Category: Uncategorized

• Simon Willison: A quote from Corey Quinn (May 26, 2026)
  “I cannot believe I’m saying this, but getting the literal Pope to canonize your product’s specific technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is the single greatest act of vendor lobbying I have ever seen.” — Corey Quinn, on Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah’s influence on Magnifica Humanitas
• TNW : From the Vatican stage, Anthropic’s Chris Olah says AI cannot be steered by AI labs alone (May 25, 2026)
  At the Vatican launch of Magnifica humanitas, Anthropic’s Christopher Olah warned frontier AI labs face incentives that can conflict with doing right, and urged oversight from governments, churches, and civil society.
• Business Insider: Google is going to ruin the internet (May 21, 2026)
  Google’s new AI search will give direct, personalized answers instead of links, threatening website traffic, ad revenue, and the open web.
• NY Times: To Understand Pope Leo’s Efforts on A.I., Look at the Man 3 Seats Away (May 26, 2026)
  Pope Leo XIV released an encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” urging A.I. be “disarmed,” and calling for moral limits to protect human dignity. He engaged directly with tech leaders, including Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah.
• Epoch AI: Frontier labs don’t use most AI compute (yet) (May 21, 2026)
  ChatGPT sparked a massive AI compute boom to roughly 16–20 million H100-equivalents by end-2025, funded by hundreds of billions annually. Top frontier labs used under half that compute, though OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI are growing fast.
• Pew Research Center: US views of how data centers affect the environment, energy costs, jobs and more (Mar. 12, 2026)
  Most Americans have heard about data centers, but opinions are mixed. Many see negative impacts on the environment, home energy costs, and nearby quality of life, while larger shares view local jobs and tax revenue benefits as positive.
• WSJ: Employ an AI Twin to Handle Your Piles of Busy Work (May 21, 2026)
  Executives are adopting AI “digital twins” that mimic their speech and writing to give presentations, answer questions, and advise employees, expanding reach and productivity. 
• WSJ: Your AI Has a Long Memory. And That Can be a Problem. (May 25, 2026)
  Chatbots that remember help with schedules, preferences, and family details, but their memory can cling to outdated, incorrect, or sensitive facts, biasing advice and invading privacy. 
• MIT Technology Review: A reality check on the AI jobs hysteria (May 26, 2026)
  Current labor data show AI has not yet caused large-scale white-collar job losses, and exposed occupations do not have higher unemployment. Young workers in exposed roles have declined.
• WSJ: The First Class of AI Natives Is Graduating. Offices Are Getting Ready. (May 25, 2026)
  The Class of 2026, raised alongside ChatGPT, brings strong AI skills, using tools to speed work, automate tasks, and win some advanced roles. 
• NY Times Opinion: A.I. Is a Job Creator (May 22, 2026)
  Artificial intelligence will automate many white‑collar tasks, but it won’t trigger a job apocalypse, and new roles, like data‑center construction and A.I. management, are already emerging. 
• Jack Clark: Reckoning with the future; and a singularity story (May 26, 2026)
  AI progress is accelerating, producing systems that outperform humans on many tasks, and may soon improve themselves, driving large social and economic change.
• NY Times: Main Takeaways From Pope Leo’s Encyclical on A.I. (May 25, 2026)
  Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, urges centering human dignity amid AI, and says AI is not human. 
• NY Times: Pope Leo Has Released an Encyclical About A.I. Why Is That Important? (May 24, 2026)
  Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas”, about preserving human dignity in the era of artificial intelligence. 
• WSJ: What Investors Should Realize About Those AI IPOs (May 22, 2026)
  Latest-generation AI models pose security and liability risks, so makers are restricting access to governments, and trusted users. That will make AI companies government contractors, reshape commercial models, and change what investors should expect.

