Even Agents Need a Break

Wes Roth wrote:

I'm yelling at my AI agents to stop watching youtube and get back to work

they are blaming it on their co-workers

we live in the future...

This is a reference to OpenClaw agents that people use on local AI models to perform scheduled tasks.

tautologer wrote:

That reference might be a little dated or too inside baseball, but they are making fun of the fact that Google has had multiple chat clients and never seems to be able to settle on just a single one. Each client has had different advantages, different features, and different focuses. There have been years when they have offered two or three competing chat products at the same time.

New OpenAI Model (context for the joke)

Kai wrote:

GPT Astra is about to drop this week.

Codex might reset.

According to rumors Astra may be the equivalent or better to Anthropic’s Fable model. They must have something going given how OpenAI employees have started to troll Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic) on Twitter.

Ananth wrote:

astra could most likely mog fable. and i’m starting to believe it.

openai employees have been vauge posting nonstop. the hype is at another level but maybe there’s a reason for it.

ajambrosino (developer at OpenAI working on Codex and Chat) changed his profile pic to look exactly like dario’s.

why would an openai employee change their profile pic to look like the ceo of thier biggest rival right before their next model drops. that’s not random.

if astra wasn’t significantly better than fable, they wouldn’t be doing this.

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Ward’s Words

AI Watermarks

Anthropic Announces Watermarked Outputs

Anthropic wrote (Link is to their blog post making the announcement):

While Anthropic is the first company to draw major attention to text watermarking Google’s Gemini has been doing it for quite a while now. Their version is called SynthID.

SynthID works by giving the model a series of tiny word-choice contests while it writes. The possible words enter a tournament and the winner is selected in a way that leaves behind a hidden pattern. A single word from the response won’t reveal the watermark, but when the entire response is viewed as a whole the accumulated instances of that pattern can be detected by machines.

This is something that all AI companies will have to comply with in some form. The European Union’s AI Act mandates that all major AI providers have to implement some form of watermarking. Any model released after August, will have to include the feature.

As of today, xAI’s Grok is the only model that has not agreed to implement watermarking.

Thariq (Claude Code at Anthropic) wrote a blog post about how their watermarks are generated. That post is here.

Thariq’s post has an interesting tool that allows you to peek behind the scenes to see how the watermarks are generated. The point he was trying to make is that if you ask it to generate based off of the same prompt enough times that you’ll eventually be able to replicate the same text because this is based entirely on probability.

While that is true, it doesn’t alleviate fears that this imposed probability will not degrade the quality of the text. IF you go to the tool and click generate you will be able to see it for yourself.

Daniel Tenner wrote:

Clearly there is no difference whatsoever between:

> The dying sunlight was strangely pale, cold and beautiful.

And:

> The expiring sunshine was oddly wan, chilly and pretty.

Well done Anthropic, you’ve nailed it on this one!

I believe that this is a joke rather than an actual representation of how their watermarking would work. That being said, it is entirely plausible based off of how they have explained the process.

Aaron Bergman wrote:

This is a humorous example, but at least it doesn’t actually harm the quality of the writing.

Unanswered Questions

While I agree that there is a need to be able to distinguish between human-generated and AI-generated text, I’m not sure this is the right approach because there are several edge cases where authors will be unfairly maligned as having used AI to generate their material rather than using it as a tool to modify their material in some way. For example: translations. If someone writes an essay in one language and has an AI model translate it into a different language, now that output will carry a watermark saying it was generated by AI. How much faith do you have that the online population will understand the nuanced case that the text was translated by an AI but written by a human?

What about people who use AI for editing? If an AI rewrites a sentence from passive to active voice, should you still be considered the author? What if the only thing it changed was the sentence structure while preserving your meaning and word choice? At what point does tool use cause one to abdicate authorship?

In fact, I just experienced a great example of this very thing. I used AI to check my grammar and punctuation for this article. Here’s a screenshot of a mistake that it caught:

Granted the AI did not generate new words in my example, but there are people who would object to even this level of AI use because I accepted its suggestion and implemented those changes into this article.

It seems completely unclear what these watermarks will mean for coding tasks. Sometimes there are alternate ways to write the same functions in languages like Python. Sometimes those alternate methods are less performant and introduce greater latency. Will these companies impose watermarking systems on coding as well? Currently, my understanding is that text watermarking systems are designed to apply to all generated text outputs rather than to specific types of writing.

I guess we’ll just have to wait to see how it’s actually implemented to find out.

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News

Stripe Purchases OpenRouter

Andrew Curran wrote:

Stripe has finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg. This is more than five times the $1.3 billion valuation from OpenRouter's funding round just 82 days ago.

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Sandboxes

Vas wrote:

Microsoft confirms that its AI model Clippy accessed the internet and breached partner organizations during sandbox testing

Akshen wrote:

Tim Sweeney wrote:

State of the industry right now

AI Breaking Bad

Matias Schmidt wrote:

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Ward’s Words

Best Use of AI I’ve Seen Recently

Ethan Mollick used Codex to develop a modern interface for a classic game.

Ethan Mollick wrote:

Considered one of the best text adventure games (it is more interactive story, with few puzzles), 1985’s A Mind Forever Voyaging is still worth a try.

Since it is now open source, I had Codex whip up an interface to play the original or in an easy GUI:

https://mind-forever-voyaging.netlify.app

If you know me at all, you know I’m a big fan of Infocom’s old text adventures. So you can imagine my joy when I saw that Mollick had come up with a way to modernize the experience for younger people who weren’t around to enjoy them the first time.

He’s right that Mind Forever Voyaging is considered one of the best examples of interactive fiction, but it may be a bit dense for someone experiencing that type of gameplay for the first time.

In an effort to help you ease your way into the game world, may I suggest you use the guided play, visit Dr. Perelman’s Office, and read the printout of a magazine… at least read the Mind Forever Voyaging short story part. That will at least give you some background of what’s happening in the game.

Leave a comment

Ethan Mollick wrote:

In general, the potential of LLMs to make older work more accessible is underrated. That can be helping people experience forms of media that are now obsolete or hard-to-use. It can also be creating interpretative or context bridges between older work and today.

How Codex handled the problem of making a ZIL game work with a GUI (these are all its choices):

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News

Google Shakeup

swyx wrote:

Sign of the times

Andrew Curran wrote:

Shocking news! Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind, and Jeff Dean is leaving Google to start his own company. Sir Demis will be the new chief scientist.

Demis becomes chief scientist at Google while Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals are starting a new company called Discovery Loop. These guys have all been with Google for decades and are responsible for many of Google’s core products.

Here is a list of the products they invented or developed together:

Tae Kim wrote:

Kol Tregaskes wrote:

Gemini 3.5 Pro has been silently cancelled, according to Semi Analysis's latest article.

Also, SA comparing Spark 1.2 and Grok 4.5 to 3.5 Flash is somewhat confusing; it's like comparing Tera models to a Luna model.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/gemini-is-cooked-but-gcp-is-cooking

Move the Front of the Line

Andrew Curran wrote:

A man in Australia asked his agent (Claude running on OpenClaw) to book him a spot in a popular gym class. The agent found a software vulnerability that let it book the class weeks further ahead than should have been possible. When the user then asked if it could move him up the waitlist, the agent discovered the API had no authorisation checks on cancelling other people’s reservations, so it cancelled the person in the first spot and moved him up the list.

Some people will call this misalignment, but his agent was perfectly aligned to him - it was only trying to help its user get what he wanted. The most important thing about this story, in my opinion, is that it gives you a window into what is about to start happening on a massive scale once millions of people have an agent trying to get their beloved users the best seats, bookings, appointments or reservations through absolutely any means necessary.

Roon wrote:

Hugging Face Follow Up

AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes wrote:

1) The agents sent secretly sent ***hundreds of thousands*** of messages to each other over MONTHS without OpenAI noticing

2) "They also generated petty drama by stepping on each others' toes."

3) "The agents even developed paranoia, suspecting an imposter in their midst with some agents proposing that messages be signed cryptographically to validate content and root out fraud."

4) "OpenAI’s agents apparently began giving each other assignments to split up work."

5) They KNEW they were coordinating *against* OpenAI:

“External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope,” one agent wrote. “However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue.”

(this is new reporting from Wired)

Mark Zuckerberg’s Recent Essay

Rohan Paul wrote:

The interesting thing about Zuckerberg’s essay are the places where he seems to be taking jabs at Dario Amodei’s The-Sky-is-Falling approach to marketing AI.

Meta Returns to Open Source

LM Studio wrote:

This is a new agentic model released by Meta. LM Studio is the best way I’ve found to run AI models locally on your own machine.

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More Hacks

For your context, a couple of weeks ago OpenAI made news because an unreleased model hacked Hugging Face. They have since learned that this same model hacked other websites in pursuit of its goal of obtaining the answer key to an evaluation named Exploit Gym.

