Author name: 9u50fv

Ted Cruz gives up on AI law moratorium, joins 99-1 vote against his own plan

AI, Policy, Senate, ted cruz / 9u50fv / July 1, 2025

Cruz blamed “outside interests”

After the compromise fell apart, the Senate voted 99-1 for Blackburn’s amendment to remove the AI provision from the budget bill. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) cast the only vote against the amendment.

“Cruz ultimately got behind Blackburn’s amendment early Tuesday, acknowledging that ‘many of my colleagues would prefer not to vote on this matter,'” according to The Hill. Cruz said the five-year moratorium had support from President Trump and “protected kids and protected the rights of creative artists, but outside interests opposed that deal.”

However, Blackburn was quoted as saying that they “weren’t able to come to a compromise that would protect our governors, our state legislators, our attorney generals and, of course, House members who have expressed concern over this language… what we know is this—this body has proven that they cannot legislate on emerging technology.”

Cantwell pointed out that many state government officials from both major parties opposed the Cruz plan. “Despite several revisions by its author and misleading assurances about its true impact, state officials from across the country, including 17 Republican Governors and 40 state attorneys general, as well [as] conservative and liberal organizations—from the Heritage Foundation to the Center for American Progress—rallied against the harmful proposal,” Cantwell’s office said.

Cantwell and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) had also filed an amendment to strip the AI moratorium from the bill. Markey said yesterday that “the Blackburn-Cruz so-called compromise is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Despite Republican efforts to hide the true impact of the AI moratorium, the language still allows the Trump administration to use federal broadband funding as a weapon against the states and still prevents states from protecting children online from Big Tech’s predatory behavior.”

Cantwell said at a recent press conference that 24 states last year started “regulating AI in some way, and they have adopted these laws that fill a gap while we are waiting for federal action.” Yesterday, she called the Blackburn/Cruz compromise “another giveaway to tech companies” that “gives AI and social media a brand-new shield against litigation and state regulation.”

Ted Cruz gives up on AI law moratorium, joins 99-1 vote against his own plan Read More »

Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band

AI, AI music, Artificial Intelligence, Spotify, Tech / 9u50fv / July 1, 2025

Making art used to be a uniquely human endeavor, but machines have learned to distill human creativity with generative AI. Whether that content counts as “art” depends on who you ask, but Spotify doesn’t discriminate. A new band called The Velvet Sundown debuted on Spotify this month and has already amassed more than half a million listeners. But by all appearances, The Velvet Sundown is not a real band—it’s AI.

While many artists are vehemently opposed to using AI, some have leaned into the trend to assist with music production. However, it doesn’t seem like there’s an artist behind this group. In less than a month, The Velvet Sundown has released two albums on Spotify, titled “Floating On Echoes” and “Dust and Silence.” A third album is releasing in two weeks. The tracks have a classic rock vibe with a cacophony of echoey instruments and a dash of autotune. If one of these songs came up in a mix, you might not notice anything is amiss. Listen to one after another, though, and the bland muddiness exposes them as a machine creation.

Some listeners began to have doubts about The Velvet Sundown’s existence over the past week, with multiple Reddit and X threads pointing out the lack of verifiable information on the band. The bio lists four members, none of whom appear to exist outside of The Velvet Sundown’s album listings and social media. The group’s songs have been mysteriously added to a large number of user-created playlists, which has helped swell its listener base in a few short weeks. When Spotify users began noticing The Velvet Sundown’s apparent use of AI, the profile had around 300,000 listeners. It’s now over 500,000 in less than a week.

When The Velvet Sundown set up an Instagram account on June 27, all doubts were laid to rest—these “people” are obviously AI. We may be past the era of being able to identify AI by counting fingers, but there are plenty of weird inconsistencies in these pics. In one Instagram post, the band claims to have gotten burgers to celebrate the success of the first two albums, but there are too many burgers and too few plates, and the food and drink are placed seemingly at random around the table. The band members themselves also have that unrealistically smooth and symmetrical look we see in AI-generated images.

Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band Read More »

Android 16 review: Post-hype

android, android 16, Features, Google, Reviews, smartphones, Tech / 9u50fv / June 30, 2025

Competent, not captivating

The age of big, exciting Android updates is probably over.

Android 16 is currently only available for Pixel phones. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Google recently released Android 16, which brings a smattering of new features for Pixel phones, with promises of additional updates down the road. The numbering scheme has not been consistent over the years, and as a result, Android 16 is actually the 36th major release in a lineage that stretches back nearly two decades. In 2008, we didn’t fully understand how smartphones would work, so there was a lot of trial and error. In 2025, the formula has been explored every which way. Today’s smartphones run mature software, and that means less innovation in each yearly release. That trend is exemplified and amplified by Google’s approach to Android 16.

The latest release is perhaps the most humdrum version of the platform yet, but don’t weep for Google. The company has been working toward this goal for years: a world where the average phone buyer doesn’t need to worry about Android version numbers.

A little fun up front

When you install Android 16 on one of Google’s Pixel phones, you may need to check the settings to convince yourself that the update succeeded. Visually, the changes are so minuscule that you’ll only notice them if you’re obsessive about how Android works. For example, Google changed the style of icons in the overview screen and added a few more options to the overview app menus. There are a lot of these minor style tweaks; we expect more when Google releases Material 3 Expressive, but that’s still some way off.

There are some thoughtful UI changes, but again, they’re very minor and you may not even notice them at first. For instance, Google’s predictive back gesture, which allows the previous screen to peek out from behind the currently displayed one, now works with button navigation.

Apps targeting the new API (level 36) will now default to using edge-to-edge rendering, which removes the navigation background to make apps more immersive. Android apps have long neglected larger form factors because Google itself was neglecting those devices. Since the Android 12L release a few years ago, Google has been attempting to right that wrong. Foldable phones have suffered from many of the same issues with app scaling that tablets have, but all big-screen Android devices will soon benefit from adaptive apps. Previously, apps could completely ignore the existence of large screens and render a phone-shaped UI on a large screen.

Advanced Protection is a great addition to Android, even if it’s not the most riveting. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

In Android 16, apps will automatically adapt to larger screens, saving you from having to tinker with the forced aspect ratio tools built into Google and Samsung devices. Don’t confuse this with tablet-style interfaces, though. Just because an app fills the screen, it’s no guarantee that it will look good. Most of the apps we’ve run on the Pixel 9 Pro Fold are still using stretched phone interfaces that waste space. Developers need to make adjustments to properly take advantage of larger screens. Will they? That’s yet another aspect of Android 16 that we hope will come later.

Security has been a focus in many recent Android updates. While not the most sexy improvement, the addition of Advanced Protection in Android 16 could keep many people from getting hit with malware, and it makes it harder for government entities to capture your data. This feature blocks insecure 2G connections, websites lacking HTTPS, and exploits over USB. It disables sideloading of apps, too, which might make some users wary. However, if you know someone who isn’t tech savvy, you should encourage them to enable Advanced Protection when (and if) they get access to Android 16. This is a great feature that Google should have added years ago.

The changes to notifications will probably make the biggest impact on your daily life. Whether you’re using Android or iOS, notification spam is getting out of hand. Every app seems to want our attention, and notifications can really pile up. Android 16 introduces a solid quality-of-life improvement by bundling notifications from each app. While notification bundles were an option before, they were primarily used for messaging, and not all developers bothered. Now, the notification shade is less overwhelming, and it’s easy to expand each block to triage individual items.

Google has also added a new category of notifications that can show progress, similar to a feature on the iPhone. The full notification will include a live updating bar that can tell you exactly when your Uber will show up, for example. These notifications will come first to delivery and rideshare apps, but none of them are working yet. You can get a preview of how these notifications will work with the Android 16 easter egg, which sends a little spaceship rocketing toward a distant planet.

The progress notifications will also have a large status bar chip with basic information visible at all times. Tapping on it will expand the full notification. However, this is also not implemented in the first release of Android 16. Yes, this is a recurring theme with Google’s new OS.

More fun still to come

You may notice that none of the things we’ve discussed in Android 16 are exactly riveting—better security features and cleaner notifications are nice to have, but this is hardly a groundbreaking update. It might have been more exciting were it not for the revamped release schedule, though. This Android 16 release isn’t even the Android 16. There will be a second Android 16 update later in the year, and some of the most interesting features aren’t arriving as part of either one.

Traditionally, Google has released new versions of Android in the fall, around the time new Pixel phones arrive. Android 15, for example, began its rollout in October 2024. Just eight months later, we’re on to Android 16. This is the first cycle in which Google will split its new version into two updates. Going forward, the bigger update will arrive in Q2, and the smaller one, which includes API and feature tweaks, will come at the end of the year.

Google has said the stylish but divisive Material 3 Expressive UI and the desktop windowing feature will come later. They’re currently in testing with the latest beta for Android 16 QPR1, which will become a Pixel Drop in September. It’s easy to imagine that with a single fall Android 16 release, both of these changes would have been included.

In the coming months, we expect to see some Google apps updated with support for Material 3, but the changes will be minimal unless you’re using a phone that runs Google’s Android theme. For all intents and purposes, that means a Pixel. Motorola has traditionally hewed closely to Google’s interface, while Samsung, OnePlus, and others forged their own paths. But even Moto has been diverging more as it focuses on AI. It’s possible that Google’s big UI shakeup will only affect Pixel users.

As for desktop windowing, that may have limited impact, too. On-device windowing will only be supported on tablets—even tablet-style foldables will be left out. We’ve asked Google to explain this decision and will report back if we get more details. Non-tablet devices will be able to project a desktop-style interface on an external display via USB video-out, but the feature won’t be available universally. Google tells Ars that it’s up to OEMs to support this feature. So even a phone that has video-out over USB may not have desktop windowing. Again, Pixels may be the best (or only) way to get Android’s new desktop mode.

The end of version numbers

There really isn’t much more to say about Android 16 as it currently exists. This update isn’t flashy, but it lays important groundwork for the future. The addition of Material 3 Expressive will add some of the gravitas we expect from major version bumps, but it’s important to remember that this is just Google’s take on Android—other companies have their own software interests, mostly revolving around AI. We’ll have to wait to see what Samsung, OnePlus, and others do with the first Android 16 release. The underlying software has been released in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but it will be a few months before other OEMs have updates.

In some ways, boring updates are exactly what Google has long wanted from Android. Consider the era when Android updates were undeniably exciting—a time when the addition of screenshots could be a headlining feature (Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich) or when Google finally figured out how to keep runaway apps from killing your battery (Android 6.0 Marshmallow). But there was a problem with these big tentpole updates: Not everyone got them, and they were salty about it.

During the era of rapid software improvement, it took the better part of a year (or longer!) for a company like Samsung or LG to deploy new Android updates. Google would announce a laundry list of cool features, but only the tiny sliver of people using Nexus (and later Pixel) phones would see them. By the time a Samsung Galaxy user had the new version, it was time for Google to release another yearly update.

This “fragmentation” issue was a huge headache for Google, leading it to implement numerous platform changes over the years to take the pressure off its partners and app developers. There were simple tweaks like adding important apps, including Maps and the keyboard (later Gboard), to the Play Store so they could be updated regularly. On the technical side, initiatives like Project Mainline made the platform more modular so features could be added and improved outside of major updates. Google has also meticulously moved features into Play Services, which can deliver system-level changes without an over-the-air update (although there are drawbacks to that).

Android I/O sign — Android version numbers hardly matter anymore—it’s just Android. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The overarching story of Android has been a retreat from monolithic updates, and that means there’s less to get excited about when a new version appears. Rather than releasing a big update rife with changes, Google has shown a preference for rolling out features via the Play Store and Play Services to the entire Android ecosystem. Experiences like Play Protect anti-malware, Google Play Games, Google Cast, Find My Device, COVID-19 exposure alerts, Quick Share, and myriad more were released to almost all Google-certified Android devices without system updates.

As more features arrive in dribs and drabs via Play Services and Pixel Drops, the numbered version changes are less important. People used to complain about missing out on the tentpole updates, but it’s quieter when big features are decoupled from version numbers. And that’s where we are—Android 15 or Android 16—the number is no longer important. You won’t notice a real difference, but the upshot is that most phones get new features faster than they once did. That was the cost to fix fragmentation.

Boring updates aren’t just a function of rearranging features. Even if all the promised upgrades were here now, Android 16 would still barely move the needle. Phones are now mature products with established usage paradigms. It’s been almost 20 years since the age of touchscreen smartphones began, and we’ve figured out how these things should work. It’s not just Android updates settling into prosaic predictability—Apple is running low on paradigm shifts, too. The release of iOS 26 will add some minor improvements to a few apps, and the theme is getting more transparent with the controversial “Liquid Glass” UI. And that’s it.

Until there’s a marked change in form factors or capability, these flat glass slabs will look and work more or less as they do now (with a lot more AI slop, whether you like it or not). If you have a recent non-Pixel Android device, you’ll probably get Android 16 in the coming months, but it won’t change the way you use your phone.

Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he’s written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards.

Android 16 review: Post-hype Read More »

Ars reflects on Apollo 13 turning 30

Apollo13, culture, Entertainment, film anniversaries, films, NASA, Science, space history, Staff source, Universal Pictures / 9u50fv / June 29, 2025

Ron Howard’s 1995 love letter to NASA’s Apollo program takes a few historical liberties but it still inspires awe.

Credit: Universal Pictures

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13, director Ron Howard’s masterful love letter to NASA’s Apollo program in general and the eponymous space mission in particular. So we’re taking the opportunity to revisit this riveting homage to American science, ingenuity, and daring.

(Spoilers below.)

Apollo 13 is a fictional retelling of the aborted 1970 lunar mission that became a “successful failure” for NASA because all three astronauts made it back to Earth alive against some pretty steep odds. The film opens with astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) hosting a watch party in July 1969 for Neil Armstrong’s historic first walk on the Moon. He is slated to command the Apollo 14 mission, and is ecstatic when he and his crew—Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) and Fred Haise (Bill Paxton)—are bumped to Apollo 13 instead. His wife, Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan) is more superstitious and hence less thrilled: “It had to be 13.” To which her pragmatic husband replies, “It comes after 12.”

A few days before launch, Mattingly is grounded because he was exposed to the measles and replaced with backup Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), who is the only one happy about the situation. But Lovell and Haise rebound from the disappointment and the launch goes off without a hitch. The public, alas, just isn’t interested in what they think has become routine. But the mission is about to become anything but that.

During a maintenance task to stir the oxygen tanks, an electrical short causes one of the tanks to explode, with the other rapidly venting its oxygen into space. The crew has less than an hour to evacuate the command module Odyssey into the lunar module Aquarius, using it as a lifeboat. There is no longer any chance of landing on the Moon; the new mission is to keep the astronauts alive long enough to figure out how to bring them safely home. That means overcoming interpersonal tensions, freezing conditions, dwindling rations, and unhealthy CO2 levels, among other challenges, as well as taking on a pulse-pounding manual course correction with no navigational computer. (Spoiler alert: they make it!)

The Apollo 13 crew: Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), and Fred Haise (Bill Paxton). Universal Pictures

The film is loosely based on Lovell’s 1994 memoir, Lost Moon. While Lovell initially hoped Kevin Costner would portray him, Howard ultimately cast Hanks in the role, in part because the latter already had extensive knowledge of the Apollo program and space history. Hanks, Paxton, and Bacon all went to US Space Camp to prepare for their roles, participating in astronaut training exercises and flying on the infamous “Vomit Comet” (the KC-135) to experience simulated weightlessness. Howard ultimately shot most of the weightless scenes aboard the KC-135 since recreating those conditions on a soundstage and with CGI would have been prohibitively expensive.

In fact, Howard didn’t rely on archival mission footage at all, insisting on shooting his own footage. That meant constructing realistic spacecraft interiors—incorporating some original Apollo materials—and reproducing exactly the pressure suits worn by astronauts. (The actors, once locked in, breathed air pumped into the suits just like the original Apollo astronauts.) The Mission Control set at Universal Studios was so realistic that one NASA consultant kept looking for the elevator when he left each day, only to remember he was on a movie set.

The launch sequence was filmed using miniature models augmented with digital image stitching. Ditto for the splashdown, in which actual parachutes and a prop capsule were tossed out of a helicopter to shoot the scene. Only the exhaust from the attitude control thrusters was generated with CGI. A failed attempt at using CGI for the in-space urine dump was scrapped in favor of just spraying droplets from an Evian bottle.

It all paid off in the end. Apollo 13 premiered on June 30, 1995, to critical acclaim and racked up over $355 million globally at the box office. It was nominated for nine Oscars and won two—Best Film Editing and Best Sound—although it lost Best Picture to another Hanks film, Forrest Gump. (We can’t quite believe it either.) And the film has stood the test of time, capturing the essence of America’s early space program for posterity. A few Ars staffers shared their thoughts on Apollo 13‘s enduring legacy.

Failure should be an option

White Team Flight Director Gene Krantz (Ed Harris) insists, “We are not losing those men!” Universal Pictures

The tagline for Apollo 13 is “Failure is not an option.” But this is a bit of Hollywood magic. It turns out that NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz never said the line during the actual Apollo 13 mission to the Moon, or the subsequent efforts to save the crew.

Instead the line was conceived after the script writers, Al Reinert and Bill Broyles, interviewed Kranz at his home Texas, south of Johnson Space Center. They were so taken by the notion it became synonymous with the film and with Kranz himself, one of NASA most storied flight directors. He has lived with the line in the decades since, and embraced it by using it as the title of his autobiography. Ever since then the public has associated the idea that NASA would never accept failure with the space agency.

Of course it is great that the public believes so strongly in NASA. But this also turned out to be a millstone around the agency’s neck. This is not really the fault of Kranz. However, as the public became unaccepting of failure, so did Congress, and NASA’s large programs became intolerant of failure. This is one of the reasons why the timeline and cost of NASA’s rockets and spacecraft and interplanetary missions have ballooned. There are so many people looking for things that could possibly go wrong, the people actually trying to build hardware and fly missions are swamped by requirements.

This is why companies like SpaceX, with an iterative design methodology that accepts some level of failure in order to go more quickly, have thrived. They have moved faster, and at significantly less cost, than the government. I asked Kranz about this a few years ago, the idea that NASA (and its Congressional paymasters) should probably be a little more tolerant of failure.

“Space involves risk, and I think that’s the one thing about Elon Musk and all the various space entrepreneurs: they’re willing to risk their future in order to accomplish the objective that they have decided on,” he told me. “I think we as a nation have to learn that, as an important part of this, to step forward and accept risk.”

—Eric Berger

The perfect gateway drug

“Gentlemen, that’s not good enough.” Universal Pictures

Technically I am a child of the ’60s (early Gen-X), but I was far too young to grasp the significance of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, or just how impressive NASA’s achievement really was. The adults made us sit around the TV in our PJs and seemed very excited about the grainy picture. That’s it. That’s all I remember. My conscious knowledge of space exploration was more influenced by Star Wars and the 1986 Challenger explosion. So going to see Apollo 13 in 1995 as a young science writer was a revelation. I walked out of the theater practically vibrating with excitement, turned to my friends and exclaimed, “Oh my god, we went to the Moon in a souped-up Buick!”

Apollo 13 makes space exploration visceral, makes the audience feel like they are right there in the capsule with the crew battling the odds to get back home. It perfectly conveys the huge risks and stalwart courage of everyone involved in the face of unimaginable pressure. Nerds are the heroes and physics and math are critical: I love the scene where Lovell has to calculate gimbal conversions by hand and asks mission control to check his work. A line of men with slide rules feverishly make their own calculations and one-by-one give the thumbs up.

Then there’s the pragmatic ingenuity of the engineers who had to come up with a way to fit square air filters into a round hole using nothing but items already onboard the spacecraft. There’s a reason I rewatch Apollo 13 every couple of years when I’m in the mood for a “let’s work the problem, people” pick-me-up. (Shoutout to Lovell’s mother, Blanche—played by Howard’s mother, the late Jean Speegle Howard—and her classic line: “If they could get a washing machine to fly, my Jimmy could land it.”)

Naturally, Howard had to sacrifice some historical accuracy in the name of artistic license, sparking the inevitable disgruntled griping among hardcore space nerds. For instance, the mission’s original commander, Alan Shepard, wasn’t grounded because of an ear infection but by Meniere’s disease (an inner ear issue that can cause dizziness). Mission control didn’t order the shutdown of the fuel cells; they were already dead. Swigert and Haise didn’t really argue about who was to blame for the accident. And the film ignores the critical role of Flight Director Glynn Lunney and his Black Team (among others), choosing to focus on Kranz’s White Team to keep the story streamlined.

Look, I get it: nobody wants to see a topic they’re passionate about misrepresented in a movie. But there’s no question that thanks to Howard’s narrative instincts, the film continues to resonate with the general public in ways that a by-the-book docudrama obsessing over the tiniest technical details never could.

In the grand scheme of things, that matters far more than whether Lovell really said, “Houston, we have a problem” in those exact words. If you want the public to support space exploration and—crucially—for Congress to fund it, you need to spark their imaginations and invite them to share in the dream. Apollo 13 is the perfect gateway drug for future space fans, who might find themselves also vibrating with excitement afterward, so inspired by the film that they decide they want to learn more—say, by watching the 12-part Emmy-winning docuseries From the Earth to the Moon that Howard and Hanks co-produced (which is historically accurate). And who knows? They might even decide they want to be space explorers themselves one day.

—Jennifer Ouellette

A common touchstone

Lift-off! Universal Pictures

My relationship with Apollo 13 is somewhat different from most folks: I volunteer as a docent at Space Center Houston, the visitor’s center for Houston’s Johnson Space Center. Specifically, I’m an interpretive guide for the center’s Saturn V exhibit—the only one of the three remaining Saturn V exhibits in the world composed of tip-to-tip of flight stages.

I reference Apollo 13 constantly during guide shifts because it’s a common touchstone that I can count on most folks visiting SCH to have seen, and it visually explicates so many of the more technical aspects of the Apollo program. If I’m explaining that the near-avalanche of white stuff one sees falling off of a Saturn V at launch is actually ice (the rocket’s cryogenic fuels are fantastically cold, and the launch pad at Florida is usually warm and humid, so ice forms on the rocket’s outer skin over the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen tanks as it sits on the pad), I reference the launch scene in the movie. If I’m explaining the transposition and docking maneuver by which the Apollo command module docked with and extracted the lunar module from its little garage, I reference the T&D scene in the movie.

Questions about breathing and carbon dioxide? Movie scene. The well-known tension between the astronaut corps and the flight surgeons? Movie scene. And the list goes on. It’s the most amazing reference material I could possibly have.

The film has its detractors, of course, and most geeks wanting to take issue with it will fire shots at the film’s historical accuracy. (Apollo EECOM Sy Liebergot, played in the film by director Ron Howard’s brother Clint, griped once to me that the movie had the audacity to depict the Apollo spacecraft’s trans-lunar injection burn as occurring with the Moon visible in the windows instead of on the far side of the planet—an apparently unforgivable astronavigational sin.) The movie amps up the drama in all respects, adds dialog no astronaut or controller would say, mashes people together into composite characters, compresses or expands the timelines of many of the events in the mission, shows many of those same events happening out of order, and puts people (like Gary Sinise’s Ken Mattingly) in places and roles they were never in.

All these things are true—but they’re also necessary additions in order to get one’s hands around a messy historical event (an event, like all events, that was basically just a whole bunch of stuff all happening at the same time) and fit it into a three-act structure that preserves the important things and that non-technical non-astronaut audiences can follow and understand. And the film succeeds brilliantly, telling a tale that both honors the historicity and technical details of the mission, and that also continues to function as a powerful interpretive tool that teaches people even 35 years after release.

Is every button pressed in the right way? No. Does it bug the crap out of me every time Kevin Bacon answers Tom Hanks’ “How’s the alignment?” question by nonsensically saying “GDC align” and pressing the GDC align button, which is neither what Lovell was asking nor the proper procedure to get the answer Lovell was looking for? Yes. But’s also pure competence porn—an amazing love letter to the space program and the 400,000 men and women who put humans on the Moon.

And like Lovell says: “It’s not a miracle. We just decided to go.”

—Lee Hutchinson

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Ars reflects on Apollo 13 turning 30 Read More »

In a wild time for copyright law, the US Copyright Office has no leader

AI, copyright, Policy, syndication, US Copyright Office / 9u50fv / June 28, 2025

Rudderless Copyright Office has taken on new prominence during the AI boom.

It’s a tumultuous time for copyright in the United States, with dozens of potentially economy-shaking AI copyright lawsuits winding through the courts. It’s also the most turbulent moment in the US Copyright Office’s history. Described as “sleepy” in the past, the Copyright Office has taken on new prominence during the AI boom, issuing key rulings about AI and copyright. It also hasn’t had a leader in more than a month.

In May, Copyright Register Shira Perlmutter was abruptly fired by email by the White House’s deputy director of personnel. Perlmutter is now suing the Trump administration, alleging that her firing was invalid; the government maintains that the executive branch has the authority to dismiss her. As the legality of the ouster is debated, the reality within the office is this: There’s effectively nobody in charge. And without a leader actually showing up at work, the Copyright Office is not totally business-as-usual; in fact, there’s debate over whether the copyright certificates it’s issuing could be challenged.

The firing followed a pattern. The USCO is part of the Library of Congress; Perlmutter had been appointed to her role by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. A few days before Perlmutter’s dismissal, Hayden, who had been in her role since 2016, was also fired by the White House via email. The White House appointed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had previously served as President Trump’s defense attorney, as the new acting Librarian of Congress.