• WSJ: Meet Mark Zuckerberg’s Right-Hand Man Who’s Unleashing AI at Meta (May 24, 2026)
  Andrew Bosworth, a blunt Zuckerberg lieutenant, is leading Meta’s aggressive shift to AI. He pushed employee tracking to train agents, refused opt-outs, and oversaw mass layoffs.
• NY Times: Soundtrack to 8,000 Job Cuts: A Meta Worker’s Layoff-Themed A.I. Songs (May 20, 2026)
  After Meta cut 8,000 jobs, an employee used internal A.I. tools to create “520 FM,” an internal radio station of A.I.-generated songs about the layoffs. Colleagues said it offered distraction, comfort, and dark humor.
• Andy Masley: I think I figured out exactly how the “AI used a bottle of water per prompt” miscalculation happened (May 24, 2026)
  A Washington Post graphic, using a rough GPT‑4 estimate, spread the myth that each AI prompt uses a whole bottle of water. It mixed onsite, offsite, and hydroelectric evaporation, so real use is only a few milliliters per prompt.
• NY Times: Artificial Intelligence Floods Court Dockets with Home-Brewed Lawsuits (May 25, 2026)
  A.I. helps self-represented litigants file many more, longer, and more complex complaints, flooding federal dockets and overwhelming courts. 
• WSJ: AI Expands From Multibillion-Dollar Enterprises to Main Street (May 25, 2026)
  By the Way Bakery adopted an AI planning tool to replace sprawling spreadsheets, tracking ingredients, labor, and production schedules to fill supermarket orders. A low-cost AI app and automation freed staff to bake.
• NY Times Opinion: As a Doctor, I Can Understand the Allure of ChatGPT (May 24, 2026)
  A physician used ChatGPT to interpret lab results and received practical, personalized advice, steady encouragement, and nonjudgmental availability.
• WSJ: AI Can Help Debunk Conspiracy Theories and Pull People From the Brink (May 24, 2026)
  AI chatbots that clearly marshal facts can persuade people to abandon conspiracy theories, with effects lasting months. They work best when informative, not condescending, and can be used in conversations.
• NY Times: Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical (May 25, 2026)
  Pope Leo XIV published an encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, warning that A.I. threatens human dignity, work, and social stability. He called for regulation, worker protection and retraining, education, child safeguards.
• NY Times: As A.I. Fever Rises in Silicon Valley, Pope Leo Has a Few Words (May 25, 2026)
  Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, urging caution about A.I., saying it amplifies the power of the few. 
• WSJ: Pope Leo Compares AI Threat to Biblical ‘Tower of Babel’ (May 25, 2026)
  Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” warns that AI threatens human dignity, risks reducing people to cogs, and concentrates power in few private hands. 
• Dean W. Ball: Dean Ball on Encyclical
  The Vatican’s AI encyclical is Eurocentric, enamored of academic talking points, and evasive about where AI is headed. 
• WSJ: Venture Capitalist John Doerr Says AI Is the Biggest Tech ‘Tsunami’ Ever (May 23, 2026)
  John Doerr calls generative AI the biggest innovation tsunami, and he backs AI to address climate and healthcare. 

• Daniel Stenberg: Mythos finds a curl vulnerability (May 10, 2026)
  Anthropic’s Mythos scanned curl and reported five “confirmed” vulnerabilities, but manual review found only one low-severity CVE, plus about twenty bugs. The report improved curl, shows AI code analyzers are powerful, useful, and complementary to human review.
• NY Times: Meta’s Embrace of A.I. Is Making Its Employees Miserable (May 8, 2026)
  Meta is pushing its 78,000 workers to adopt A.I., tracking keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen activity to train models, and tying A.I. use to performance reviews.
• WSJ: Apple, Intel Have Reached Preliminary Chip-Making Agreement (May 8, 2026)
  Apple and Intel reached a preliminary deal for Intel to make some Apple chips, after yearlong talks; specifics, including which iPhones, iPads, and Macs would use them, remain unclear. 
• Rival Research: Mythos 'Discovered' a CVE Already in Its Training Data (May 5, 2026)
  Anthropic says Claude Mythos found a remote kernel exploit, but the flaw is a 20-year-old RPCSEC_GSS stack overflow, copied from older Kerberos code. FreeBSD patched it.
• WSJ: AI’s Next Phase Plays Into TSMC’s Hands (May 11, 2026)
  Big tech’s huge AI chip spending is straining global production, boosting demand for contract makers. TSMC dominates advanced-chip manufacturing, enjoys rising margins, high customer commitments.
• Reuters: Cloudflare to cut about 20% workforce as AI adoption reshapes operations (May 7, 2026)
  Cloudflare will cut about 1,100 jobs, roughly 20% of staff, as it restructures operations around AI.
• Andy Masley: Let's not compare data center heat exhaust to nuclear bombs (May 10, 2026)
  Data centers consume vast energy and emit large daily heat, but because they release it steadily, it’s far less concentrated and harmful than a nuclear blast. 
• NY Times: A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready. (May 8, 2026)
  Silicon Valley’s AI leaders prepared for apocalyptic risk, while ignoring human backlash, which has become violent and political.
• NY Times Opinion: The Atheist and the Machine God (May 9, 2026)
  Artificial intelligence could push people toward atheism, revive mystical religion, or increase metaphysical uncertainty, leaving many unsettled. Conversations with chatbots like Claude highlight puzzles about machine consciousness, and whether subjective experience is fundamental.
• CyberInsider: EU calls VPNs “a loophole that needs closing” in age verification push (May 8, 2026)
  The European Parliamentary Research Service warns VPNs are increasingly used to bypass online age-verification rules, calling it a legislative loophole that needs closing.