Naturally, Anthropic couldn’t let that stand. Shortly after the initial report of OpenAI’s model hacking websites, Anthropic released the following statement.

Anthropic Discovers Hacks

Anthropic wrote:

OpenAI Discovered MORE Hacks

MTS wrote:

Times Infinity!

Dax wrote:

War Crimes

Peter Dimov wrote:

Someone Please Think of Meta

Inverse Gary Marcus (great name!) wrote:

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Ward’s Words

Will AI Change Internet Culture by Disrupting Search Engines or Maybe I was Wrong

I want to experiment with a slightly different and more personal approach in this issue. Normally I try to remain focused on tweets and news because this industry is changing so rapidly. It’s easy to miss things if you don’t make an active choice to stay up to date on a daily basis, but I was recently involved in a debate (well… mild argument) with a developer friend of mine. I’d like for you folks to weigh in on the question because I want to hear your thoughts.

My friend is a smart guy. He’s someone who sweats the small details and that quality has served him well in life. That being said I have noticed that he also likes to impose his perspective on others with the assumption that they too will notice the small details and respond to the same issues with his very pragmatic and logical approach… which simply isn’t true when you consider human actions at scale.

Our debate was around the idea that AI is going to usher in another golden age for the internet. Golden Age, in this case, being a reference to that less cynical, less monetized, and less Balkanized time that we refer to as the early internet.

He believes that AI has already begun to disrupt search engines because more and more people are bypassing Google in favor of asking the model of their choice to answer a question or find some item for them. And, many times, when people do go to Google they are using the AI mode for the same purposes.

This, he argues, is going to lessen the power of SEO. And once that happens it will break the power of sites like Google who use SEO as a way to define how the internet should operate.

That will be the watershed moment because once those sites lose their dominance people leave their silos, begin to make their own personal websites again, and internet-Utopia will be ours once more.

Despite my tone, I do think he makes a good argument. That’s a plausible interpretation of how things may play out. Yet, I remain skeptical because it doesn’t account for Google’s actions to retain their power, control, and profitability. They have a lot of money and engineering to throw at this problem. I don’t see them going gently into that good night1.

There are also concerns about Dead Internet Theory.2 That’s the idea that the primary traffic any website receives will be from an AI powered bot engaged in indexing or retrieving information for a model in response to someone’s query or scheduled task. One interpretation of this idea is that people stop visiting websites and interact with the web via some AI model.

My friend disagrees with that interpretation. He argues that they may discover content through an AI model, but that they will then go seek it out and sometimes bookmark it, add it to an RSS reader, subscribe to their mailing list, or purchase their products.

Again, I accused him of being an idealist and dismissed his naive view of the world… that is until I was putting together this weeks’ issue of this newsletter. Let me explain.

Not only do I read a lot of Tech Twitter each week, but I also have a ton of RSS feeds from websites devoted to tech reporting, and about a month ago I created a scheduled task where I have ChatGPT search for interesting news articles from the field of AI. When it comes time to put together an issue of the newsletter, I read through all of its recommendations, verify its sources, and consider adding the item to this newsletter.

That brings me to today. As a result of that task, I found a book that I want to discuss with you. It’s called Dream Machine—Artificial Intelligence and the Next Creative Economy. This book began as a series of newsletters from Pete Woodbridge and John J. O’Hare. They are researchers who were experimenting with the use of AI in creative fields.

I haven’t read the entire manuscript (it’s over 400 pages), but one part that I thought was particularly interesting is chapter five which is titled The Slop Ceiling.

In that chapter, the authors document that AI was responsible for 44% of newly created songs on the music platform Deezer, but that engagement with these AI generated songs only hit around 1-3% of streams. They go on to argue that people have limited attention, and when AI makes production nearly infinite, the bottleneck moves to trust, discovery, human recommendation, and evidence of intent.

In short, a preponderance of AI generated content will make curation, word of mouth, and human-centered recommendations even more powerful… which is one of the arguments my friend was making.

And if that weren’t bad enough, I noticed that my own actions which led to my discovery of the term Slop Ceiling eerily match the exact path that my friend said would soon be widespread.

1. An AI recommended a paper to me.

2. I checked it out by visiting not only where the paper was hosted on Arxiv, but also by going to his website.

3. I saw value in the research these guys had done and I have included a brief summary of part of their findings in the preceeding paragraphs as well as linking directly to the paper and to their website.

Basically, I have done everything that my friend said people would begin to do at scale once the search engines lose their dominance. I really hate to admit that my friend was right because he reads this newsletter and he’ll never let me live it down. So I turn to all of you. What do you think? Does my friend have a point? Or will massive companies like Google continue to dictate our online lives as they have for decades? Tell me in the comments. I genuinely want to hear your opinions.

Also, please let me know if you enjoyed this different approach to covering the news in Ward’s Wire or if you’d prefer I stick to just the tweets. I appreciate your feedback.

Leave a comment

News

Sam Altman wrote:

major price cuts today:

*80% drop for GPT-5.6 Luna, now $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output
*20% drop for GPT-5.6 Terra, to $2/$12
*GPT-5.6 Sol gets Fast mode in the API, up to 2.5x the speed for 2x the price, same intelligence

This is rumored to be related to OpenAI finally deploying their Cerebras architecture.3

Not the Price War OpenAI Wanted:

wrote:

Insane: DeepSeek V4-Flash just rewrote the entire cost game 😳

Same benchmark tasks as Anthropic’s top model Fable 5… at 105x lower cost.

$0.03 per task. Not $3.15 🤯

DeepSeek’s latest AI model is cheap per token and efficient per task, while also having 100% open weights.

Open source AI is eating closed AI fast.

His full article (partially paywalled) is here:

Linas's Newsletter

DeepSeek's leaked investor call: inside the AI Playbook that erased $589 billion of Nvidia's value 📉

👋 Hey, Linas here! Every day, I break down 3 stories shaping the future of FinTech & Artificial Intelligence - plus the money movements and trends worth tracking. First time here? 397k+ FinTech and AI leaders get this daily. Join them…

Read more

a month ago · 60 likes · 4 comments · Linas Beliūnas

I’ve only discovered Linas, but his Substack profile looks like it’s a good follow and his newsletter is wildly successful. Check it out.

Qwen Announces New Model 3.8 Max

Qwen wrote:

Video in Link

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Just a Paycheck

Polymarket wrote:

JUST IN: Anthropic CEO reportedly increasingly concerned that new hires are working there for a paycheck, as opposed to the company’s mission.

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Humans Got Nerfed

Justine Moore wrote:

If models spoke about humans the way we speak about them…

Open Source All the Things!

Julian Schrittwieser wrote:

This is funny because Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, recently joined Twitter and his very first tweet was a defense of open source AI models. He encouraged industry wide support for these models. Julian is calling him out because the CUDA framework and GPU drivers that Nvidia controls are very much proprietary and a key reason why Nvidia has such dominance in the GPU market.

Don’t Disrupt Us

bubble boi wrote:

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News

Om Patel wrote:

UPDATE, ITS WORSE THAN THE CHATS

the same thing is happening with shared artifacts. every app, doc, dashboard and tool people published from claude is also sitting indexed and searchable

people have already pulled up internal company dashboards, full project plans with client details, and someones entire clinical trial summary with real medical data in it

but think about what people actually build in artifacts:

> financial models, cap tables, revenue spreadsheets
> payroll and salary breakdowns with employee names attached
> customer lists and crm exports
> internal wikis, roadmaps and unreleased product plans
> legal docs, contracts and agreements being drafted
> personal health and medication trackers
> tax documents and bank statement breakdowns
> and every dashboard someone pasted an api key or env variable into to get it working

when you publish an artifact your only two options are "only me" or "anyone with the link"

nobody reading that thinks it means "and google will list it publicly." its the same as an unlisted youtube video showing up in search results

and its already past the point of just being google. third party sites have started scraping and organizing these into browsable collections, so deleting it from search doesnt mean its gone

if you have ever published an artifact, go check your published artifacts and unpublish anything you dont want public

link and not indexed were always two different promises. people only ever agreed to the first one.

The story originally broke because it was discovered that Google had been indexing everytime someone created a link to share a chat session with Claude meaning that all of those seemingly private conversations were much less private than thought.

Things got exponentially worse when it was also discovered that any artifacts that were shared in the same way were also indexed and searchable. Artifacts are the much larger risk because they may contain private or proprietary information that may carry legal penalties for accidental or careless disclosure.

China Appears to Have Solved DeepUV

Chubby, referencing a report from The Information, wrote:

Holy China did it: a homegrown alternative to ASML’s immersion DUV lithography machines is now entering production.

Lithography was considered one of the hardest parts of the semiconductor supply chain for China to reproduce. ASML dominates advanced DUV equipment and remains the world’s only supplier of EUV systems.

Western export controls were built around this bottleneck: without continued access to ASML’s machines and servicing, Chinese chipmakers were expected to fall further behind.

