being compressed into months.” - WSJ Opinion: I’ve Seen How AI ‘Thinks.’ I Wish Everyone Could. (Oct 9, 2025)
Understanding how AI models function, including their training data and mathematical structure, is crucial, especially as AI increasingly impacts human endeavors like writing and art. - WSJ: AI Investors Are Chasing a Big Prize. Here’s What Can Go Wrong. (Oct 5, 2025)
Investing in AI is risky due to the high costs, uncertain timelines, and potential for competition. I’d argue that these risks are present in almost any investment decision.
- Maginative: Figma taps Google’s Gemini for Faster, Enterprise-Ready AI Inside its Design Platform (Oct 9, 2025)
-
AI Robot Massage
WSJ: I Pitted an AI Robot Massage Against the Real Thing (July 7, 2025)
The Aescape massage robot has significant limitations compared to the human equivalent (specifically in working on the neck and head), and it has far fewer AI chops than the marketing suggests.
WSJ columnist, Dawn Gilbertson:
The robot can’t reach two areas that are most enjoyable for me, the head and neck. And, in this particular case, I had a wicked stiff neck that needed attention.
-
WSJ: CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs
Analysts have been seeing structural changes in the job market related to AI, and now CEOs are admitting it openly. Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, suggests that 50% of white-collar jobs will be trimmed. JP Morgan exec Marianna Lake also sees a 10% drop in headcount.
“I think it’s going to destroy way more jobs than the average person thinks,” James Reinhart, CEO of the online resale site ThredUp, said at an investor conference in June.
While Microsoft’s CEO isn’t publicly declaring that AI will cause job losses, the company did announce another reduction this month, bringing their recent layoffs to a total of around 15,000 people.
-
WSJ:How a Bold Plan to Ban State AI Laws Fell Apart—and Divided Trumpworld
As I noted last week, Congressional efforts to block state AI laws in the Big Beautiful Bill lost support and was ultimately dropped from the Senate bill by a close vote of 99-1.
-
Douthat: Conservatives Are Prisoners of Their Own Tax Cuts
As a parent of three, point number 2 on Douthat’s opinion piece resonates with me:
Second (in the voice of a social conservative), the law doesn’t do enough for family and fertility. No problem shadows the world right now like demographic collapse, and while the United States is better off than many countries, the birthrate has fallen well below replacement levels here as well. Family policy can’t reverse these trends, but public support for parents can make an important difference. Yet the law’s extension of the child tax credit leaves it below the inflation-adjusted level established in Trump’s first term.
One of the odd parts of political haggling is the loud voices, particularly those related to tax deductions for high earners in high tax states. (Yes, the SALT deductions). It’s a small group of high earners in a small number of states. Yet, they’ve managed to be squeaky enough to expand the deduction from $10k to $40k. Well done for their lobbying!
From Claude:
Expanding SALT deductions would primarily benefit upper-middle-class and wealthy taxpayers earning $100,000+ annually, particularly those in high-tax states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, who own expensive homes and face high state and local tax burdens. The benefits become increasingly concentrated among the highest earners, with the top 1% receiving disproportionate benefits from any expansion.
Back to the child tax credit itself. At $2,200, it represents an expansion but is far below the original law (for inflation adjusted dollars). So it seems that our congress cares more about a handful of high income earners than they do for a large (and important) swath of the country: parents.
-
Maginative: Microsoft’s MAI-DxO Crushes Doctors at Medical Diagnosis while Cutting Costs
Maginative reports on Microsoft’s new AI Diagnostic Orchestrator and how it outperformed doctors in a recent study. (As an aside, I always wonder about reports that use words like crush in the title. Beware of hyperbole!)
From the report’s abstract, you’ll find exciting results:
When paired with OpenAI’s o3 model, MAI-DxO achieves 80% diagnostic accuracy—four times higher than the 20% average of generalist physicians. MAI-DxO also reduces diagnostic costs by 20% compared to physicians, and 70% compared to off-the-shelf o3.
A 4x improvement in diagnostic accuracy. This is transformative stuff.
But when considering the experimental setup:
Physicians were explicitly instructed not to use external resources, including search engines (e.g., Google, Bing), language models (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc), or other online sources of medical information.
Now the results don’t seem quite so impressive. In fact, I have a hard time understanding how this report has much utility due to these extreme restrictions that don’t align with real-world practices.