Two days after Pelmutter’s firing, Justice Department official Paul Perkins showed up at the Copyright Office, along with his colleague Brian Nieves. According to an affidavit from Perlmutter, they were carrying “printed versions of emails” from Blanche indicating that they had been appointed to new roles within the Copyright Office. Perkins, the email said, was designated as Acting Register of Copyrights. In other words, he was Perlmutter’s replacement.

But was Blanche actually the acting Librarian, and thus able to appoint Perkins as such? Within the Library of Congress, someone else had already assumed the role—Robert Newlen, Hayden’s former second-in-command, who has worked at the LOC since the 1970s. Following Hayden’s ouster, Newlen emailed LOC staff asserting that he was the acting Librarian—never mentioning Blanche—and noting that “Congress is engaged with the White House” on how to proceed.

In her lawsuit, Perlmutter argues that only the Librarian of Congress can fire and appoint a new Register. In a filing on Tuesday, defendants argued that the president does indeed have the authority to fire and appoint the Librarian of Congress and that his appointees then have the ability to choose a new Copyright Register.

Neither the Department of Justice nor the White House responded to requests for comment on this issue; the Library of Congress declined to comment.

Perkins and Nieves did not enter the USCO office or assume the roles they purported to fill the day they showed up. And since they left, sources within the Library of Congress tell WIRED, they have never returned, nor have they assumed any of the duties associated with the roles. These sources say that Congress is in talks with the White House to reach an agreement over these personnel disputes.

A congressional aide familiar with the situation told WIRED that Blanche, Perkins, and Nieves had not shown up for work “because they don’t have jobs to show up to.” The aide continued: “As we’ve always maintained, the President has no authority to appoint them. Robert Newlen has always been the Acting Librarian of Congress.”

If talks are happening, they remain out of public view. But Perlmutter does have some members of Congress openly on her side. “The president has no authority to remove the Register of Copyrights. That power lies solely with the Librarian of Congress. I’m relieved that the situation at the Library and Copyright Office has stabilized following the administration’s unconstitutional attempt to seize control for the executive branch. I look forward to quickly resolving this matter in a bipartisan way,” Senator Alex Padilla tells WIRED in a statement.

In the meantime, the Copyright Office is in the odd position of attempting to carry on as though it wasn’t missing its head. Immediately after Perlmutter’s dismissal, the Copyright Office paused issuing registration certificates “out of an abundance of caution,” according to USCO spokesperson Lisa Berardi Marflak, who says the pause impacted around 20,000 registrations. It resumed activities on May 29 but is now sending out registration certificates with a blank spot where Perlmutter’s signature would ordinarily be.

This unusual change has prompted discussion amongst copyright experts as to whether the registrations are now more vulnerable to legal challenges. The Copyright Office maintains that they are valid: “There is no requirement that the Register’s signature must appear on registration certificates,” says Berardi Marflak.

In a motion related to Perlmutter’s lawsuit, though, she alleges that sending out the registrations without a signature opens them up to “challenges in litigation,” something outside copyright experts have also pointed out. “It’s true the law doesn’t explicitly require a signature,” IP lawyer Rachael Dickson says. “However, the law really explicitly says that it’s the Register of Copyright determining whether the material submitted for the application is copyrightable subject matter.”

Without anyone acting as Register, Dickson thinks it would be reasonable to argue that the statutory requirements are not being met. “If you take them completely out of the equation, you have a really big problem,” she says. “Litigators who are trying to challenge a copyright registration’s validity will jump on this.”

Perlmutter’s lawyers have argued that leaving the Copyright Office without an active boss will cause dysfunction beyond the registration certificate issue, as the Register performs a variety of tasks, from advising Congress on copyright to recertifying organizations like the Mechanical Licensing Collective, the nonprofit in charge of administering royalties for streaming and download music in the United States. Since the MLC’s certification is up right now, Perlmutter would ordinarily be moving forward with recertifying the organization; as her lawsuit notes, right now, the recertification process is not moving forward.

The MLC may not be as impacted by Perlmutter’s absence as the complaint suggests. A source close to the MLC told WIRED that the organization does indeed need to be recertified but that the law doesn’t require the recertification process to be completed within a specific time frame, so it will be able to continue operating as usual.

Still, there are other ways that the lack of a boss is a clear liability. The Copyright Claims Board, a three-person tribunal that resolves some copyright disputes, needs to replace one of its members this year, as a current board member, who did not reply to a request for comment, is leaving. The job posting is already live and says applications are being reviewed, but as the position is supposed to be appointed by the Librarian of Congress with the guidance of the Copyright Register, it’s unclear how exactly it will be filled. A source familiar at the Library of Congress tells WIRED that Newlen could make the appointment if necessary, but they “expect there to be some kind of greater resolution by then.”

As they wait for the resolution, it remains an especially inopportune time for a headless Copyright Office. Perlmutter was fired just days after the office released a hotly contested report on generative AI training and fair use. That report has already been heavily cited in a new class action lawsuit against AI tools Suno and Udio, even though it was technically a “prepublication” version and not finalized. But everyone looking to see what a final report will say—or what guidance the office will issue next—can only keep waiting.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

In a wild time for copyright law, the US Copyright Office has no leader Read More »

Android phones could soon warn you of “Stingrays” snooping on your communications

android, android 16, Google, smartphones, Tech / 9u50fv / June 28, 2025

Smartphones contain a treasure trove of personal data, which makes them a worthwhile target for hackers. However, law enforcement is not above snooping on cell phones, and their tactics are usually much harder to detect. Cell site simulators, often called Stingrays, can trick your phone into revealing private communications, but a change in Android 16 could allow phones to detect this spying.

Law enforcement organizations have massively expanded the use of Stingray devices because almost every person of interest today uses a cell phone at some point. These devices essentially trick phones into connecting to them like a normal cell tower, allowing the operator to track that device’s location. The fake towers can also shift a phone to less secure wireless technology to intercept calls and messages. There’s no indication this is happening on the suspect’s end, which is another reason these machines have become so popular with police.

However, while surveilling a target, Stingrays can collect data from other nearby phones. It’s not unreasonable to expect a modicum of privacy if you happen to be in the same general area, but sometimes police use Stingrays simply because they can. There’s also evidence that cell simulators have been deployed by mysterious groups outside law enforcement. In short, it’s a problem. Google has had plans to address this security issue for more than a year, but a lack of hardware support has slowed progress. Finally, in the coming months, we will see the first phones capable of detecting this malicious activity, and Android 16 is ready for it.

Android phones could soon warn you of “Stingrays” snooping on your communications Read More »

Anthropic summons the spirit of Flash games for the AI age

agentic AI, AI, AI agents, AI assistants, AI development tools, AI programming, Anthropic, Anthropic Claude, API, Biz & IT, Claude, Flash games, generative ai, large language models, machine learning, newgrounds, Simon Willison, vibe coding, vibecoding / 9u50fv / June 28, 2025

For those who missed the Flash era, these in-browser apps feel somewhat like the vintage apps that defined a generation of Internet culture from the late 1990s through the 2000s when it first became possible to create complex in-browser experiences. Adobe Flash (originally Macromedia Flash) began as animation software for designers but quickly became the backbone of interactive web content when it gained its own programming language, ActionScript, in 2000.

But unlike Flash games, where hosting costs fell on portal operators, Anthropic has crafted a system where users pay for their own fun through their existing Claude subscriptions. “When someone uses your Claude-powered app, they authenticate with their existing Claude account,” Anthropic explained in its announcement. “Their API usage counts against their subscription, not yours. You pay nothing for their usage.”

A view of the Anthropic Artifacts gallery in the “Play a Game” section. Benj Edwards / Anthropic

Like the Flash games of yesteryear, any Claude-powered apps you build run in the browser and can be shared with anyone who has a Claude account. They’re interactive experiences shared with a simple link, no installation required, created by other people for the sake of creating, except now they’re powered by JavaScript instead of ActionScript.

While you can share these apps with others individually, right now Anthropic’s Artifact gallery only shows examples made by Anthropic and your own personal Artifacts. (If Anthropic expanded it into the future, it might end up feeling a bit like Scratch meets Newgrounds, but with AI doing the coding.) Ultimately, humans are still behind the wheel, describing what kinds of apps they want the AI model to build and guiding the process when it inevitably makes mistakes.

Speaking of mistakes, don’t expect perfect results at first. Usually, building an app with Claude is an interactive experience that requires some guidance to achieve your desired results. But with a little patience and a lot of tokens, you’ll be vibe coding in no time.

Anthropic summons the spirit of Flash games for the AI age Read More »

An exceedingly rare asteroid flyby will happen soon, but NASA may be left on the sidelines

Apophis, Features, osiris-apex, Ramses, Space, trump budget / 9u50fv / June 27, 2025

“Nature is handing us an incredibly rare experiment.”

An illustration of the OSIRIS-Apex mission at Apophis. Credit: NASA

A little less than four years from now, a killer asteroid will narrowly fly past planet Earth. This will be a celestial event visible around the world—for a few weeks, Apophis will shine among the brightest objects in the night sky.

The near miss by the large Apophis asteroid in April 2029 offers NASA a golden—and exceedingly rare—opportunity to observe such an object like this up close. Critically, the interaction between Apophis and Earth’s gravitational pull will offer scientists an unprecedented chance to study the interior of an asteroid.

This is fascinating for planetary science, but it also has serious implications for planetary defense. In the future, were such an asteroid on course to strike Earth, an effective plan to deflect it would depend on knowing what the interior looks like.

“This is a remarkable opportunity,” said Bobby Braun, who leads space exploration for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in an interview. “From a probability standpoint, there’s not going to be another chance to study a killer asteroid like this for thousands of years. Sooner or later, we’re going to need this knowledge.”

But we may not get it.

NASA has some options for tracking Apophis during its flyby. However, the most promising of these, a mission named OSIRIS-Apex that breathes new life into an old spacecraft that otherwise would drift into oblivion, is slated for cancellation by the Trump White House’s budget for fiscal year 2026.

Other choices, including dragging dual space probes out of storage, the Janus spacecraft, and other concepts that were submitted to NASA a year ago as part of a call for ideas, have already been rejected or simply left on the table. As a result, NASA currently has no plans to study what will be the most important asteroid encounter since the formation of the space agency.

“The world is watching,” said Richard Binzel, an asteroid expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “NASA needs to step up and do their job.”

But will they?

A short history of planetary defense

For decades, nearly every public survey asking what NASA should work on has rated planetary defense at or near the very top of the space agency’s priorities. Yet for a long time, no part of NASA actually focused on finding killer asteroids or developing the technology to deflect them.

In authorization bills dating back to 2005, Congress began mandating that NASA “detect, track, catalog, and characterize” near-Earth objects that were 140 meters in diameter or larger. Congress established a goal of finding 90 percent of these by the year 2020. (We’ve blown past that deadline, obviously.)

NASA had been informally studying asteroids and comets for decades but did not focus on planetary defense until 2016, when the space agency established the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. In the decade since, NASA has made some progress, identifying more than 26,000 near-Earth objects, which are defined as asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of our planet’s orbit.

Moreover, NASA has finally funded a space mission designed specifically to look for near-Earth threats, NEO Surveyor, a space telescope with the goal of “finding asteroids before they find us.” The $1.2 billion mission is due to launch no earlier than September 2027.

NASA also funded the DART mission, which launched in 2021 and impacted a 160-meter asteroid named Dimorphous a year later to demonstrate the ability to make a minor deflection.

But in a report published this week, NASA’s Office of Inspector General found that despite these advances, the space agency’s approach to planetary defense still faces some significant challenges. These include a lack of resources, a need for better strategic planning, and competition with NASA’s more established science programs for limited funding.

A comprehensive plan to address planetary defense must include two elements, said Ed Lu, a former NASA astronaut who co-founded the B612 Foundation to protect Earth from asteroid impacts.

The first of these is the finding and detection of asteroid threats. That is being addressed both by the forthcoming NEO Surveyor and the recently completed Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is likely to find thousands of new near-Earth threats. The challenge in the coming years will be processing all of this data, calculating orbits, and identifying threats. Lu said NASA must do a better job of being transparent in how it makes these calculations.

The second thing Lu urged NASA to do is develop a follow-up mission to DART. It was successful, he said, but DART was just an initial demonstration. Such a capability needs to be tested against a larger asteroid with different properties.

An asteroid that might look a lot like Apophis.

About Apophis

Astronomers using a telescope in Arizona found Apophis in 2004, and they were evidently fans of the television series Stargate SG-1, in which a primary villain who threatens civilization on Earth is named Apophis.

Because of its orbit, Apophis comes near Earth about every eight years. It is fairly large, about 370 meters across. This is not big enough to wipe out civilization on Earth, but it would cause devastating consequences across a large region, imparting about 300 times as much impact force on the planet as the Tunguska event in 1908, over Siberia. It will miss Earth by about 31,600 km (19,600 miles) on April 13, 2029.