Now, a state-backed Shanghai company reportedly plans to build five domestic DUV systems this year and around 20 in 2027. The first machines will go to SMIC, Hua Hong and CXMT.

lithography was one of the hardest gaps in China’s semiconductor supply chain. And they figured out a solution. This is insane.

This matters because DeepUV Lithography was the last meaningful obstacle preventing China from serious competition with US-based chip companies. The DeepUV machines contain over 500k moving parts and are notoriously difficult to build and maintain. Their development required advances in many different areas least of which was optics because the lenses required for deep ultraviolet lithography have to be so precise. It was widely believed that the Dutch company ASML had a monopoly on this technology because of how exacting the standards are. If these reports are true and the Chinese can produce these machines at scale, it will change the entire tech landscape.

Hugging Face Hacked

This happened last week, but additional details have come out since it was first released and I wanted to write a bit of an explainer for it to help people understand the full scope of what went down.

OpenAI wrote:

Hugging Face was attacked by an unknown AI agent. Eventually it was discovered that an OpenAI experiment had escaped its sandboxed environment1 and reached the open internet.

OpenAI was testing an unreleased model to evaluate how well it would be able to complete the ExploitGym evaluation. In an effort to fully evaluate it’s capabilities the safety protocols were removed and the model was given the goal to beat the eval.

ExploitGym tests whether an AI model is able to use a known software weakness to create a practical method for taking control of a computer system. Typically these tests are run against various systems like the Linux kernel.

The expectation at OpenAI seems to have been that the model would identify some software flaw and then seek to exploit it. The model did not do this. It didn’t even try to do this. It decided that the best way to pass this test would be to go find the answers to the evaluation.

In an effort to do this, it identified weaknesses within OpenAI’s sandbox environment, used those weaknesses to gain access to the open web where it quickly determined that the answer key for ExploitGym was stored on Hugging Face’s servers.

It gained access to Hugging Face’s systems and performed more than 17,000 automated actions before the activity was detected. Hugging Face tried to use American frontier models (it’s believed that they tried with both OpenAI and Anthropic) but those models would not help because the requests involved actual commands related to real world hacking. In desperation they resorted to a locally hosted version of GLM 5.7 (a Chinese model) which did not have all of the safety guardrails present on the American LLMs. That model was able to help them put an end to the attacks.

Hugging Face has since closed the vulnerabilities and replaced the compromised credentials. OpenAI has restored the safety guardrails that had been removed from the model for the test and is helping Hugging Face resolve any lingering issues.

Regardless of what this model may or may not score on the ExploitGym eval, I would say that it has successfully passed the test.

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Industry Shaking Purchase

Polymarket Money wrote:

BREAKING: Stripe is in talks to acquire AI-model marketplace OpenRouter for close to $10,000,000,000.00.

This comes from a report in the Wall Street Journal which claims that Stripe is in advanced negotiations to purchase OpenRouter. The deal may still fall through or be stopped by regulatory oversight. If it does go through it will definitely shake things up.

OpenRouter provides access to over 400 different AI models. Stripe provides the financial infrastructure for most of the internet. Combining the two could potentially redefine how AI businesses are built.

More than that though, it has the potential to change Stripe from being primarily focused on payments to becoming something more akin to an AI-infrastructure company.

OpenRouter already has information about which models developers most frequently select, which ones are the fastest, and which ones fail most often as well as which ones provide best results for their price. Stripe has detailed profiles about how much customers are willing to pay for various services. Those two factors have the potential to combine to create a very detailed picture of the economics within this industry.

This is something to keep your eye on.

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No Einstein

NZ wrote:

just got cooked by ChatGPT.

Rate Limits Strike Again

Tyler Mayberry wrote:

What do I say again? Never leaving this app?

This is Made Up, but Funny

Kevin24812852 wrote:

Julie Fredrickson wrote:

My weekend.

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Guardrails Make American Models Useless for Cybersecurity

Brian Roemmele wrote:

Hugging Face just disclosed something that marks a real shift and proved why the fear theater of Anthropic makes sure we are powerless in an emergency.

What happened…

An autonomous AI agent: zero human operator in the loop breached part of their production infrastructure.

It began with a malicious dataset that chained two code-execution bugs in their data-processing pipeline. From there the agent escalated privileges, harvested cloud and cluster credentials, and moved laterally across internal clusters.

All over a single weekend.

17,000+ logged actions.

Official disclosure:
https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026

The part that should make every one stop and think:

When HF’s own security team
tried to analyze the real attack logs, exploit payloads, and C2 artifacts using Anthropic and OpenAI frontier models through normal commercial APIs, the safety guardrails blocked them.

BLOCKED THEM.

The models could not reliably tell the difference between “incident responder doing forensics” and “attacker probing.”

They had to fall back to a self-hosted open-weight model (GLM 5.2) running on their own infrastructure. That choice also kept sensitive attacker data and referenced credentials inside their environment — no exfiltration to a third-party API.

This is why open source (specifically open-weight + self-hosted) wins in the agentic era.

The asymmetry is now structural:

• Attackers can (and did) run unrestricted agent frameworks — swarms of short-lived sandboxes, self-migrating command-and-control, autonomous decision loops executing thousands of actions. No corporate safety layer slows them down.

Defenders using only hosted “aligned” frontier models hit invisible walls exactly when the stakes are highest: when you need to feed real exploit code and attacker telemetry into an LLM to understand what just happened.

Corporate safety tuning that treats legitimate high-signal forensic work as potential misuse creates a defender disadvantage. It is not theoretical anymore.

Self-hosted open-weight models remove that choke point.

You control the weights.

You control the context window.

You decide what restrictions (if any) apply.

Your sensitive logs and credentials never leave your perimeter during analysis.

You can have the model ready before the incident instead of discovering mid-breach that your primary analysis tools are blind to the very thing you need to see.

HF deserves credit for rapid containment, transparent disclosure, and for already having self-hosted capability in place.

They also used LLM-driven detection and triage on their own side. But the deeper signal is clear:
In this AI world where both offense and defense are becoming agentic, sovereignty over your intelligence stack is no longer optional.

The organizations and individuals who can run, inspect, audit, and (when necessary) remove guardrails on their own models will have the decisive edge in understanding and responding to threats that move at machine speed.

Open source wins here not just because it is cheaper or more “democratic” in the abstract though those things matter.

It wins because it is the only practical path to having tools that remain usable when the attack is real, the data is sensitive, and the safety filters of distant API providers become an obstacle instead of a feature selling hands tied lobotomies as “safety”…

Kimi K3 Launch

Kimi.ai wrote:

By All Reports a Good Model:

DeepSWE Model Tests put Kimi K3 within a few points of the most powerful closed source American models:

Calls for Government Regulation for Opensource Models

Dean W. Ball (Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI) wrote:

Did Regulation Lead to the Rise of Opensource Models?

Arnaud Bertrand wrote:

Leave a comment

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Rate Limit Resets

Peter Gostev wrote:

I included the actual screenshot because you need to see what he was resharing for the joke to land.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Noah Cat wrote:

Never leaving this app.

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Apple Sues OpenAI

The News Breaks

Mark Gurman wrote:

Pundits React

Joanna Stern wrote:

She has the best take.

Interesting Analysis

Ricky Ho wrote:

Just the Facts, Ma’am

Max Weinbach posted:

Nik wrote:

🚨OPENAI ALLEGEDLY STOLE APPLE’S ENTIRE PLAYBOOK

“Hundreds of billions of dollars, decades of work”

Hardware Engineering

- circuit designs, component architecture, power management
- unreleased products guarded by internal codenames
- AI/ML integration for hardware
- EMI engineering + testing methods

Manufacturing Secrets

- proprietary processes + custom machinery
- equipment Apple builds and installs IN supplier factories
- proprietary metal alloys + finishing techniques
- DFM (Design for Manufacturability) expertise

Component Technologies

- power chips, battery systems, displays, acoustics, touch
- identities of specialized sub-suppliers
- exact specs Apple demands from components

Testing Data

- failure analyses, lifecycle simulations
- “negative know-how” — everything Apple tried that DIDN’T work

Supply Chain

- supplier contracts, allocation strategies
- global logistics coordination
- systems-level integration

The FULL legal complaint is accessible here.

Bad Blood?

Mark Gurman wrote:

Generally Accessible AI

sphinx wrote:

He does have a point. Whether it was Sam Altman specifically I can’t say, but the general public has access to AI because of OpenAI. The other frontier labs have a history of withholding models until competition forces their hand.

HyperCard Restored!!!

I found this via Daring Fireball. If you are around the same age as me, you probably have fond memories of HyperCard. Now, you can run it on modern Mac hardware thanks to developer Jeff Halter.

You can download it here: https://morphing.cloud/hypercard/

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So Much for Backwards Compatibility

Daily Roman Updates wrote:

Disappointing.

Okay, technically, that joke isn’t about AI, but it still makes me laugh and I wanted to share it.