AI’s arms race—companies racing for talent, GPUs, models and customers—is straining infrastructure and prompting reorganizations. Simultaneously, legal, ethical, and regulatory tensions are escalating as firms monetize AI features, deploy agents, and courts and governments move to limit or enable uses.

• Simon Willison: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 (Mar. 13, 2026)
  Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 now support 1M-token contexts, standard pricing, and no long‑context premium.
• WSJ: Musk Says xAI Must Be Rebuilt as Co-Founders Exit (Mar. 13, 2026)
  xAI’s founding team is leaving as Elon Musk orders multiple reorganizations, after merging xAI into SpaceX, hiring new talent, integrating it with Tesla, and pushing to improve coding.
• NY Times: Meta Delays Rollout of New A.I. Model After Performance Concerns (Mar. 12, 2026)
  Meta delayed Avocado after tests showed it trailed rivals like Google’s Gemini 3.0 in reasoning, coding, and writing. It pushed the release to May, is considering licensing Gemini, and is reorganizing its A.I. efforts.
• WSJ: Amazon’s Win Against Perplexity Kicks AI Shopping Wars Into High Gear (Mar. 11, 2026)
  A judge barred Perplexity’s AI agent from using Amazon’s password-protected pages to shop for users while the case continues. Retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, and Target, are rushing to protect ad revenue, build AI tools, and control shopping bots.
• WIRED: Grammarly Is Offering ‘Expert’ AI Reviews From Your Favorite Authors—Dead or Alive (Mar. 4, 2026)
  Grammarly, now part of Superhuman, added AI tools like an “Expert Review” that mimics living and dead writers, scholars, and celebrities. Critics call it unethical. I think it’s a gimmick for a company with a dim future.
• WSJ: FedEx Is Planning an AI Agent Workforce (Mar. 13, 2026)
  FedEx is building AI agents to automate operations, aiming to put AI in over half of workflows by 2028, while consolidating data, modernizing systems, and training staff.
• WSJ: China’s ByteDance Gets Access to Top Nvidia AI Chips (Mar. 12, 2026)
  ByteDance is buying hundreds of Nvidia Blackwell systems through Aolani Cloud in Malaysia, about 36,000 B200 chips, to boost AI research and global products.
• WSJ: How the OpenAI-Anthropic Feud Could Warp the Future of AI (Mar. 7, 2026)
  OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei have escalated a public feud, trading barbs as they compete for users, talent, and IPO dollars.
• Western Montana News: Montana Leads the Nation with Groundbreaking Right to Compute Act – Western Montana News (Apr. 21, 2025)
  Montana passed SB 212, the Right to Compute Act, making it the first state to guarantee citizens’ rights to own, access, and use computational and AI tools. The law limits government regulation, and requires safety, shutdown, and annual risk reviews.
• CNBC: Oracle is building yesterday’s data centers with tomorrow’s debt (Mar. 9, 2026)
  AI chips are advancing faster than data centers can be finished, so OpenAI paused expansion at Oracle’s Abilene Stargate to await newer Nvidia GPUs.

• 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.

• 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.”