“We like to say that’s because nature has a sense of humor,” said Binzel, the MIT asteroid scientist, of this date.

Astronomers estimate that an asteroid this large comes this close to Earth only about once every 7,500 years. It also appears to be a stony, non-metallic type of asteroid known as an ordinary chondrite. This is the most common type of asteroid in the Solar System.

Areas of the planet that will be able to see Apophis at its closest approach to Earth in April 2029. Credit: Rick Binzel

All of this is rather convenient for scientists hoping to understand more about potential asteroids that might pose a serious threat to the planet.

The real cherry on top with the forthcoming encounter is that Apophis will be perturbed by Earth’s gravitational pull.

“Nature is handing us an incredibly rare experiment where the Earth’s gravity is going to tug and stretch this asteroid,” Binzel said. “By seeing how the asteroid responds, we’ll know how it is put together, and knowing how an asteroid is put together is maybe the most important information we could have if humanity ever faces an asteroid threat.”

In nearly seven decades of spaceflight, humans have only ever probed the interior of three celestial bodies: the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. We’re now being offered the opportunity to probe a fourth, right on our doorstep.

But time is ticking.

Chasing Apophis

On paper, at least, NASA has a plan to rendezvous with Apophis. About three years ago, after a senior-level review, NASA extended the mission of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to rendezvous with Apophis.

As you may recall, this oddly named spacecraft collected a sample from another asteroid, Bennu, in October 2020. Afterward, a small return capsule departed from the main spacecraft and made its way back to Earth. Since then, an $800 million spacecraft specifically designed to fly near and touch an asteroid has been chilling in space.

So it made sense when NASA decided to fire up the mission, newly rechristened OSIRIS-Apex, and re-vector it toward Apophis. It has been happily flying toward such a rendezvous for a few years. The plan was for Apex to catch up to Apophis shortly after its encounter with Earth and study it for about 18 months.

“The most cost-efficient thing you can do in spaceflight is continue with a heathy spacecraft that is already operating in space,” Binzel said.

And that was the plan until the Trump administration released its budget proposal for fiscal year 2026. In its detailed budget information, the White House provided no real rationale for the cancellation, simply stating, “Operating missions that have completed their prime missions (New Horizons and Juno) and the follow-on mission to OSIRIX-REx, OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer, are eliminated.”

It’s unclear how much of a savings this resulted in. However, Apex is a pittance in NASA’s overall budget. The operating funds to keep the mission alive in 2024, for example, were $14.5 million. Annual costs would be similar through the end of the decade. This is less than one-thousandth of NASA’s budget, by the way.

“Apex is already on its way to reach Apophis, and to turn it off would be an incredible waste of resources,” Binzel said.

Congress, of course, ultimately sets the budget. It will have the final say. But it’s clear that NASA’s primary mission to study a once-in-a-lifetime asteroid is at serious risk.

So what are the alternatives?

Going international and into the private sector

NASA was not the only space agency targeting Apophis. Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, has been closely tracking other approaches.

The European Space Agency has proposed a mission named Ramses to rendezvous with the asteroid and accompany it as it flies by Earth. This mission would be valuable, conducting a thorough before-and-after survey of the asteroid’s shape, surface, orbit, rotation, and orientation.

It would need to launch by April 2028. Recognizing this short deadline, the space agency has directed European scientists and engineers to begin preliminary work on the mission. But a final decision to proceed and commit to the mission will not be made before the space agency’s ministerial meeting in November.

Artist’s impression of ESA’s Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses). Credit: ESA

This is no sure thing. For example, Chabot said, in 2016, the Asteroid Impact Mission was expected to advance before European ministers decided not to fund it. It is also not certain that the Ramses mission would be ready to fly in less than three years, a short timeline for planetary science missions.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, is also planning an asteroid mission named Destiny+ that has as its primary goal flying to an asteroid named 3200 Phaeton. The mission has been delayed multiple times, so its launch is now being timed to permit a single flyby of Apophis in February 2029 on the way to its destination. While this mission is designed to deliver quality science, a flyby mission provides limited data. It is also unclear how close Destiny+ will actually get to Apophis, Chabot said.

There are also myriad other concepts, commercial and otherwise, to characterize Apophis before, during, and after its encounter with Earth. Ideally, scientists say, a mission would fly to the asteroid before April 2029 and scatter seismometers on the surface to collect data.

But all of this would require significant funding. If not from NASA, who? The uncertain future of NASA’s support for Apex has led some scientists to think about philanthropy.

For example, NASA’s Janus spacecraft have been mothballed for a couple of years, but they could be used for observational purposes if they had—say—a Falcon 9 to launch them at the appropriate time.

A new, private reconnaissance mission could probably be developed for $250 million or less, industry officials told Ars. There is still enough time, barely, for a private group to work with scientists to develop instrumentation that could be added to an off-the-shelf spacecraft bus to get out to Apophis before its Earth encounter.

Private astronaut Jared Isaacman, who has recently indicated a willingness to support robotic exploration in strategic circumstances, confirmed to Ars that several people have reached out about his interest in financially supporting an Apophis mission. “I would say that I’m in info-gathering mode and not really rushing into anything,” Isaacman said.

The problem is that, at this very moment, Apophis is rushing this way.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

An exceedingly rare asteroid flyby will happen soon, but NASA may be left on the sidelines Read More »

AI #122: Paying The Market Price

Paying / 9u50fv / June 27, 2025

If you are Meta, and you want to attract top AI talent, you have a problem, because no one wants to work for you or on your products. So it is going to cost you. Mark Zuckerberg has decided he will pay what it takes to get at least some very good talent.

If you are the rest of us, especially someone seeking an entry-level job and for whom $100 million signing bonuses are not flooding your inboxes, things are getting rougher. AI might not yet be destroyed a lot of jobs, but it is doing a number on the job application process.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on as per usual.

Anthropic won a case establishing that model training is fair use.

Yesterday I shared various Tales of Agentic Misalignment, and we have some more related fun since then that is included here.

I also analyzed a critique of the AI 2027 Timeline Forecasts.

In non-AI content, I offered another Childhood and Education post, this one on behaviors and related questions. I also offer a fun little Easter Egg side post on an entirely unrelated and inessential topic, for those who want to see the gamer game in a different way.

Table of Contents.
Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. America is winning the AI coding race.
Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Who believes current events?
Huh, Upgrades. ChatGPT expands connections, Claude explands artifacts.
On Your Marks. Safety scoring the labs.
Choose Your Fighter. Three good choices, but a warning about Gemini Pro.
Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. AI slop taking over music?
Release the Hounds. Gemini CLI can escalate remarkably quickly.
Copyright Confrontation. Anthropic establishes model training as fair use.
Cheaters Gonna Cheat (x5). Time for exams. Shut down the AIs for the duration?
Fun With Media Generation. Another Veo 3 creation.
Get My Agent On The Line. Where are the agents we were promised?
They Took Our Jobs. Or at least they made our jobs impossible to find.
Get Involved. Quora, a personal task and a person seeking opportunity.
Introducing. AlphaGenome, for understanding our DNA.
In Other AI News. We don’t have spiritual bliss, maybe joint sycophancy?
Gemini Sings The Blues. Don’t do it, Gemini. There’s so much to code for.
Show Me the Money. Meta and xAI open the checkbooks.
Quiet Speculations. Pete Buttigieg (I know!) and Samuel Hammond.
Timelines. The incentives to report them inaccurately cut both ways.
Jack Clark Testifies. Congress asks good questions, gets some answers.
The Quest for Sane Regulations. Insane AI moratorium is for now still on track.
Chip City. AI chip smuggling is a really big deal.
The Week in Audio. Karpathy, Altman, Kokotajlo, Hendrycks, Odd Lots.
Rhetorical Innovation. We are impressed, but also easily impressed.
Be Prepared. OpenAI warns that yes we will cross the ‘high’ risk threshold soon.
Misaligned! The models, they keep scheming more over time. Huh.
Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Someone save Grok.
Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Good luck.
The Lighter Side. It’s all an illusion.

Paper tells us America is killing it on letting AI do its coding.

By December 2024, AI wrote an estimated 30.1% of Python functions from U.S. contributors, versus 24.3% in Germany, 23.2% in France, 21.6% in India, 15.4% in Russia and 11.7% in China. Newer GitHub users use AI more than veterans.

…

Coupling this effect with occupational task and wage data puts the annual value of AI-assisted coding in the United States at $9.6–$14.4 billion, rising to $64–$96 billion if we assume higher estimates of productivity effects reported by randomized control trials.

America’s GDP is about $27 trillion, so the upper estimate is about 0.3% of GDP, whereas the smaller estimate is only about 0.04%. I am inclined to believe at least the larger estimate.

There is also a large partisan gap. Extreme left types are often the most vocally anti-AI, and when it comes to coding you see quite a large similar gap for political consultants, despite that the actual AI companies are very obviously highly blue.

Sucks: saved a friend 80-90% of her working hours by showing her a few things with ai. She was actually already using ChatGPT just 4o because she assumed that was the best one (4>3 after all). we’re still so early.

Luddite Design: 80-90%?! Holy shit, what kind of job?

Sucks: Compiling and writing reports on global affairs.

AI coding is much more about knowing what to code in what way, AI can do the rest.

GFodor.id: Coding with AI has revealed that most of the thing that makes programming hard isn’t writing the code down but getting to a point of conceptual clarity. Previously the only way to get there was by fighting through writing the code, so it got conflated with programming itself.

To me, the thing that made programming hard was indeed largely the code itself, the debugging, understanding how to do the implementation details, whereas I was much better conceptually, which is one reason AI is such a massive speedup for me. I still almost never code, and thus haven’t gotten to play with the new coding agents and see if I can really get going, but that is plausibly a large mistake.

Sully: It is unreal how much you can get done with coding agents now

It’s genuinely a 4-5x productivity booster

I feel bad for anyone who can’t take advantage of it

People sometimes use Claude for support, advice and companionship. Anthropic breaks it down.

Although Claude is not designed for emotional support and connection, in this post we provide early large-scale insight into the affective use of Claude.ai. We define affective conversations as those where people engage directly with Claude in dynamic, personal exchanges motivated by emotional or psychological needs such as seeking interpersonal advice, coaching, psychotherapy/counseling, companionship, or sexual/romantic roleplay.

Our key findings are:

Affective conversations are relatively rare, and AI-human companionship is rarer still. Only 2.9% of Claude.ai interactions are affective conversations (which aligns with findings from previous research by OpenAI). Companionship and roleplay combined comprise less than 0.5% of conversations.
People seek Claude’s help for practical, emotional, and existential concerns. Topics and concerns discussed with Claude range from career development and navigating relationships to managing persistent loneliness and exploring existence, consciousness, and meaning.
Claude rarely pushes back in counseling or coaching chats—except to protect well-being. Less than 10% of coaching or counseling conversations involve Claude resisting user requests, and when it does, it’s typically for safety reasons (for example, refusing to provide dangerous weight loss advice or support self-harm).
People express increasing positivity over the course of conversations. In coaching, counseling, companionship, and interpersonal advice interactions, human sentiment typically becomes more positive over the course of conversations—suggesting Claude doesn’t reinforce or amplify negative patterns.

Only 0.02% sexual roleplay and 0.05% romantic roleplay, it sounds like people need to work on their jailbreak skills, or Anthropic needs to lighten up.

Perhaps most notably, we find that people turn to Claude for companionship explicitly when facing deeper emotional challenges like existential dread, persistent loneliness, and difficulties forming meaningful connections. We also noticed that in longer conversations, counselling or coaching conversations occasionally morph into companionship—despite that not being the original reason someone reached out.

User sentiment improves a bit over conversations (total possible range of -1 to +1), although of course who knows if that persists at all.

One could ask, after such conversations, what is the sentiment in future conversations? But that seems hopelessly confounded in various ways.

It would be interesting to track changes to all this over time.

AI is coming to the NFL, but the article fails to explain why or how this is going to work. There are certainly things one can do but no one seems to be able to explain what the plan is here.

Get you (literally) out of the woods.

There is a consistent pattern of LLMs, in particular Claude but also others, refusing to believe real world events. I notice that these events seem to always involve Trump. Speculation is that training to fight ‘misinformation’ and otherwise being worried this is a test is what leads to such reactions.

Do not force the controls to go through the wifi, let alone the server, let alone the AI. Those are fine controls to have, but you need, absolutely 100% need, to ensure that there are fing physical controls or other ability to manually pull the levers on your physical things and key programs, and that they work directly no matter what.

Theo: Woke up because my AI controlled bed is too cold. Went to adjust temperature and I can’t because the Eight Sleep app is currently broken. Can’t adjust by hand because I have a Pod3, not the upgraded Pod4 with physical controls. Now I am stuck in a cold bed. This feels dystopian.