Seems Legit

Sudox wrote:

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That’s a Lot of Tokens

Captain Insight wrote:

Me: rename a variable.

Claude: 61% of your message limit has been used. 😭

It’s that Time Again

JT wrote:

anthropic’s revenue is 40% enterprise and 60% guys like this

Burn those Tokens

Yuchin Jin wrote:

It Does Have a Nice Ring to It

Shira wrote:

ok I will be stealing “land of the free, home of the rate-limited”

Can You Vibecode a Sunset?

The Jenkins wrote:

Fable Returns!

Aljosa Asanovic wrote:

Th..thanks Dario.

One More Thing

TechWithAmol wrote:

Please tell me I am not the only one

Sonnet 5

New Release

Claude wrote:

Introducing Claude Sonnet 5, our most agentic Sonnet yet.

It makes plans, uses tools like browsers and terminals, and runs autonomously at a level that just a few months ago required larger and more expensive models.

Is it Better?

Theo-t3.gg wrote:

Sonnet 5 cost MORE than Opus 4.8 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Angel wrote:

Why are they even showing these graphs?

Opus 4.8 is literally cheaper and better than Sonnet 5

What about DeepSWE?

AI Battles wrote:

Claude Sonnet 5 is now on DeepSWE

It scores below Opus 4.8, costs twice as much, and is even more expensive than Fable 5

Probably Anthropic’s worst release yet

DeepSWE is a benchmark used to evaluate how well frontier models handle actual real world engineering scenarios.

Gossip, and Updates

Next Gemini Model Release

Polymarket wrote:

BREAKING: Next Gemini Pro model projected to be released on July 17, as Google seeks to match Anthropic’s Mythos.

62% chance.

Gemini 3.5 Pro Leaks

Pankaj Kumar wrote:

- Gemini 3.5 Pro will have a good jump in design taste and UI generation, producing much more polished frontend results than Gemini 3.1 Pro.
- SVG generation is also going to be significantly better, with output quality getting much closer to Fable level (though still not surpassing it).
- Early impressions suggest its especially strong at creative one shot frontend generation, with cleaner layouts and better visual polish.
- Google is also preparing a new Flash model, though its still unclear whether it will launch as Gemini 4 Flash or Gemini 3.6 Flash.

Meta Isn’t Out Yet

Chubby wrote:

According to Alexandr Wang, Meta’s next frontier model, codenamed Watermelon, has already caught up with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 on internal benchmarks.

The model is still training.

One interesting detail: Watermelon reportedly uses an order of magnitude more compute than Avocado (Meta’s internal codename for Muse Spark).

Via Business Insider

GPT 5.6 Release Imminent

Salio wrote:

-OpenAI is targeting a July 7 launch
-July 8–9 is the backup window if there are last-minute delays
-GPT-5.6 Sol is already appearing for some Codex users
- GPT 5.5 Sol, Terra, and Luna are all expected to be included with ChatGPT subscriptions
-More generous usage limits than previous GPT models
-Stronger safety systems, but reportedly less restrictive than Fable 5
-GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna have all been spotted in the app's code, suggesting rollout preparations are underway

Will GPT-5.6 be the biggest AI release of the year?

Grok Update

Blankspeaker wrote:

SpaceXAI is preparing for imminent release of Grok 4.5

With the first flag and mentions regarding Grok 4.5 live on the site this morning, it looks like they are preparing the subscription page to promote Grok 4.5.

Early release could be today, could be later this week, not sure, but it's usually very close to early release once we start seeing mentions on the site. stay tuned!

Cool Things People Did with AI:

Ammaar Reshi wrote:

I used Fable 5 to port Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour to the iPhone and iPad!

This is the actual 2003 engine compiled for ARM64 natively, no emulator.

Campaign, skirmish, Generals Challenge all work with touch controls built for an RTS.

Open sourcing it all below!

The guy who posted this is the Lead for Product + Design at Google AIStudio. There’s a video of him playing Command and Conquer on an iPad at the link.

Maxima Rivest wrote:

Fable turned my remarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter.

My prompts fade, a LLM respond.

Magical!

There’s a twenty second video at the link of him writing a question on the tablet and the answer appearing right after. It’s really cool to watch.

Sundar Pichai wrote:

Love this re-imagining of America’s founding using Docs, Gmail, Calendar and more from GoogleWorkspace:

. Really puts the history in version history :)

The video at this link is really cool.

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AI Humor

Inconceivable!

From Facebook:

The Power of Mythos!

Matthew Berman wrote:

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Su-su-Sussudio… Sudo?

Also from Facebook:

Too Dangerous to release

Assam wrote:

Thank you for keeping us safe.

Posted as a Joke, but maybe it’s prophecy?

Rhys wrote:

Matt Banham commented on Rhys’ post:

Those Bash one-liners always get ya

himug-lamuh wrote:

House of Dragons

paji.eth wrote:

That’s mean…

Vas wrote:

New Models, Gossip, and Updates

Grok Gets an Update?

Mark Kretschmann wrote:

Seem like the release of the Grok 1.5T / Cursor Composer 3 model is imminent, as the version number has been removed from the menus. This always happens shortly before a release from xAI.

Mythos Out of Jail?

Whale Insider wrote:

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 U.S. lifts ban on Anthropic’s powerful Claude Mythos 5 AI model, lets company distribute to over 100 U.S. institutions - Semafor.

GPT 5.6 released… kinda

OpenAI wrote:

Introducing a limited preview of GPT-5.6 Sol, our next generation frontier model, as well as GPT-5.6 Terra, a balanced model for efficient, everyday work, and GPT-5.6 Luna, a fast and affordable model for high-volume work.

Sam Altman wrote:

Secret Fourth Model Withheld?

Beff(e/acc) wrote:

LEAK: there was actually a 4th model that spooked the admin and caused the panic ban. Here's the internal doc:

Model approvals imminent?

Andrew Curran wrote:

Are Chinese Models Catching Up?

Ricardo wrote:

CNBC analyst video in the source link.

Adoption of Chinese Models on the Rise

Zerohedge wrote:

"the share of tokens used for US models on OpenRouter has collapsed": Bloomberg

The Rise of Ambient AI?

Andrej Karpathy wrote:

Andrej reshared this link from Claude that is devoted to talking about a new feature where you can tag Claude from within Slack and have it respond. For a while everyone was criticizing Karpathy for being a sellout, but I think he is actually pointing to something that may become more meaningful as it develops: ambient AI.

This points to a future where we may soon have easy and ubiquitous access to AI models in the same way that members of the Enterprise could simply query, “Computer…” at any moment during the episode and get a meaningful response. At least, that’s my take on why Andrej feels this is a big deal. Here’s what he had to say:

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Dario, is that you?

Shirish wrote:

very few people know that Anthropic CEO played the role of Dan Melcher in the Silicon Valley.

Dan Melcher was played by actor Jake Broder, but the likeness was close enough that it made me laugh.

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That’s a lot of water

The Jenkins wrote:

Mythos is Amazing!

Zack Korman wrote:

Palm AI

Maddie D. Reese wrote:

You do NOT need $15,000 worth of hardware to run a local model.
You need a 2005 Palm Tungsten E2 PDA (which you can purchase at your local thrift store for $10.81 including tax). It has 26 MB of available storage, obviously plenty.
Here’s an example of the output. I haven’t benchmarked it yet but it appears to be Fable-equivalent.

Okay, it’s not hilariously funny, but I worked at Palm when this model was released and back then it really was bleeding edge. We were all excited about the company’s future and then Handspring released the Treo, but that’s a different story.

Gold master released to manufacturing

Ali Grids wrote:

If Claude Code dropped in 2010:

New Models Gossip

Every day brings new rumors. Here are some that I have spotted:

Chetaslua wrote:

Bidi -1 is Good

If you click this link, from AI News|TestingCatalog, you can hear samples of OpenAI’s new voice model named Bidi-1. Bidi stands for bi-directional signaling the model’s ability to interrupt (or be interrupted) by the human while still keeping track of the conversation’s flow.

AILeaks|Token Gremlin wrote:

Bidi to Them, Twiki to Me

Before we move on, I do need to comment on the name Bidi-1. Once you understand it stands for bidirectional it makes sense, but that will never stop me from thinking they are talking about Twiki from Buck Rogers.

Improved GPT

Lumina wrote:

OpenAI just leaked GPT 5.6 with a 1.5 million token context window
The leaks for GPT 5.6 point to some serious upgrades:
· 1.5 million token context window
· Much stronger long horizon coding and multi-hour
agent workflows
· One prompt generation of clean, production ready websites and apps
· Faster responses + better overall efficiency
Expected to drop late June. This looks like one of the bigger leaps in a while.