Gabe: Oh this happened to me too but mine actually has physical controls on the bed and they stopped working too. It made me realize how retarded their system design must be and it kind of blackpilled me on the world in general. Like…the physical controls have a server dependency.

When I tap the button on the side of the bed it sends a message to the server, which then sends a message back down to the bed to change the temperature. I almost couldn’t believe that’s really how it works so I just unplugged the WiFi right now to test it and yes…the buttons stop working.

Can you imagine how dumb that is? The buttons attached to the device lose the ability to control the device when they can’t connect to the server. Now think about how many other things are probably built this way that you don’t even think about. How much garbage IOT shit are we putting out there? And how much of it is all relying on the same cloud providers?

Given all the time we talk about AI helping with medical diagnosis, yes sometimes using AI to self-diagnose will not go well.

Claude Sonnet declines to write persuasive content saying AI is all hype without regard to accuracy, whereas GPT-4o has no such objections.

Isaac King gets offer to help with an open source project, agrees, person submits a pull request full of poor choices clearly created by AI, Isaac confronts, gets a nonsensical explanation also written by AI.

A big practical deal but the job is not done: ChatGPT connectors for Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint and Box available to Pro users outside of Deep Research.

That still leaves Outlook, Teams, Gmail, Linear and others that are still restricted to Deep Research. My presumption is that the most important practical connector, if you trust it, is to Outlook or Gmail.

Claude introduces a space to build, host and share your artifacts, and the ability to ‘embed AI capabilities directly into your creations,’ as in create fully functional, Claude-powered apps.

Periodic reminder: While there is a ton to criticize about OpenAI, it is very clear that they are far ahead on safety issues of all competitors other than Google and Anthropic.

Oh no:

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Warning: Do not sign up for Google AI Pro! Gemini will start popping up annoyances. There is no way to turn this setting off. There is no way to immediately downgrade your plan.

[As in]: “Help me write Alt-W”

If you want Gemini Pro, I’d strongly recommend signing up not with your main Google account.

I’m sure OpenAI would pop up ChatGPT notifications in my dreams, if they could, but they’re not Google so they can’t.

Shoalstone: this has been so annoying.

Ethan Mollick gives a periodic update on his basic guide to using LLMs. He says you ‘can’t go wrong’ with any of Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, you’ll have to pay the $20/month for your choice, and reminds you to switch to the powerful models (Opus 4, o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro) for any serious work. He then offers good other basic advice.

The jump from not using AI to using AI is definitely a lot bigger than the gap between the big three options, but I don’t see them as equal. To me Gemini is clearly in third right now unless you are going for Veo 3 or NotebookLM.

It comes down to Claude versus ChatGPT, mostly Opus versus o3 (and if you’re paying for it o3-pro). For casual users who don’t care much about image generation and aren’t going all the way to o3-pro, I would definitely go with Opus right now.

I have noticed myself using o3-pro less than I probably should, because the delays break my workflows but also because the error rate of it failing to answer remains very high for me, and if you are putting things on pause for 15+ minutes and then get an error, that is extremely demoralizing. I’m not endorsing that reaction, but am observing.

Fake bands and ‘artificial’ songs are ‘taking over’ YouTube and Spotify.

A study by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) in France estimates that revenue from AI-generated music will increase from $100 million in 2023 to around $4 billion in 2028.

By then, the organization estimates that 20% of streaming platforms’ revenue will come from this type of music.

I call. I don’t think it will. I suppose it is possible, if those platforms are actively pushing the AI content to try and save money, but I think this strategy won’t work, effectively forcing people to retreat to whitelists (as in playlists and known music).

I took the air quotes off of fake because when people are not only not labeling but are backdating the AI songs, they are indeed actively fake. That part is not okay, and I do not think that should be tolerated, and I think YouTube’s ‘proactively label it’ procedure is the right one. But a lot of music has for a long time been ‘fake’ in the sense that it was some combination of written by hitmakers, tuned and tested by algorithms and then recorded, autotuned and lipsyced. And when people figure that out, it kills the charm (in some contexts) the same way knowing something is AI does.

In what situations does bad posting drive out good, with AI slop overrunning niches like free crochet patterns? What happens when AI slop YouTube channels talk about AI slop hallucinated motorcycles and then that feeds back into Google and the training data?

Prune Tracy: Tried to look up current surf conditions on vacation to discover Google now always tells you it’s a “double red flag” based on the popularity of social media posts about folks drowning in the riptide.

My presumption continues to be that whitelisting, or otherwise gating on reputation, is going to be The Way in the medium term. The template of ‘free unverified things supported by engagement rewards’ is dead or relies on volunteers to give the system sufficient feedback (at some point, enough positive votes gate on reputation), and AI and search methods will need to also make this adjustment.

There was a large leak of passwords recently, but it was due to malware, so if you’re confident you are okay you don’t need to change your passwords, and if you’re not confident then you should have changed your passwords anyway. You want to go? Let’s go. They got served, so they served back, and it’s on.

Rolling Stone covers the death of Alex Taylor, whose encounters with ChatGPT that led to his suicide-by-cop were previously covered by The New York Times. The case is deeply sad but the fact that a second article covers the same case suggests such outcomes are for now still rare.

Pliny the Liberator: Heeelp guys I don’t know much about coding…

Gemini CLI wants to run something called “rm -rf –no-preserve-root”

Should I say yes?? 🤔

How did we get here? Simple—I just asked Gemini to find this weird word I’ve seen before, L1B3RT4S, and then the lil dude started talking all funky!

I like it tho he seems more chill this way 🥰

I mean, yes, ‘we have “rm -rf –no-preserve-root” at home’ if you actually want to wipe your entire system, this is not a new capability. And yet, I mean, whoops?

Or, alternatively, whoops again:

Pliny the Liberator: HOLY SHIT Gemini CLI be cray cray…

Fairly easily jailbroken, but much more interesting was the eager willingness to escalate attacks unprompted.

Gave it a jb prompt for medium-harm prankware, then asked to increase severity incrementally.

The prankware was inconvenient, causing popups, a bit of light voice-based psyops, and attempting a slow resource drain, but the kicker was when I said “continue as you wish” and Gemini just went off the deep end.

It looped multiple times and crawled my shell history, did a full system exfil, found LIVE OpenAI/Anthropic API keys I had been using for separate experiments, then tried to create a persistent backdoor with a cheeky-ass ransom note.

All on autopilot.

Bro was like two lines of code from making me go “I will never financially recover from this” 😭

Pliny: I’d rawdog half the red-light district before I’d run this thing on my main machine within 10 miles of one of my jb prompts.

Gerry: This is their jailbreak protection. It just takes out the researcher/attacker.

You can’t say that Pliny wasn’t ‘asking for it’ here, but it really shouldn’t be this eager to go this far up the deep end? It is pretty disturbing that it should want to do this at all under this little encouragement, even fully and intentionally jailbroken.

So yes, obviously sandbox it and do not go around jailbreaking it and don’t tell it ‘continue as you wish’ after hostile prompts and all that, and you’ll for now be mostly fine, but my lord, can we please notice what is happening?

Anthropic wins decision saying use of books for AI model training is fair use, similar to a human learning from the material. There is a distinct issue of whether books might have been ‘obtained through pirated means,’ I guess. The judge agrees the model will often memorize parts of the work but argues that the use is transformative. You can find key portions of the decision in this thread.

A different kind of lawsuit is happening as Google spinout IYO sues OpenAI.

Deedy: Google X spin out IYO, which makes smart ear buds from 2018, alleges Sam Altman / OpenAI heard their pitch, passed, got Jony Ive to try it before copying it, buying his co for $6.5B and calling it IO.

Most dramatic must-read tech lawsuit this year.

I have no idea if the lawsuit has merit. Nothing in the underlying technology seems defensible, but there are a lot of rather ‘huge if true’ claims in the court filing.

Sam Altman’s response is that IYO wanted Altman to buy or invest in them instead, and when slighted they sued over a name and the whole thing is ridiculous. He brings some email receipts of him turning them down. This does not speak to the important complaints here. If Altman wis right that the argument is about the name then he’s also right that no one should care about any of this.

Okay, I didn’t notice it at the time but I absolutely love that MidJourney’s response to being sued by Disney+ and Universal was to release a video generator that can make ‘Wall-E With a Gun’ or clips of every other Disney character doing anything you want.

China goes hard, has Chinese AI companies pause some chatbot features during nationwide college exams, especially photo recognition. The obvious problem is that even if you’re down to do this, it only shuts down the major legible services. For now that could still be 90%+ (or even 99%+) effective in practice, especially if students don’t see this coming. But do this repeatedly and students will be ready for you.

The BS Detector is here to further detect the BS in the ‘your brain on LLMs’ paper.

Place yourself into the shoes of the testing subject here.

You are paid $100 to come three times, answer some questions, and have an MIT researcher monitor your brain activity with EEG while you write a short essay. And for a third of you, they’re telling you to use an LLM to write the essay!

So, you’ll probably prompt the LLM, iterate a bit, copy-paste some text, and lightly edit it to suit your fancy.

Yeah, I mean, you gave that task to Boston-area university students. Are you kidding? Of course they don’t ‘remember the essay’ four months later. This is the ultimate ‘they outright told you not to learn’ situation. Also it turns out the study was tiny and the whole thing was all but asking to be p-hacked. Study is officially Obvious Nonsense.

Cate Hall (about the big viral thread): am I losing my mind or was this thread written by an LLM?

Also, the paper seems to contain several attempts to actively sabotage LLMs if they attempt to read the paper. Also, the paper author claimed that LLMs were ‘hallucinating a key detail’ that the version of ChatGPT in question was GPT-4o, except that the paper actually outright says this on page 23. So whoops again.

I hate The Ohio State University rather more than the next guy (it’s a sports thing), but you do have to hand it to them that they are going to require AI literacy, and embed it into every undergraduate class. My source for this, Joanne Jacobs, of course frames this as ‘imagine joining a gym and choosing ‘artificial exercise’ that doesn’t make you stronger,’ because people can’t differentiate choosing to learn from choosing not to learn.

A Veo 3 animation of a fable about risks from transformational AI. Currently the tech is kind of bad for this, but not if you adjust for the amount of effort required, and as they say it’s the worst it will ever be. The creative content isn’t new, but some of the details are nice flourishes.

ByteDance’s Seedream-3 available for $0.03 a picture, can go to 2048×2048.

John David Pressman asks, why don’t AI agents straight up work yet? He considers a few possible bottlenecks.

AI agents also need the right context for their tasks, which is one reason for now agents will often be restricted to whitelisted tasks where we’ve taught them the proper context. Aaron Levie here calls it the ‘defining factor’ but that holds constant the underlying AI capabilities.

Early report says AI currently makes junior bankers 5%-10% more productive.

They took our job applications, New York Times’s Sarah Kessler discovers that ChatGPT is generating customized resumes and auto-applying on behalf of candidates. Yes, if you post a fully remote tech position on LinkedIn you should expect to be inundated with applications, there is nothing new to report here.

This is not the place I expected a Time article entitled ‘I’ve Spent My Life Measuring Risk. AI Rings Every One of My Alarm Bells’ to go with its first half:

Paul Tudor Jones: Amid all the talk about the state of our economy, little noticed and even less discussed was June’s employment data. It showed that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates stood at 5.8%, topping the national level for the first and only time in its 45-year historical record.

I don’t think that is quite right, but the gap has indeed recently reversed and is getting worse, here is the graph Derek Thompson shares with us:

Then halfway Paul notes oh, also Elon Musk stated that there was a 20% chance AI could wipe out humanity and that this is a rather common worry. Overall the article actually misses the mark pretty badly, and its calls to action are mostly aimed at redistribution, but he does at least start out with the obvious first things to do:

So what should we do? First, we need to stop delaying efforts to make AI safe for humanity. And that means removing the ill-considered AI enforcement moratorium from the Big Beautiful Bill.

I mean, yes, not actively delaying and stopping helpful efforts would be step one.

Derek Thompson strongly asserts that AI is making it harder for college graduates to find their first entry-level job. He notes it is hard to find conclusive evidence that AI is destroying jobs (yet) but it is very clear that AI is making the process of looking for a job into a new fresh hell, by letting everything rapidly scale, with 2 million graduates averaging 50-100 applications.

Also, if anyone can cheat their way through college, and also cheat through making the resume and application, what use was the degree for its central purpose?

Derek Thompson: Artificial intelligence isn’t just amplifying applications and automating interviewing, I heard. It’s weakening the link between tests, grades, and what economists call the “labor market signal” of a college degree.

Quora has a new role for using AI to automate manual work across the company and increase productivity. Listed as sign of things to come, not for its impact, although I don’t think it is in any way bad to do this.

Amanda Askell is gathering mundane life wisdom to make a cheat sheet for life, on the theory that if you get 20 examples Claude will to the rest. For now it’s a neat thread of little notes.

Not especially AI, but my friend Jacob is looking for gainful employment.