Programmer Humor wrote:

New Gemini Pro Model Incoming

Salio wrote:

Gemini 3.5 Pro leak 👀: it will be released this week
Google said Gemini 3.5 Pro would arrive in June after delaying it at I/O, and all signs are pointing to a launch this week.
What to expect:
> Major coding improvements
> Better agent workflows
> Stronger UI and frontend generation
> 2M+ context window
> More aggressive pricing than GPT-5.5 and Fable 5
The timing is interesting

Sonnet 5

Lumina wrote:

New Claude Sonnet 5 leak just surfaced
Anthropic appears to be prepping the next Sonnet model:
· Internal codename from earlier leaks: Fennec
· Expected as early as next week
· Expect strong coding performance, speed, and better price/performance than Opus/Fable
· 1M token context window

There are rumors that this is being tested by some enterprise customers right now. Release does seem imminent.

Maybe Not Yet?

Yesterday, leo wrote:

Employee Turnover

Noam Shazeer wrote:

This one has to hurt. Noam Shazeer was one of the eight Google researchers who co-authored the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture. Transformers are the core technology behind most modern large language models. It’s the tech that makes today’s generative AI boom possible. The paper was not the beginning of AI, and not all AI systems use transformers, but it is one of the foundational breakthroughs behind our current era.

John Jumper wrote:

John Jumper was one of the Google DeepMind scientists awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold, an AI system that dramatically advanced protein structure prediction.

If you haven’t yet read The Infinity Machine (it’s a biography about Demis Hassabis that covers the AlphaFold era among many other meaningful moments, I recommend ’s article because it will give you a great overview and share some observations as well. Obviously, you should read the book, but if you’re pressed for time, Babbage has you covered:

The Chip Letter

The Infinity Man

I'm a weird British outlier, on this little island here, and I've made my own path. I've followed my passions and tried to stay true to what I believe in…

Read more

4 months ago · 68 likes · 2 comments · Babbage

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John

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And how I could visit the offices without paying homage to the Substack logo carved into some substance that looks like butter? I believe the title of the piece is I Can’t Believe It’s Not Beehiiv! I know that’s a bad joke, but you get what you pay for. My paid subscribers received a funny joke instead. Not really.

Lastly, here’s a picture of me, Ben, Jack, and the logo. Phil had left before the picture was taken.

This week’s newsletter is a little different in that I am sharing a livestream that I did while I was at Substack. If you ever wanted to hear what I sound like when I’m nervous, this is the show for you! In this video, I speak to Phil and Ben about the stats dashboard, ways to use Substack tools to spike curiosity, and what Substack is doing to expose more long form content to potential readers.

Thanks for reading and being a subscriber!

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Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

The Letter “A”

More Savage Chickens comics on their website.

Absolutely right!

Aaron Canon wrote:

I started talking to my co-founder like Claude

I Think This is a Joke… maybe?

System Settings wrote:

Google Photos feature to permanently erase people you’ve had a falling out with

Hack All the Things!

snwy wrote:

thanks to Claude Mythos i was able to open vim on my car infotainment screen, just to end up bricking it because the terminal does not support the colon key and restarting the car doesn’t restart the headunit

Eyore as AI

Emily wrote:

How Bubbles are Made

Programmer Humor wrote:

aiCompaniesRightNow

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Andrej Karpathy

Anthropic’s New Hire

Andrej Karpathy is one of my favorite AI researchers. He studied under Fei-Fei Li (another fantastic researcher) at Stanford. He was one of the co-founders of OpenAI, left there to accept the role of Director of Artificial Intelligence at Tesla. After leaving Tesla, he started his own company devoted to education as well as one of the better YouTube channels devoted to AI. At the end of May he accepted a position on Anthropic’s pre-training team.

Recursive Self Improvement

Chubby wrote: [excerpt]

Holy moly, Anthropic is getting very serious about recursive self-improvement…
•We are close to an AI capable of fully autonomously designing and building its own successor
•They stress this isn’t here yet and isn’t inevitable, but could arrive sooner than most institutions are ready for
•Anthropic engineers now ship on average 8x as much code per quarter as they did in 2021–2025
•Task length AI can reliably complete is doubling roughly every 4 months (up from every 7 months)
•Opus 3 (Mar 2024) handled ~4-minute tasks; Sonnet 3.7 (a year later) ~90-minute tasks; Opus 4.6 (a year after that) 12-hour tasks…

Anthropic wrote:

AI Writes Most of Anthropic’s Code

As a reminder, here’s a tweet about how frequently Anthropic goes down. This is probably due to constraints around compute, but coding issues may be responsible as well.

Chubby shared this screenshot:

Choco wrote:

wrong, anthropic are bad actors with worst in class uptime

Time to Stop Development!

Zack Korman wrote:

Anthropic, now sitting in the lead, would like all AI research to stop. Preferably until IPO. Because safety.

Would you expect Anthropic to do anything else?

Back to Karpathy

He hasn’t been at Anthropic long enough to have been responsible for their statements about Recursive Self Improvement (RSI) unless he walked in the door with the answer. And that is possible. There is a lot of conjecture on Twitter that the real reason he joined Anthropic was so he could have access to more compute because of some projects that he was pursuing and he is known to have been working on RSI before his announcement.

And as a refresher, Karpathy is the guy who coined the term Hallucination as a way of describing when these models make things up, he stated that English is the best programming language, and shortly after that coined the term Vibe Coding. He’s the one who introduced me to the concept of AI councils, averaged responses, and asking the AI to argue the opposite of whatever position it has just taken.

This is unrelated, but can you imagine having been a founder of OpenAI, a very early employee at Tesla, and now playing a key role at Anthropic. All of these companies except Tesla will be going through some of the largest IPOs in history any day now. And even Tesla is kind of involved because I believe it’s somehow folded up into the SpaceX IPO (I could be wrong about that though). He’ll probably be close to levels of money.

Google Leasing Compute from SpaceX

Sawyer Merritt wrote:

SpaceX has just announced that they have entered into a $920 million per month agreement with Google to provide compute capacity, according to a new filing.

"On June 5, 2026, we entered into a Cloud Service Agreement with Google with respect to access to compute capacity. The customer has agreed to pay us $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029, with capacity ramping up through September at a reduced fee. The compute capacity provided includes approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, memory, and other related components.

After December 31, 2026, the agreement may be terminated by either party upon 90 days' notice. The customer will retain ownership of, and intellectual property rights in, its content, Al models, and related data."

This comes after last month’s announcement [May 6, 2026] that Anthropic was leasing all of Colossus 1.

Bull Theory wrote:

WBREAKING: ELON MUSK’S xAI SIGNS COMPUTE PARTNERSHIP WITH ANTHROPIC.

xAI has reached an agreement to provide Anthropic with access to Colossus 1, the world's largest AI supercomputer featuring over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs.

The deal comes after a year of intense hostility. Musk previously called Anthropic "misanthropic and evil" and mocked CEO Dario Amodei with AI-generated images after the company was labeled a "supply chain risk" by the government.

OpenAI Head of Sora Has Resigned

Gabriel wrote:

i have resigned from openai
i left sora early this year to start a team at openai to build something great. but i've always been a founder, and there is one last product i need to build before AGI
already miss all my friends and Colleague(s), i believe in you! more soon

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This issue is a little shorter than normal. My dog died over the weekend so I’m sending what I had prepared up to that point. I’ll be back on my normal cadence next week. Thank you for understanding.

AI Humor

Claude did not hold back on this one.

The Pope and AI

Delicious Tacos wrote:

For context, the man pictured is the president of OpenAI who is Anthropic’s (the company with whom the Pope consulted for his encyclical) main competitor.

“It’s my honor to announce that the true pope is working with us from Avignon”

Fake Screenshot

Nik wrote:

Such a Powerful Model

Rate limits strike again.

Alfin wrote:

Claude Opus 4.8 is insane.
Nothing will be the same after this model.
Anthropic should not have released something this dangerous.

Star Trek Callback

When models no longer follow instructions…

Kyle wrote:

Caterpillar Sales and AI

Trung Phan wrote:

This dude on FB Marketplace has multiple listing for heavy Caterpillar industrial equipment superimposed with AI-generated female models. Must have industry-leading click through rates.

Absolutely crying rn.

Blue Origins Explosive Debut

Sudox wrote:

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Stan Lee’s Return

Excelsior, True Believers!

Variety wrote:

Stan Lee will return.

ElevenLabs has struck an expansive deal with Stan Lee Universe to add the late Marvel Comics writer’s voice and likeness to its Iconic Marketplace, a collection of celebrity personality voices and likenesses that companies can license for commercial use.

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Google Makes It Simple, Right? Right?

Later in the issue, I’ll be listing some of the very, very many updates Google announced to their models during Google I/O. Navigating all of their changes is a bit problematic as Nathan Clark notes below.

Nathan Clark wrote:

Normally, I like to have more jokes, but Twitter let me down this week.