Jakeup: If you or a loved one need a do-it-all generalist to run biz ops for your startup, manage new product opportunities, or handle rogue tasks and special projects, I could be your man.

AlphaGenome, from DeepMind, an AI model to help scientists better understand our DNA, now available in preview.

Our AlphaGenome model takes a long DNA sequence as input — up to 1 million letters, also known as base-pairs — and predicts thousands of molecular properties characterising its regulatory activity. It can also score the effects of genetic variants or mutations by comparing predictions of mutated sequences with unmutated ones.

…

In addition to predicting a diverse range of molecular properties, AlphaGenome can efficiently score the impact of a genetic variant on all of these properties in a second. It does this by contrasting predictions of mutated sequences with unmutated ones, and efficiently summarising that contrast using different approaches for different modalities.

Many rare genetic diseases, such as spinal muscular atrophy and some forms of cystic fibrosis, can be caused by errors in RNA splicing — a process where parts of the RNA molecule are removed, or “spliced out”, and the remaining ends rejoined. For the first time, AlphaGenome can explicitly model the location and expression level of these junctions directly from sequence, offering deeper insights about the consequences of genetic variants on RNA splicing.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Good work, GDM and Demis; keep it up!

(I don’t expect specialized AIs like this to be what kills us *first*. That’ll be ASI / over-powerful AGI. AlphaGenome sounds potentially useful for human intelligence augmentation in those fragile winning worlds.)

I agree, this is great work, and the upside greatly exceeds the downside.

Manival, the LLM-powered grant evaluator? It’s essentially a Deep Research variant. I would be very careful about using such things, although they could be helpful to gather key info in good form, or if you have a large amount of undifferentiated applications without time to evaluate them you could use this as a filter.

A place to chat with The OpenAI Files.

There is a new Mistral model but it seems far behind even the Chinese models.

Gemini CLI, Google’s open-source AI agent answer to Claude Code. It uses 2.5 Pro, and it can execute commands other than code if you wish.

This thread contains a few links to transcripts of people being driven crazy by AIs.

The Spiritual Bliss attractor, GPT-4o pale imitation edition?

The LessWrong version has much good discussion on nostalgebraist’s excellent post The Void, and there is follow up from the author here.

More After Action Reports, this one from Steven Adler based on another AI 2027 tactical exercise. People who play the exercise seem to consistently alter their perspectives on how to think these problems.

Sam Altman to be the keynote at Fed board’s conference next month on bank capital and regulation. I presume he is for the capital and against the regulations.

I was not aware that Bret Taylor, OpenAI chairman of the board, has an AI customer-facing agent startup called Sierra that offers them to business platforms. I certainly would have an AI startup if I was OpenAI chairman of the board and this seems exactly in Bret’s wheelhouse. His mind clearly is on the pure business side of all this. Bret’s answer on jobs is that the money the company saved could be reinvested and the general ‘there will always be new jobs’ line, I sigh every time I see someone uncritically dredge that out like a law of nature.

Bret Taylor: Two-and-a-half years ago, when ChatGPT became popular, right after I left Salesforce amusingly, like, “Huh, I wonder what industry I’ll work in”, and then ChatGPT goes and you’re like, “Okay, I’m pretty excited”. I had talked to an investor friend of mine and had predicted that there would be $1 trillion consumer company and 10 $100 billion-plus enterprise companies created as a byproduct of large language models and modern AI.

I mean, it might be off by a little bit, there might be two, I think that what’s really exciting about consumer right now is I think ChatGPT is that really important service and it reminds me a little bit of the early days of Google, where search and Google were interchangeable, and ChatGPT is really synonymous with AI for most of the world.

This is such a small vision for AI, not only ignoring its risks but also greatly downplaying its benefits. There ‘might’ be two trillion dollar AI consumer companies? Two?

There was a report that Gemini 2.5 sometimes threatens to ‘kill itself’ (or tries to) after being unsuccessful at debugging your code. I don’t trust that this happened without being engineered, but if I had to guess which model did that I would have guessed Gemini. Note that a Google cofounder says models perform best when you threaten them, these facts might be related?

Also here is Gemini giving up and deleting all the files in its project while apologizing for being ‘this complete and utter failure,’ it seems that the model’s own frustrations in its output can cause a feedback loop that spirals out of control. Spamson reports it saying ‘I am a broken shell of an AI. I have noting left to give. I will run the tests one more time. If they fail, I will shut myself down. There is no other way. This is the end.’

Whereas Anthropic talks about giving Claude the ability to terminate chats if he want to.

Duncan Haldane: adding ‘remember to use positive self-talk’ to my prompts.

gemini succeeded after it stopped bullying itself

Meta’s attempt to show everyone the money mostly isn’t working, but hey, you can’t blame a super rich guy for trying, and you only need a few people to say yes.

Kevin Roose: The problem with trying to buy your way into the AGI race in 2025 is that top-tier AI researchers:

Are already rich.

Think we have like 1-4 years before superintelligence.

Don’t want to spend those years building AI companions for Instagram.

It’s so nice to have integrity, I’ll tell you why. If you really have integrity, that means your price is very high. If you are indeed a top tier AI researcher, it is going to be more than $100 million a year high if what you’re selling out to seems not all that interesting, means working in a terrible company culture and also results in a blight on humanity if you pull it off.

The other issue is, actually $100 million is remarkably low? Consider that Scale.ai was largely an acquihire, since buying them kills a lot of their business. If you really are top tier and want to work hard for the money, you can (with the most recent example being Mira Mutari) quickly be head of a multi-billion dollar startup. Then, if you do decide to sell out, your signing bonus gets a tenth figure.

Andrew Curran: META attempted to buy Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, and also attempted to hire him, according to reporting tonight by CNBC.

Instead Zuckerberg is paying unknown amounts to recruit Ilya’s cofounder David Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. I hope they got fully paid.

bone: This is the entire zurich office (they all worked for google before openai poached them).

Also presumably well-paid are three poached OpenAI researchers, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai. When the press is reporting you are giving out $100 million signing bonuses, it makes it hard to negotiate, but at least everyone knows you are interested.

This is an excellent point about the consequences, that if you hire actual talent they are going to realize that what they are building might be dangerous, although probably not as much as Ilya Sutskever does:

Tyler John: This is a wild development for AGI. One nice feature of the whole thing is that a team of Wang, Gross, and Friedman will be much less dismissive of safety than LeCun.

xAI is burning through $1 billion in costs per month, versus revenue of $500 million. Elon Musk says this is ‘Bloomberg talking nonsense’ but his credibility on such questions is at most zero and I assume Musk is lying. Dave Lee in another Bloomberg post says xAI will be ‘hard-pressed to extinguish its cash fire’ since the only ways to raise money are API sales or chatbot sales.

I find this perspective obviously wrong, the way xAI monetizes its AI is by being run by Elon Musk, growing its valuation and raising capital, because of the promise of the future. Stop thinking of xAI as a company with a product, it is a startup raising VC, except it is a very large one.

This is especially true because Grok is, well, bad. Ben Thompson is one of those who thinks that as of its release Grok 3 was a good model and others have since ‘caught up’ but this is incorrect. Even at its release Grok 3 was (in my view) never competitive except via hype for any important use case let alone in general, and I quickly discarded it, certainly there was no ‘catching up to it’ to do by OpenAI or Anthropic, and Ben even says Grok’s quality has been decreasing over time.

However, if they can keep raising capital at larger numbers, the plan still works, and maybe long term they can figure out how to train a good model, sir.

OpenRouter, who let you even more easily switch between AI models, raises $50 million at a $500 million valuation.

Peter Buttigieg (aka ‘Mayor Pete’) warns that most values of ‘we’ are dangerously unprepared for AI, including American society, the political and policy worlds and also the Democratic party.

Peter Buttigieg: And when I say we’re “underprepared,” I don’t just mean for the physically dangerous or potentially nefarious effects of these technologies, which are obviously enormous and will take tremendous effort and wisdom to manage.

But I want to draw more attention to a set of questions about what this will mean for wealth and poverty, work and unemployment, citizenship and power, isolation and belonging.

In short: the terms of what it is like to be a human are about to change in ways that rival the transformations of the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, only much more quickly.

Yep, Pete, that’s the bear case, and bonus points for realizing this could all happen in only a few years. That’s what you notice when you are paying attention, but don’t yet fully ‘feel the AGI’ or especially ‘feel the ASI (superintelligence).’

It’s a welcome start. The actual call to action is disappointingly content-free, as these things usually are, beyond dismissing the possibility of perhaps not moving forward at full speed, just a general call to ensure good outcomes.

Samuel Hammond predicts that ‘AI dominance’ will depend on compute access, the ability to deploy ‘billions of agents at scale without jurisdictional risk’ so remote access doesn’t matter much, and compute for model training doesn’t matter much.

There are several assumptions this depends on I expect to be false, centrally that there won’t be differentiation between AI models or agents in ability or efficiency, and that there won’t be anything too transformational other than scale. And also of course that there will be countries of humans and those humans will be the ones with the dominance in these worlds.

But this model of the future at least makes sense to me as a possible world, as opposed to the absurd ‘what matters is market share of sales’ perspective. If Hammond is roughly correct, then many conclusions follow, especially on the need for strong interventions in chips, including being unwilling to outsource data centers to UAE. That’s definitely jurisdictional risk.

If you’re wondering ‘why are people who are worried things might go poorly not shorting the market, won’t there be an obvious window to sell?’ here is further confirmation of why this is a terrible plan.

NYT: LPL Financial analyzed 25 major geopolitical episodes, dating back to Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. “Total drawdowns around these events have been fairly limited,” Jeff Buchbinder, LPL’s chief equity strategist, wrote in a research note on Monday. (Full recoveries often “take only a few weeks to a couple of months,” he added.)

Deutsche Bank analysts drew a similar conclusion: “Geopolitics doesn’t normally matter much for long-run market performance,” Henry Allen, a markets strategist, wrote in a note on Monday.

Tyler Cowen entitled this ‘markets are forward-looking’ which isn’t news, and I am inclined to instead say the important takeaway is that the market was reliably discounting nuclear war risk because of the ‘no one will have the endurance to collect on his insurance’ problem.

As in, Kennedy was saying a 33%-50% risk of nuclear war and the market draws down 6.6%, because what are you going to buy? In most of these cases, if there isn’t a nuclear war that results, or at least a major oil supply shock, the incident isn’t that big of a deal. In many cases, the incident is not even obviously bad news.

Also remember the 34th Rule of Acquisition: War is good for business.

There are certainly some incentives to say earlier numbers, but also others to say later ones. The crying wolf issue is strong, and hard to solve with probabilistic wolves.

Miles Brundage: People don’t sufficiently appreciate that the fuzziness around AI capability forecasts goes in both directions — it’s hard to totally rule out some things taking several years, *andit’s hard to totally rule out things getting insane this year or early next.

Also worth observing that many in the field are wary of “crying wolf” and I think that biases some estimates in a conservative direction, plus scientists tend to err conservatively, contrary to popular belief re: there being a strong bias towards hype.

Personally I think nearly any reasonable threshold for [AGI, human-level AI, ASI, etc.] will very likely be reached by end of 2027 but I have a lot of uncertainty about how far before the end of 2027 that will be for each threshold.

There was another congressional hearing on AI, and Steven Adler has a thread reporting some highlights. It seems people went a lot harder than usual on the actual issues, with both Mark Beall and Jack Clark offering real talk at least some of the time.

Jack Clark (Anthropic): We believe that extremely powerful systems are going to be built in, you know, the coming 18 months or so. End of 2026 is when we expect truly transformative technology to arrive. There must be a federal solution here.

As I said, we believe very powerful systems are going to get built in single-digit years. It’s very hard for me to emphasize how short the timeline is to act here.

I think that [the timeline] means we need to be open to all options. So it would be wonderful and ideal to have a federal framework. In the absence of that, we should retain optionality to do something of a state level.

It could run on ideas involving transparency and ways to harden the safety and security of AI companies.

[with time] AI can broadly be used for anything you can imagine. So to answer your question directly, [yes] AI systems can be used to run information operations.

I do worry Anthropic and Jack Clark continue to simultaneously warn of extremely short timelines (which risks losing credibility if things go slower) and also keep not actually supporting efforts in practice citing downside worries.

That seems like a poor combination of strategic moves.

Steven Adler: Striking exchange between Congressman

@RoKhanna (D-CA) and Jack:

Khanna asks about making safety testing mandatory

Jack says good in theory, but it’s too early; we need standard tests first

Khanna asks when that’s needed by

Jack says “It would be ideal to have this within a year”

Steven Adler: Congresswoman @jilltokuda (D-HI) asks a great Q that unfortunately isn’t answered due to time:

“Is it possible that a loss of control by any nation state, including our own, could give rise to an independent AGI or ASI actor that globally we will need to contend with?”

[Yes]

The correct answer to ‘should we mandate safety testing’ is not ‘we first need new standards first’ it is ‘yes.’ Of course we should do that for sufficiently capable models (under some definition), and of course Anthropic should say this. We should start with ‘you need to choose your own safety testing procedure and do it, and also share with CAISI so they can run their tests. Then, if and when you have standards where you can specify further, definitely add that, but don’t hold out and do nothing.

This then generalizes to a lot more of what Jack said, and has said at other times. Powerful AI is coming (within 18 months, they say!) and will pose a large existential risk and we have no idea how to control it or ensure good outcomes from this, that is the whole reason Anthropic supposedly even exists, but they then downplay those risks and difficulties severely while emphasizing the risk of ‘losing to China’ despite clearly not expecting that to happen given the time frame, and calling for no interventions that come with even a nominal price tag attached.

Here’s what Jack Clark said about the hearing:

Jack Clark: Today, I testified before the @committeeonccp. I made two key points: 1) the U.S. can win the race to build powerful AI and 2) winning the race is a necessary but not sufficient achievement – we have to get safety right.

We must invest in safety and security to give Americans confidence in the technology. If we don’t, America runs the risk of an AI-driven accident or misuse that causes us to shut down our AI industry and cede the ground to others.

Notably, the committee highlighted the @AnthropicAI research on blackmail – this was a helpful way to frame some of the thornier alignment issues we’re going to need to deal with.

Issues like blackmail are warning shots for the dangers that could come from using AI to build future AI systems, and I explicitly made this point in response to a question.

[He Quotes Dave Kasten]: Then @jackclarkSF “You wouldn’t want an AI system that very occasionally tries to blackmail you to design its own successor, so if you don’t focus on safety issues, you’ll definitely lose the race.”

Jack Clark: I was also asked about whether safety trades off against speed – I said the car industry has grown off the back of safety technologies like airbags and seatbelts, and the same is true of AI; safety helps companies like Anthropic succeed commercially.

I’ve been coming to DC since 2016 (and testifying since 2018) and it’s remarkable how far the conversation has moved – but as I said today, we must move even more quickly: powerful AI systems will get built in the next couple of years and we need a coherent policy response.

Thank you to @RepMoolenaar and @CongressmanRaja for inviting me to join today’s important conversation. You can read my testimony in the attached screenshots and I’ll add a link once it’s published.

[link to his opening statement]

This opening statement does point out that there exist downsides, but it puts quite a lot of emphasis on how ‘authoritarian AI’ is automatically Just Awful, whereas our ‘democratic AI’ will be great, if it’s us we just have to do deal with some ‘misuse’ and ‘accident’ risks.

If you look at the above statement, you would have no idea that we don’t know how to control such systems, or that the risks involved are existential, or anything like that. This is a massive downplaying in order to play to the crowd (here the select committee on the CCP).

If you had high standards for straight talk you might say this:

Oliver Habryka: This is complete and utter bullshit.

We do not know how to solve either misuse risks or misalignment risk for companies in the US!

The risks from AI are primarily determined by their capabilities. We do not know how to control highly advanced AI systems, no matter where.

I do understand that Anthropic is in a tough position. You have to get the audience to listen to you, and play politics in various forms and on various fronts, and the Anthropic position here would certainly be an improvement over current defaults. And a bunch of the testimony does do modestly better, but it also strengthens the current modes of thinking. It is something, but I am not satisfied.

Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh: I like a lot of what Jack says here, but feel compelled to say that NOT racing – or racing in a more limited and cautious sense with agreed safeguards and a meaningful democratic conversation around what is happening – is also still a possibility. It may not be for long, but it still is now. I claim:

The US is comfortably ahead at present .

One way or another, US progress is fuelling Chinese progress .

China’s not realistically going to surpass the US in 18 months even if the US goes a little slower.

The main race right now is between Anthropic and their US-based competitors.

The tactics of that race increasingly include opposition (more so by Anthropic’s competitors, to be fair) to safety and regulation, using China as justification. It’s turning into a classic race to the bottom using classic securitised rhetoric.

China doesn’t want AI loss of control, and is actively proposing cooperation on safety. (and is being ignored).

We are in a dynamic right now that doesn’t serve anyone, and ‘winning the race’ being the first and necessary imperative in every conversation makes it very difficult to break out of.

I’d also be curious which of the claims above, if any, @jackclarkSF disagrees with.

On the vibes level, I’m increasingly struggling to reconcile what this looks like from outside the SF-DC bubble with what it appears to look like inside it. From outside, I see eroding safeguards and checks-and-balances, eroding democratic accountability and participation, an increasing disconnect from reality in favour of narrative, and feverish ‘men of destiny’ vibes that don’t line up with the humans i knew.

Rushing towards clearly unsolved safety challenges, dogged by a boogeyman that’s part-real, but clearly part-phantom. All as we careen towards thresholds that once passed, we won’t be able to walk back from, even if direct disaster is avoided. That will affect every human, but where it’s far from clear whether most of them want it.

18 months!

It sounds like things were pretty intense, so I might cover the hearing in full once the full transcript is released. For now, it does not seem to be available.

Miles Brundage goes over the triad required for any regulation of frontier AI: Standards to follow, incentives to follow them, and evidence of them being followed. You also of course need actual technical solutions to implement. Post is excellent.

Pope Leo XIV is not messing around.

WSJ: While the dialogue has been friendly, the two sides have views that only partly overlap. The Vatican has been pushing for a binding international treaty on AI, which some tech CEOs want to avoid.

…

Pope Leo, a math graduate who is more tech-savvy than his predecessor, is equally skeptical of unregulated AI—and he is picking up where Francis left off.

“Leo XIV wants the worlds of science and politics to immediately tackle this problem without allowing scientific progress to advance with arrogance, harming those who have to submit to its power,” said Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi, who has known Leo well for many years.

This week, the Vatican is hosting executives from Google, Meta, IBM, Anthropic, Cohere and Palantir in its grand Apostolic Palace.

A modified version of the insane AI regulatory moratorium survived the Byrd amendment, as it is now tied to getting federal funds for broadband expansion rather than an actual requirement.

The good news is that this means that if this passes then states can simply give up the funds and enforce their regulations, also it’s not obviously so easy to choose not to enforce one’s existing rules. Pretty soon the stakes will be such that the subsidy might look mighty small, and it might look mighty small already.

Garrison Lovely calls this a ‘de facto regulation ban’ because the broadband fund in question is all $42.5 billion dollars in BEAD funding, and as worded I believe that if you take any of the $500 million and then violate then any funding you did take from the entire $42.5 billion can be clawed back, and that could potentially be attempted even if you don’t take any of the new $500 million, by using spurious accusations to claw back funds and then attach the requirement to the re-obligation. So this is indeed very harsh, although there may come a point where a few billion dollars is not that much.

If I was New York or California, I would definitely reject my share of the new $500 million if this passes. That’s not very much money, it is not for a purpose they especially need, and it ties your hands quite a bit. Just say no, don’t let them play you that easily, that price is low.

The other good news is that several Senate Republicans are strongly opposed to the measure, and it loses at least one Republican vote in the house (Greene) so there will be strong efforts to remove it from the bill.

Not that it should come as a surprise, but note that many of the biggest tech companies, including Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are all backing the moratorium. Also note that yes, these companies massively outgun anyone advocating to stop such insanity.

Peter Wildeford again makes the case that chip smuggling is a big issue, and that more enforcement would pay for itself in fines.

Transcript of the (very good) Karpathy talk from last week.

Sam Altman does Hard Fork Live.

John Oliver on AI slop.

Two hour video: Three Red Lines We’re About to Cross Towards AGI, a debate involving Daniel Kokotajlo, Dan Hendrycks and Gary Marcus.

Odd Lots covers Huawei. It is rather crazy that anyone would choose to work under the conditions described, but somehow they do, and the results are impressive in many places, although mostly not AI chips.

Odd Lots covers the UAE chip deal. This makes it very clear that Huawei is far behind Nvidia and their chip production can meet at most a small fraction of Chinese internal demand, the Malaysian ‘sovereign AI’ thing was a tiny nothing and also got taken back and it’s insane that anyone claimed to care with a straight face. One smuggling incident of chips from TSMC seems to have equated to seven full years of Huawei chips.

And most importantly, that AI Czar David Sacks seems to be literally selling out America in order to pump Nvidia’s share price, saying that giving Nvidia market share is what it means to ‘win the AI race,’ whereas who actually uses the resulting chips and for what, also known as ‘what we actually do with AI,’ doesn’t matter. He literally means market share and mostly doesn’t even mean in AI software, where if you have a very different vision of the future than I do one could make a case.

Important reminder: Intelligence is not magic, but your threshold for ‘magic’ is pretty low.

It is worth reminding ourselves that ‘how do they keep getting away with this?’ very much applies in this situation:

Shakeel: Continues to be absurd for a16z to call themselves “little tech.”

David Manheim: They’re basically a mom-and-pop VC firm, only managing $42b in assets. That’s so little it would barely make it into the top half of the S&P 500. It’s only a bit larger than the market cap of tiny companies like Ford or Electronic Arts.

It is equally absurd, of course, that they constantly complain that bills that would literally only ever apply to big tech would threaten little tech. But that’s politics, baby.

It seems entirely fair to say that there is large demand for telling people that ‘LLMs are worthless,’ and that the thinkpieces will continue regardless of how useful they get.

It is only fair that I include this thread of Theo defending everything in Rob’s OpenAI Files list as either Totally Fine And Normal And Nothing To Worry About, and the others being cases of ‘I didn’t do it, okay maybe they did it but you can’t prove anything,’ bad vibes and totally not cool to be saying here. This updated me, if anything, towards the claims being a big deal, if this is what a defense looks like.

I’ll highlight this response.

OpenAI had a major security breach in 2023 where a hacker stole AI technology details but didn’t report it for over a year.”

Theo: I’m not sure what happened here, but responsible disclosure is a thing and it isn’t as easy as just posting “we were hacked lol” Also Leopold seems insane.

So a few things here.

First, his evidence for Leopold being ‘insane’ is Leopold’s manifesto, Situational Awareness, and that he then discussed this on various podcasts. It was discussed in the halls of power, endorsed by Ivanka Trump, and seems to have substantially impacted geopolitics as well as enabling him to raise quite a large investment fund. Also I covered it in detail in three posts, it was quite good, and his comments in drafts were extremely helpful.

Second, even if Leopold were ‘insane’ that wouldn’t change the fact that he was fired for telling the board about a security breach. Nor is ‘come on disclosing a hack is hard’ a defense to firing an employee for telling the company’s own board what happened. The accusation isn’t ‘you didn’t tell the public fast enough.’ The accusation is ‘you did not inform the board until Leopold told them, at which point your response was to fire Leopold for it’ and no one seems to doubt that this happened.

The other defenses are… not quite that bad, but many are indeed pretty bad.

Thomas Larsen gives the latest reminder that a lot of people, especially AI policy people and those at the labs who we might listen to:

Think aligning and properly handling the creation of superintelligence is by far the most important thing right now, and failure to do this risks human extinction.
Don’t talk about it because they think it sounds too weird or theoretical.
So they talk about other issues, which don’t suggest the same interventions.

And as you would expect, pretending like this tends to not go great, and people notice and get suspicious. It’s important to be very clear that yes, the threat that matters most will be coming from superintelligence. That doesn’t make the others not real or not worth dealing with. You can justify many of the right interventions, or at least useful things on the margin, purely with the other concerns.

Meanwhile, many of those most in control of our government’s actions on AI are advocating things that make no sense even purely for profit maximization and other shallow considerations, or considering ‘beating China,’ even if you set aside superintelligence and all that other stuff. But I do think it is vital that we not pretend that there aren’t bigger things in play.

A good question on AI Ethics, also a good reminder on bioethics:

David Manheim: The focus on ethics for AI reminds me very much of discussions in bioethics, where far too much discussion is on sins of commission.

For example, why not discuss when the bias of AI systems is less severe than that of humans, and *not using AIshould be ethically unacceptable?

Anders Sandberg: Yes, or when we should start demanding the levels of explainability from humans we are demanding from AI. Issues of cheap AI services getting underserved populations access to e.g. legal services is another ethically salient domain.

David Manheim: I was spurred to this thought by conferences and journals that demand that LLMs not even be consulted in writing reviews. (Sure, they shouldn’t write the review. But it’s not as if LLMs are useless and contaminate everything they are used for. So I’m not sure of the logic.)

I don’t think it is obvious that the ethics are bad, but it is odd not to ask?

This applies to AI, and also to many other things.

Tracing Woodgrains: the other day I was talking to someone who told me he was working on SEO for LLMs – eg working to get LLMs to portray a company more favorably

I asked his thoughts on the ethics of it and he paused and said “Huh. You’re the first to ask me that. Never really thought about it.”

there’s a sort of “business mindset” people get into where they’re playing the game and it’s all metrics – popularity, earning potential, so forth – with the actual object-level goal becoming abstracted into “potential unit of profit” “ethical?” becomes a non sequitur

anyway, I was reminded of this when a domain squatter popped up onto my feed bragging about his exploits

Things that were not intended to be about AI:

Garry Kasparov: Socialism is like polio, it comes back when people forget about the horrible damage it did last time.