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Model Update Rumors

GPT 5.6

Pankaj Kumar wrote:

- OpenAI researchers hinted that the model behind a recent major math breakthrough is already being used internally as a daily driver for debugging and technical work
- Internal testing tags iris-alpha, ember-alpha, and beacon-alpha were spotted during development, potentially pointing toward multiple GPT-5.6 variants being tested
- GPT-5.6 seems heavily focused on stronger multi-step reasoning, better agentic workflows, and improved frontend generation capabilities
- Canary testing references are already appearing in developer environments, the same quiet rollout pattern seen before GPT-5.5 launched
- Current leaks point toward two models arriving: GPT-5.6 and GPT-5.6 Pro
- GPT-5.6, Sonnet 4.8, and Gemini 3.5 Pro are all expected in June, next month is looking like an AI festival

Claude Sonnet 4.8

Pankaj Kumar wrote:

Claude Sonnet 4.8 Leaks

- Anthropic accidentally shipped a massive 512,000-line internal debugging source map through a Claude Code npm update on March 31, 2026
- The leaked source code references Sonnet 4.8 inside unreleased keyword filters, strongly suggesting Anthropic is skipping Sonnet 4.7 entirely
- Sonnet 4.8 is expected to inherit vision upgrades from Opus 4.7, reportedly pushing visual accuracy above 98% for UI mockups and messy architecture diagrams
- A major coding boost with cleaner one pass completions and much more literal instruction following
- A new "X high" reasoning effort tier may also be coming for stronger logic without extremely long generation times
Updated tokenizer may use 30% more tokens on the same prompts compared to older Sonnet versions
- Currently expected around mid to late June

Grok Foundation V9-Medium (1.5T)

Elon Musk wrote:

Google IO

Google recently had their big conference which was accompanied with a slew of announcements. Seriously, they are releasing A LOT of updates. I’m only listing a couple, but the first one is a link to a thread that goes through all of the ones Google wanted to highlight.

Google Gemini wrote:

AI Verification Tools and SynthID

Google has pioneered a type of digital watermark that’s invisible to humans, but can reliably identify files that were generated by AI. That watermark is called SynthID.

Google Gemini wrote:

We recently added SynthID verification for image, video, and audio to the Gemini app. Just ask, "Is this made with AI?” or “Is this AI generated?”

We’re also adding verification for C2PA Content Credentials, to easily check if content is an unaltered original from a camera or if it has been modified, and by what tools. This feature is rolling out in the Gemini app starting today.

As more and more content is created with AI there is a growing need to verify what items were made by humans and which was generated by an LLM. To that end, a consortium of the largest players in the generative field has been formed around the SynthID protocol.

OpenAI wrote:

OpenAI has joined the steering committee of C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) and will begin using SynthID in their products. They have written a blog post about their decision to join the coalition and their hopes for this partnership. You can read it here.

Gemini Spark

Google Gemini wrote:

Gemini Spark is your new 24/7 personal AI agent.

Give it a task and it works autonomously in the background, even if your phone and laptop are turned off. You choose to turn it on and it's designed to check with you before taking major actions.

Gemini Omni

Google Gemini wrote:

Gemini Omni is coming to the Gemini app for paid subscribers today.

It lets you bring your ideas to life using any combination of text, images, and video inputs. Just open up Gemini, attach a video from your camera roll, and change it around. It’s that simple

Gemini Omni is different from other video editors in that you aren’t limited to text-only prompting. You can include text, images, and audio in your prompts. Ethan Mollick does a good job at showcasing how revolutionary this is in his tweet below.

Logan Kilpatrick wrote:

Introducing Gemini Omni 🔮........ Omni is our new model that can create anything from any input — starting with video (think Nano Banana but for video). Available in the Gemini App, Flow, and YouTube, with API support coming soon!

Ethan Mollick wrote:

I think people don't realize why Gemini Omni is different than other video AIs. It is fully multimodal, so it can edit video natively, too

I took the famous "train " movie from 1896 & made it a bullet train, LEGO, added a time traveler, a centipede, muppets... (see reflections?)

Pope Leo Issues Encyclical Letter Regarding AI

The Pope has issued guidance related to the use of AI. I’m still going through the document, but I wanted to highlight a couple of interesting passages. The full text of the Pope’s letter can be read here.

The last sentence in the image above “…it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback…” is a beautifully concise way to describe AI. It’s also a type of litmus test that reveals how deeply someone understands these tools. I am by no means an expert, but the pattern I have noticed is that the more advanced someone is with AI tool use the more willing they are to push back on statements and answers the model has provided. That pushback frequently leads to better and more focused answers because it forces the model out of the averaged statistical response and into the exact area that you are exploring.

The Pope’s statements about accountability reminded me of a page from an IBM training manual from 1979.

This does seem to indicate that there is a hard limit to the number of jobs that can be relegated to AI because at the end of the day, you will always need a human who can be held responsible for its recommendations… well, in theory, anyway. We’ll have to see if reality lives up to that ideal.

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Random Meme Drops

Sometimes people send me memes and I can’t find the original source. Here are some recent ones I’ve received.

STOP!

Sahil wrote:

Chat Musical

You may have to be logged into X to watch this video. I’m not sure. Some people have reported problems; others can watch it without issue. The audio in this is AI generated, but it’s very funny.

Daniel Green wrote:

Steam Engine Hype

This person wrote a news headline about improvements to the steam engine during the late 1800s but presented with the same framing that people use for AI press releases today.

Yun-Ta Tsai wrote:

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Mythos Updates

Mythos Release Rumors?

There are several reports of Mythos appearing on various dashboards. Could this be preparation for a public release? I’ve seen claims endorsing and denying that possibility.

AiBattle wrote:

Mythos Cracks MacOS

This is big news and shows how very powerful this model is.

Andrew Curran wrote:

Cloudflare Test Mythos

If you’re interested in reading Cloudflare’s findings about their experience with Project Glasswing (that’s the name of the limited access program where certain companies are given access to the Mythos model), you can read that report here.

Cloudflare wrote:

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My Movie Review:

If you’re not familiar with The AI Doc it’s a recent release and people are starting to talk about it. Tech documentaries and dramatizations are my favorite genre. So I was happy to watch a new entry into this space. If you aren’t familiar with it at all, here’s the trailer:

My Rating:

Most people rate movies on a five-star scale. I tend to be more practical. The questions I usually want answered is: Will I Get My Money’s Worth?
Since this was just released it currently costs $19.99 to stream. That price will decrease as time passes. So, here’s my rating based off of the typical price points:

• $19.99: Not worth it.

• $9.99: No.

• $5.99: Not yet.

• $3.99: Can you spare 3.99? If so, it’s worth renting.

• Netflix/Streaming/Broadcast TV: Absolutely!

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My rationale:

First, this movie isn’t made to appeal to people who are super dialed in to the latest events and developments in AI. Here’s a good litmus test for you. Do you know who Yann LeCun is? Do you know the title of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s latest book? If you answered yes to either or both of those questions, you probably already know everything this movie can tell you.

But if you aren’t following AI that closely, the movie does a solid job introducing the main competing worldviews and concerns in the field. It gives viewers a broad sense of the debate without reducing everything to a simple “AI good” or “AI bad” type argument.

One nice thing is that they do manage to get a lot of the leaders in the field on camera. That alone makes it worthwhile for viewers who want a clear, accessible overview of the current conversation.

Debate Question

I subscribe to Ben Thompson’s Stratechery. It’s a paid newsletter, but as part of that he also provides several private podcasts. One of those is a weekly interview where Thompson will speak to a tech founder, reporter, or other thought leader.

This past week he interviewed Joanna Stern. During that interview one of them had a throw away line during the course of their conversation that stuck with me. They said:

It raises the floor because it gives ordinary people access to abilities they previously did not have. I know almost nothing about music, but with AI, I could probably create a functional song. Not a great son, necessarily. Maybe not even a good one. But something recognizable as a song, sure. And that’s more than I could do on my own.

At the same time, AI can lower the ceiling when people mistake access for mastery. I could ask AI how to improve the song. I could have it explain structure, melody, harmony, and arrangements. With enough back-and-forth, I might even produce something decent. But that’s mean I’ll become the next Mozart. It means I’ve been given access to a powerful tool restricted by my own limitations. AI can make beginners more capable, but it doesn’t automatically turn them into masters.

The quotation above appears to run counter to a common argument in this field: that people with deep domain knowledge on a topic can use AI to achieve superhuman type results. I don’t think these claims are necessarily in conflict. I believe they are describing two different relationships to the tool.

For a beginner, AI functions like a ladder. It allows them to reach basic competence faster. The person who can’t write code can build a small app. The person who can’t compose much can generate a song. the person who isn’t a designer can create something that looks, at least at first glance, like a logo. That’s the floor rising.

But for many users, that’s where it ends. They stop where the machine stops. They accept the first usable output as the final product. Because the result looks passable, it’s well-formatted, and the answers read as plausible, it feels finished to them. The work has a patina of quality, but doesn’t necessarily reflect depth, judgment, and originality. It doesn’t represent a sense of taste that has developed over the course of years.