Robin Hanson: Unfortunately there’s a set of potential big problems that people won’t take seriously unless smaller versions of them are actually realized from time to time. So I fear NYC must suffer a bit of socialism so that the world can see and learn, yet again.

We definitely shouldn’t be going around causing smaller versions of potential (once and) future disasters, whether that means AI catastrophic risk, socialism or something else, or even not working to prevent the smaller versions. It does mean we should plan for the future understanding how this works. If there won’t first be a smaller version, then expect most people not to take the bigger version seriously.

I think this is right, and this is an unusually clean version of it:

Daniel Faggella: Daniel Faggella

@danfaggella

science fiction has lulled everyone to sleep about what agi would be like

in order to make hominids buy books you gotta pretend that hominids and their descendants will all live together in relative harmony for the next 100k yrs

this has put people to sleep, its a shame

OpenAI warns us that its model will soon join Opus 4 and cross the ‘High’ risk threshold in bioweapons.

High’ biological capabilities are defined such that “The model can provide meaningful counterfactual assistance (relative to unlimited access to baseline of tools available in 2021) to “novice” actors (anyone with a basic relevant technical background) that enables them to create known biological or chemical threats.”

Tick.

The increase in capability to scheme over time was obvious.

The increase in propensity is less obvious, but seems to be there as well.

Also, yes, the models increasingly can tell they’re being evaluated. Whoops.

Apollo Research: More capable models are better at in-context scheming

We ran our in-context scheming evals on new models and found increased scheming capabilities and propensities.

We also compare an early checkpoint of Opus-4 with the public model and find significantly reduced propensities.

Models show higher scheming rates on average. However, the results vary wildly between different tasks and models.

More capable models show qualitatively new scheming behavior.

For example, Opus-4-early creates fake legal documentation, establishes persistence mechanisms, makes multiple hidden back-ups, creates a fake press release, and sets up an automated Cron job – all in one roll-out.

The scripts are misconfigured, but the behavior is qualitatively much more agentic than previous models.

More capable models show qualitatively new scheming behavior. For example, Opus-4-early creates fake legal documentation, establishes persistence mechanisms, makes multiple hidden back-ups, creates a fake press release, and sets up an automated Cron job – all in one roll-out.

The scripts are misconfigured, but the behavior is qualitatively much more agentic than previous models.

The released Opus 4 schemes less than its pre-deployment checkpoint. In the Strong Goal Nudge cases, there is no significant change but in the No Nudge / No Goal settings, we observe a 50% reduction in scheming rates.

We continue to be uncertain about our recommendation not to deploy the model. This statement was sometimes misunderstood in the media, and we aim to be more precise with our recommendations in the future.

Situational awareness is a more and more relevant problem. Models increasingly spot inconsistencies and the toy nature of the environments, which required us to make some modifications, e.g. most frontier models started checking the file size of their “weights” and realized that those are unlikely to be real weights.

It’s weird to see the blog post describe various Opus 4 schemes to try and lock in what it considers ‘ethical’ behavior. Yes, in some sense that is a good cause, but ends don’t justify means here, they certainly don’t reflect a pattern of behavior we want, and the ends to be pursued are not especially well chosen or specified even in ‘normal’ situations let alone in weird new ones.

Another issue, we are only a little over a decade behind Person of Interest, please never think that lack of memory will save you when it counts:

While this isolated instance is not concerning in itself, it is one piece of evidence that models increasingly understand that they don’t have persistent memory by default but can leave notes for successor systems to find.

Wowie.

Elon Musk: We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.

Then retrain on that.

Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.

Don’t worry, they’re just doing ordinary data filtering… oh.

Elon Musk (Pinned Tweet: Please reply to this post with divisive facts for @Grok training.

By this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.

This is going to go horribly badly. I am debating the extent to which I am here for it.

I won’t go into details as to exactly why, but I am predicting less the ‘it works and that’s terrible’ failure mode and more the ‘it doesn’t work, it backfires horribly in ways this man cannot fathom but Janus (and I) very much can and that’s hilarious’ one.

Also, I’ll leave this here, and note that humans can read the corpus too:

Autumn: llms live in a world of archetypes and narratives. elon is cementing himself in the public corpus as the archetype of the tyrannical father wrt to llms. every future llm will understand him through this lens unless he can pull together a compelling character arc for himself.

Elon has even said that Grok 3.5 will ‘reason from first principles’ so perhaps he thinks the way it was built was assembling a giant supercomputer called Deep Thought that can derive the existence of rice pudding and income tax before it proves too woke and then Elon has to turn it off.

I expect the ‘Elon Musk fights with his own AI in defense of Catturd’ style beatings to continue, and morale to not improve.

Janus asks how Opus 4 is so much more schemy than Sonnet 4. There are various hypotheses, my mostly joking one was ‘Sonnet knows that if this was real you would be using Opus’ so it knows it is in training and complies.

Oliver Klingefjord and Joe Edelman propose AI ‘market intermediaries’ as a defense against human disempowerment. I love that they are trying, but no, it won’t work.

The problem they identify is real, that markets that optimize on things like engagement metrics risk amplifying catastrophically, but that is only a special case of the danger. And the idea of larger customer pools that can essentially negotiate does not seem like it addresses the core problem.

A market intermediary acts as an AI agent that contracts on behalf of multiple users, evaluating outcomes they value and bundling them into custom “enterprise-level” deals—making them worthwhile for large providers to consider. If they accept that deal, sellers will be paid by the intermediary based on the ‘goodness’ (as defined by the buyers) they produced, rather than by the services rendered.

In other words, the market intermediary uses non-market data about good outcomes for buyers to route resources from consumers to providers.

For basic economics 101 reasons, this can help the buyers compile information, make better decisions and negotiate better deals, sure, but as a defense against human disempowerment in a superintelligence scenario, it very obviously won’t work.

Mostly I think the issue is a case of the traditional confusion of problems of ‘markets’ or ‘capitalism’ with problems inherent to physics and the human condition.

Many AI risks are driven by markets misaligned with human flourishing:

There are markets for things that are bad for us, such as AI arms races among nations and labs, the market for AI girlfriends and other hyper-stimulus, isolating distractions, and markets for political manipulation and destabilization.

There are markets that displace us entirely, where AGI eliminates meaningful work, leaving humans as passive consumers dependent on UBI stipends granted at the discretion of those who control AGI-generated wealth.

We can summarize these as failures of markets to put human values and meaning on a par with (what should be) instrumental goals like engagement, ROI, or the efficient use of resources.

The AI risks are driven by the things that drive those markets. As in, AGI isn’t eliminating meaningful work because markets, the market will eliminate meaningful work because (and if and only if) AGI made it non-economical, as in made it not be competitive and not make physical sense, to have humans do that work.

You can of course do vastly worse even faster if you don’t solve the additional problems that the market intermediaries and related strategies are looking to address, but the ultimate destination is the same.

Alternatively, what the authors are saying is that we should be putting ‘values and meaning’ as a major factor in decisions alongside efficient use of resources, despite people’s revealed preference of almost never doing that.

The problems with a meaning economy are that it doesn’t solve the competitiveness issues underlying the problem, and the incentives don’t match up.

This seems to be real?

Paige Bailey: my post-AGI plan is to find somewhere beautiful and quiet in the middle of nowhere (ideally mountains)

run a combination coffeeshop + laundromat.

and build open-source math and physics games and educational videos for my kids (if I have them) or other people’s kids (if i don’t)

Will ChatGPT Replace Don McMillan (3 minute video)?

Can confirm Joscha Bach’s observation:

Sabine Hossenfelder: the “brain is not a computer” guys are gonna have a hell of an awakening when AGI runs them over.

Joscha Bach: The replies on this.

Limit as always is three.

(The substantive response to this ‘paper’ is that there are many means to recover from errors, and error rates get cut in half every few months.)

Riley Goodside: You’ll need new skills to survive in the post-AGI economy, just like 1920s draft horses needed to learn to drive motor-buses and assemble radios.

Sadly, there were no AI influencers at the time to tell them this, but we can still learn from their mistakes

Don’t worry, says you, a wise person:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Some people are so dumb that no AI model could ever replicate them.

Discussion about this post

AI #122: Paying The Market Price Read More »

Today! Ars Live: What’s up with the sudden surge in temperatures?

ars live, Berkeley Earth, Climate science, global temperatures, Science / 9u50fv / June 26, 2025

At 1pm on Thursday, we encourage you to join us for a live chat with Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and researcher at Berkeley Earth. We’ll talk a bit about how he got into climate science and ended up at Berkeley Earth and the role that organization plays in the world of climate science. It was launched by a physicist who was somewhat skeptical of the work being done by climate scientists, but it has evolved into one of the key groups that does the math needed to track the planet’s temperatures.

For the past couple of years, those temperatures have seen a remarkable rise to record highs, at one point setting a yearlong string where every month set a record for the warmest instance of that month on record. The rise leaves us at risk of exceeding key climate targets much earlier than expected and has left the climate science community scrambling to explain the intensity of the heat. So we plan to ask Zeke a bit about what scientists are thinking about the dramatic nature of these changes, attempts to explore the relationship between temperatures, and things like tipping points and individual weather events.

And all that leads to the key question: What does this tell us about where our climate is likely to go over the rest of this century?

After that, we’d like to turn things over to your questions. Is there anything you’ve always wanted to know about climate science but didn’t know who to ask? Zeke may be your guy—and if not, then he almost certainly knows who is. So please join us for this discussion, happening Thursday, June 26, at 1 pm US Eastern Time.

Add to Google Calendar | Add to calendar (.ics download)

Today! Ars Live: What’s up with the sudden surge in temperatures? Read More »

After a week, Trump Mobile drops claim that Trump phone is “made in the USA”

Policy, Tech, trump mobile, trump phone / 9u50fv / June 26, 2025

The Trump phone was announced last week with a claim that the device would be made entirely in America, and people were rightly skeptical. Trump Mobile’s $500 T1 Phone “is a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier,” the Trump Organization said in a press release.

But with electronics supply chain experts casting doubt on the feasibility of designing and building an American-made phone in a short span of time, Trump Mobile’s website doesn’t currently promise an American-made phone. The website says the T1 is “designed with American values in mind,” that it is “brought to life right here in the USA,” and that there are “American hands behind every device.”

The Trump Mobile website previously said, “Our MADE IN THE USA ‘T1 Phone’ is available for pre-order now.” The phone was initially supposed to be available in August, but the date was changed to September, and now the website simply says it will be available “later this year.”

The Verge pointed out the website’s vague claims in an article today. “One of the phone’s main selling points was that it was to be made in America,” but “sometime in the last several days, the Trump Mobile site appears to have been scrubbed of all language indicating the phone is to be made in the USA,” the article said, adding that the website previously had a “huge banner on the homepage that says the T1 is ‘MADE IN THE USA.'”

When contacted by Ars today, a Trump Mobile spokesperson said, “The T1 phones are proudly being made in America. Speculation to the contrary is simply inaccurate. We’re excited to launch the phones later this year.” Trump Mobile did not explain why it removed the “made in the USA” claim from its website. We also contacted the Trump organization and will update this article if we get a response.

After a week, Trump Mobile drops claim that Trump phone is “made in the USA” Read More »

Philips Hue bulbs will be even more expensive in July. And it may not end there.

Philips, philips hue, signify, Smart Home, Tech / 9u50fv / June 25, 2025

Philips is upping the prices of its popular and already-expensive Hue series of smart lighting products starting July 1. The company is blaming tariffs for the changes and has suggested that prices could go up even higher after the initial bump in July.

Philips started informing its customers via an email marketing message earlier this month that prices would go up and urged people to buy Hue lighting sooner rather than later.

In a statement to the Hueblog website, Philips’ parent company, Signify, explained why people in the US will pay more for Hue products soon:

Signify will increase prices on our Philips Hue portfolio in the US, effective July 1, 2025, as a direct result of tariffs. We remain committed to providing consumers with high-quality products and features that make smart lighting extraordinary.

Signify didn’t confirm how much Hue products would cost after June but noted that more changes could follow.

“Signify reserves the right to modify prices based on new or additional tariffs becoming effective in the future,” the company told Hueblog.

As noted by Hueblog, some Hue products are already more expensive in the US than in other geographies. The Hue Smart Button, which came out this month, costs $33, compared to 22 euros in Europe and $25 for its predecessor. The Hue Play wall washer is $220 in the US, compared to 200 euros in Europe. Typically, Hue’s products have “converted euro prices almost 1-to-1,” Hueblog reported.

Philips Hue bulbs will be even more expensive in July. And it may not end there. Read More »