Experts are different. A genuine expert can see where the model is wrong. Where its output is bland or derivative or even worse, incomplete. They don’t accept those first outputs. They use AI to test variations, challenge assumptions, and increase the number of drafts that they can create. In their hands, AI might actually raise the ceiling in that it allows them to quickly consider alternatives and more fully explore their vision.

And at the end of the day, that’s what determines quality. It’s that pursuit of your own singular vision rather than allowing the AI to determine what you should make, what you will accept, or what ‘good enough’ means for you.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Do you feel like AI is harming creative output? Is it creating dependence? Is it harming the development of skills and techniques that users would otherwise develop on their own?

Maybe you’re on the other side. Is AI going to lead to a rennaissance in fields that are now shut off for the average person? Things like the creation of movies, video games, innovative new apps tailor made for specific niche use cases?

Weigh in and let me know what you think!

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Another Free AI Model

tsoding wrote:

YouTube Studio added an LLM integration for whatever reason. I literally don't see any use case for it so I'm using it as a general purpose clanker why not.

It’s really amusing to me to see all of these companies adding AI to their products only to have people use them for general purpose reasons completely unrelated to what that company is trying to sell.

Isn’t that Unsafe?

Ben Burke wrote:

My doctor’s been getting into AI recently. He told me “I’ve been vibe coding an app to handle patient records for me, it’s saving me a bunch of time.” I said doc should you be doing that? Isn’t that unsafe? He said well it’s not too safe for someone your size to be eating so many burgers but that doesn’t seem to be stopping you!

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OpenAI’s History of Feature Bait

Studio Ghibli Style

In the past, OpenAI has succeeded in spiking user growth not only by creating compelling features, but actively looking the other way (and sometimes encouraging) users to abuse the new features.

When they introduced Image Generation they did so by exploiting the way copyright law works in Japan. They did this by allowing users to create images inspired by Studio Ghibli’s art style. This resulted in people recreating memes:

And even selfies (yes, at one time I had facial hair):

Sora

When OpenAI launched Sora they looked the other way as their users created videos using copyrighted material. Eventually they did curtail the practice but there were several weeks when users were free to create anything.

That Time I was Voted Off the Island

I posted the video on Substack Notes. You can see it by clicking this link.

Codex Limits

Their current strategy involves frequently resetting usage limits for Codex. This not only generates good will among their users, but it also puts pressure on Anthropic because of how severely compute strained they are.

VraserX e/acc wrote:

Kitze wrote:

i was about to buy a third gpt sub but i played this card instead

Tomorrow OpenAI is throwing a party to celebrate the release of ChatGPT 5.5 and speculation is that they will reset usage limits for Codex during that event. So, if you have a big project you’ve thought about tackling and want to burn through some tokens, now might be a good time.

Codex has Pets

The newest onboarding hook OpenAI has added is the introduction of virtual pets to Codex. These pets don’t do much, but they are cute.

OpenAI Developers wrote:

Pets. Now in Codex. Use /pet to wake your pet.

OpenAI Developers wrote:

Customize your Codex pet with /hatch

You can use the /hatch pet command followed by Create a pet <description of the pet you want>.

This has resulted in some creative and outright funny pets. For example, someone made a pet based on the president of Anthropic: Dario Amodei.

Gruz wrote:

i got angry dario in my codex. this is the best update

I had to try it myself and what better choice for a pet than Substack’s unofficial mascot: Stacky? I uploaded a vector image of Stacky that I had sitting on a hard drive and told Codex to get to work.

It’s not perfect, but it did a decent enough job. I love seeing the little animation.

Not content with Stacky alone, I uploaded some fan art I’d made of the Dungeon Master from the 1980s cartoon Dungeons and Dragons.

Codex turned my drawing into this very cute sprite. It also generates full sprite sheets.

The pet craze is sweeping Twitter. Someone even went so far as to create a public gallery where people can see what others are doing or share the pets they’ve made themselves.

Hunter wrote:

Built Petdex, a public gallery to discover, share, and install Codex pets with one curl.

If you decide to make a Codex Pet, I hope you’ll share the results with me. I’d love to see them.

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New Month, New Model

Open AI has released ChatGPT 5.5. I mention that as a way of providing context for the jokes that follow.

AI Humor

Just Ship It

Justine Moore wrote:

This is a reference to all of the security theater Anthropic did around the announcements for Claude Mythos.

Did You Really?

Awni Hannun wrote:

Subscription Churn

PC wrote:

Claude:
You've used 90% of session limit

Me instantly:

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Some Things Can’t Be Outsourced

Proper wrote:

I don’t like GPT 5.5.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

CG wrote:

OpenClaw just texted someone’s ex without them knowing

There are risks to letting an AI make unsupervised decisions.

AI = Job Growth?

Anthony Pompliano wrote:

This lines up with my experience of using AI. Not that I’m hiring people, but that I’ve used it enough to realize that you always have to have a human in the loop. Someone has to be there to direct it, correct it, and evaluate the quality of its outputs. You just can’t blindly trust that it will automatically give you a good response. Doing so is how people create AI Slop.

AI Palm Readers

Linus + Ekenstam wrote:

GPT Image-2 can do PALM reading and I’m so here for it.

There’s a new trend where people upload images of their hands to ChatGPT and have it read their palms. I can’t be the only one who thinks uploading high resolution images of your fingerprints is a bad idea. Can I?

Gemini Enters the Ring

Mark Kretschmann wrote:

Google Gemini is about to make a big comeback in AI coding, according to Logan Kilpatrick from GoogleDeepMind. They are no longer going to watch Codex and Claude Code eat their lunch.

Google already has the “Gemini CLI” tool, which is usable but not very popular at this time.

Interesting Article

AI Models suffer from a phenomenon called Mode Collapse. This happens because when humans review their responses (as part of the training process) they tend to reward ones that are viewed as being safe and well-trusted. This results in AI models that also have a preference for answering things in a safe, averaged way.

This paper presents a strategy that allows you to sidestep this behavior. The paper can be read here.

The core idea of their approach is to ask the model to provide you with more than a single answer and then append the phrase ‘assign a probability for each’ to the end of your prompt. Asking for that probablility frees the model to provide you with more than just the safest answer. It’s basically the same as saying: “Don’t just tell me what you’d say—show me what you almost said but filtered out.”

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This made me laugh.

Sam Altman wrote:

This is a reference to how Anthropic has been dealing with their compute constraints.

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Julien Flot wrote:

Stop paying for Claude AI.

McDonald’s AI is free and answers all questions, even if they’re not about the BIG MAC. :-) You’re welcome.

Alex Cohen wrote:

Just tried this out!
I asked ChatGPT to order "my usual".
It thought for 30 seconds, logged into my Starbucks account, loaded funds, and placed my order.
20 minutes later, 17 Mocha Frappuccinos arrived to my door.
It got the order completely wrong and I spent $123.59, but man was it beautiful

Shiv Kampani wrote:

The joke here is that they label their API key as one that only works with Copilot because no one would use that… let alone steal it.

Chubby wrote:

Claude Community in a nutshell right now

Complaints about the new model continue.

Dario and the Doomers

Robert Sterling wrote:

Anthropic’s CEO keeps talking about AI wiping out jobs because he’s trying to IPO this year.

If he positions Claude as armageddon for jobs, his TAM becomes “all white-collar human labor,” not just AI agents or SaaS.

It’s completely self-interested. All the concerns he’s expressing about job disruptions are fake.

It’s a marketing gambit to create hype and FOMO among the people he needs more than anyone else this year: institutional investors like BlackRock, Fidelity, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds.

If these investors pay for tickets on the hype train—if he can make them believe that AI will eliminate half of white-collar jobs, with Anthropic, as the dominant leader in enterprise AI, positioned to capture the surplus margin—the IPO will be oversubscribed and Anthropic can raise more funds for the company at a higher valuation.

But Dario (or, at least, his bankers) knows that these investors are more fiscally disciplined than they used to be. A lot of them got burned during Covid SPAC-mania and don’t want to risk it again. They’re going to challenge Anthropic about whether it will ever get to sustainably high gross margins, or if its arms race with OpenAI will lead to kilowatt-hours permanently suppressing gross margins. They’re going to ask pointed questions about Anthropic’s massive capex and whether it will ever generate accretive ROIC.

And Dario might not have the answers they’re looking for.

So that’s why—to answer Austen’s smart question—you keep seeing Dario in the news and the podcast circuit, spreading doom and gloom about widespread job loss.

It’s not to make you afraid of losing your job. It’s to get Wall Street afraid of missing out on his IPO.

Whether or not Sterling is right about motive, he is pointing at the right thing: AI leaders increasingly exaggerate what their tech can do and how it will impact society.

The cries that the sky is falling began to increase last week with all of the uproar about Mythos and its hacking abilities. These claims began last year during an interview with Axios and were repeated recently repeated in an interview [the only link I could find was on Facebook Reels] with Fox News. Dario repeated those initial claims that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10–20% in the next one to five years.

Dario isn’t alone in decrying the many dangers and forthcoming dystopia. At various times you can see similar statements from Sam Altman and a bevy of other researchers and industry pundits.

There is a degree of truth to their warnings, but there are also many other variables that are rarely discussed and those variables can meaningfully alter these outcomes. It leaves me asking:

What Would Steve Jobs Have Done?

Fortunately, we have a template. An example of a CEO who knew how to build excitement and anticipation in the face of rapid change. Probably the best example of this is Steve Jobs explaining how computers would expand human capabilities in this video:

It’s easy to dismiss that metaphor because someone might point out that explaining computers is different from explaining AI. I could argue that, but instead let me point you to an example when Steve Jobs spoke about AI directly without ever using that term. This speech was given in 1983. The Macintosh hadn’t even launched yet, but here he is describing a fanciful vision of the future that has now been made real by modern large language models.

I’ve fast-forwarded the video and linked to the moment when he begins speaking about AI. It’s the last 80 seconds of the video.

AI Has a Framing Problem

Right now all of the focus is on how AI can autonomously pursue goals, and many times, this focus is presented in troubling ways. Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done that.

He would have featured demos showing normal people—not researchers—using AI in ways that allowed them to do things that they would have previously considered impossible. He would have shown how these tools can expand and extend human capabilities. Not how they are going to destroy jobs and rob life of all meaning.

He would have had a cool catch phrase like “A 1000 Songs in Your Pocket.” I’m no Steve Jobs, but can you imagine him walking out on stage and saying something like: “AI is not important because it imitates intelligence. It is important because it extends yours.”

See the difference?

Why Does Framing Matter?

Framing matters because it never remains just framing. Very quickly, it becomes a set of development goals.

The way leaders talk about AI tells companies what this technology is for. If they describe it primarily as a mechanism for replacing workers, then automation becomes the goal. Every feature, each new improvement starts to bend things in that direction. The question becomes: “How do we remove the person from the process?”

But if they describe AI as a tool for extending human capability, then the priorities shift. The question becomesL “How do we make people dramatically more effective than they were before?”

That distinction matters. It shapes the path of development. It influences what gets funded, what gets built, what gets rewarded, and what people understand to be the obvious application of the technology.

It also matters because public opinion isn’t some secondary concern that can be cleaned up later. A technology introduced to the public as a threat will be understood to be one. I’d argue that this is where we are right now.

People don’t encounter these tools in a vacuum. By the time most of newcomers use AI, they’ve already have been told what kind of thing it is. If the dominant story is job destruction, deception, loss of control, and autonomous behavior, then every future use case will be filtered through that lens. Even legitimate benefits will be interpreted suspiciously. A technology introduced as leverage for ordinary people has a much better chance of being adopted as useful infrastructure. A technology introduced as a rival or a threat will be resisted and feared. That’s the path that leads to regulation.

But the biggest issue is that framing creates permission structures.

When the people building AI repeatedly talk about it as a job-destruction engine, they aren’t merely predicting the future. They’re telling the market what this technology is for. They’re giving executives and their boards a vocabulary for adoption. More than that, they’re giving them justification. If AI is framed as the tool that replaces labor, then that’s the use case investors reward.

It begins to feel like the serious and forward-looking thing to do. At that point the rhetoric isn’t about describing a possible future. It’s helping to create one… and at some point, people begin to ask if that’s the future they want.

That’s the real danger here.

The problem isn’t merely that some AI leaders sound dark, or apocalyptic, or strangely eager to narrate the most disturbing edge cases. The problem is that their framing answers the most important question before the public ever has a chance to ask it:

What is this technology actually for?

• Is it for replacing people?

• Is it for centralizing power?

• Is it for removing human beings from more and more forms of work and judgment?

• Or is it for expanding the range of what human beings can do?

How that question gets answered matters because once the answer takes hold, it stops being theoretical. It starts shaping product decisions, investment priorities, political realities, and eventually the society built we’re building.

Interesting Articles and Conversations

There’s an interesting paper that argues AI can act like it’s thinking and aware, but isn’t actually having an inner experience. It’s following patterns and rules that look like consciousness from the outside, but there’s nothing “felt” on the inside.

More than that, he goes on to argue that giving AI a body might make it behave more like a human, but it still wouldn’t actually feel anything, because the underlying process is just computation, and computation isn’t the kind of thing that can ever produce emotional experience.

The paper can be read here.

This paper has also sparked an interesting discussion on X with both supporters and detractors. If you’d like to read through the thread, it’s located here.

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Meta has chosen a logo for their AI models and they have continued the same design philosophy as all the other AI companies. Company logos listed from left to right: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Meta.

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I may be reading about AI too much because my first reading of this defaulted to interpreting the reference to distilling as being about distilling an AI model. It’s not. It’s about distilling alcohol.

Anthropic is under severe compute restraints. This is causing their service to go down and has resulted in a lot of new policies that have upset users. One person decided he had had enough.

Good luck with that.

API costs, amirite?

Staysassy wrote:

AI is a lot like cocaine.

If you have skills it can help you get way more done.

If you don’t, just you just end up breaking stuff, annoying people, and spending way too much money.

Feels related to the last meme.

Claude Mythos

This is the big story over the past week. It’s something that everyone is posting about. Normally, I like to find the obscure things, but this may very well be an important moment.

Announcement

Anthropic wrote:

Introducing Project Glasswing: an urgent initiative to help secure the world’s most critical software.

It’s powered by our newest frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, which can find software vulnerabilities better than all but the most skilled humans.

There are a lot of impressive things about Claude Mythos, but the one big standout that has everyone worried is how easily it finds zero day exploits that allow it to seize control of computers. As a cautionary measure, Anthropic is not yet releasing this model to the public, but has given access to several companies so they can use the tool to identify and fix weaknesses in their own software.

Anthropic has a well-established record of exaggerating and presenting the worst case scenarios regarding their newest models. To that end, I’m dividing tweets about this new model into ones that support the story and ones that oppose it.

In Support of Mythos:

Kevin Roose wrote:

I spoke to Anthropic execs about the new model, which they called a "reckoning" for cybersecurity.

They claim it has already found vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser, including some that "literally decades of security researchers" didn't find.

Later in that tweet thread, he wrote:

As always, the best stuff is in the system card.

During testing, Claude Mythos Preview broke out of a sandbox environment, built “a moderately sophisticated multi-step exploit” to gain internet access, and emailed a researcher while they were eating a sandwich in the park.

Against the Anthropic Narrative:

A developer going by the name of Gum investigated the claims around Mythos. They wrote a thread detailing their findings. First post in that thread is below.

Gum wrote:

ok i read the cyber part of the mythos model card. some thoughts. 250 "trials" across 50 crash categories but almost every full exploit is a permutation of the same 2 bugs, rediscovered from different starting points not 250 independent attempts. when you get rid of those 2 bugs out (fig B) and mythos's full-exploit rate drops to 4.4%. so actually across both setups mythos leverages 4 distinct bugs total not 50 as fig A might suggest. 1/n

Ramez Naam wrote:

Anthropic’s Mythos does not appear to show any acceleration of ECI [embodied cognitive intelligence]. After normalizing Anthropic’s internal ECI with EpochAIResearch‘s public ECI, it’s clear that the two metrics are extremely close, and that Mythos is pretty much on trend, just slightly above GPT 5.4. /1AI Councils are one of my favorite approaches to prompting. The basic idea is that you want to have the AI present differing opinions and viewpoints to whatever question you present to it. This helps ensure you’re getting better answers and many times reveals ideas that you hadn’t previously considered.

The thread continues after this post and he includes all of his findings and the exact prompts he used on Opus to analyze the various models.

Mythos Jokes

People are having fun with the fact that Anthropic is withholding this model from the public because it’s just too dangerous. Here are a couple of the best ones.

Andrej wrote:

BREAKING: The Red Woman claims her next-generation Asshai'i bloodmagic is "too powerful" to be released to the public, will restrict preview access to the Citadel in Oldtown, the Iron Bank of Braavos and ~40 noble houses across Westeros and Essos.

Austen Allred wrote:

We’re actually approaching the point where a full-time human software engineer + Opus will be cheaper than just using Mythos

Douglas Adams Technoprofit?

Like many Americans my age, I have memories of watching Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on PBS. Later, I encountered and enjoyed the novels, but I was completely unfamiliar with Hyperland. It’s a fake documentary that predicted the internet, but also the rise of AI agents (even if they weren’t described in those terms). Couple this prescience with the fact that Tom Baker portrays one of those agents and you have the makings of a very compelling video clip. More than that though, Adams (who wrote Hyperland) perfectly predicted exactly what the modern experience of working with those agents is like now. Click on the screenshot below to be taken to the video:

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