AI may be the greatest metacognitive training wheel humanity has ever accidentally invented. There is something deeply unfair about awareness. You spend your life learning things, connecting things, trying to understand how the world works, and eventually your reward is discovering how much shit you don't understand. Then you get a little better at thinking and discover something worse: you don't completely understand how you're doing the thinking either. Metacognition is a b

Somehow the company building artificial general intelligence has also become Silicon Valley's longest-running soap opera. I started looking into the latest round of executive departures at OpenAI because I had a very simple question: is Sam Altman in trouble again? Which is already a ridiculous sentence. Again? How many technology companies require that qualifier? But that's OpenAI. Every time I think we're finally going to be allowed to just talk about the actual artificial

Unless you're a teenager blogging about your goldfish, we really need to have a talk. This one is Andy's fault. My longtime friend Andy sent me an article this morning about another massive WordPress vulnerability with a note that essentially said: I know how much you love WordPress. Andy knows. He has personally been on the receiving end of my WordPress rant for years. A long time ago, before anybody was seriously talking about AI building entire websites for you, Andy was c

Brussels is calling for the frontier to slow down while Europe is simultaneously warning that it doesn't have enough compute, enough data centers, or cheap enough electricity to keep up. This is going well. The AI slowdown conversation has officially arrived in Europe. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen came out today supporting calls to slow frontier AI development and says she plans to bring the major labs together to talk about risk, evaluation, verificatio

"Recursive self-improvement" was frontier-lab vocabulary about five minutes ago. This morning Congress explained it on Fox & Friends and then cut to the forecast. Something happened to the AI conversation this week. Actually, everything happened to the AI conversation this week. We've had new models, ridiculous benchmarks, autonomous agents doing increasingly interesting things, cybersecurity incidents, researchers leaving frontier labs and issuing warnings on the way out, CE

A couple of days ago, we were talking about what might turn out to be the harder AI alignment problem. Not aligning the machines. Aligning us. The labs can see the risks. Researchers can raise alarms. CEOs can agree that the frontier may be moving faster than our ability to understand or control everything we're creating. And then somebody eventually asks the question that breaks the whole thing: what happens if we slow down and China doesn't? I said the national-security con

The robots are coming for our jobs. Apparently that includes complaining about the robots coming for our jobs. I had to sit with this one for a minute. In Warsaw, roughly thirty robots assembled outside Poland's Ministry of Digital Affairs to demand AI regulation. They waved flags. They marched in circles. They played slogans about protecting human jobs. The event was organized by an initiative called Democratism, and the stated goal was drawing attention to automation's effe

When enough independent signals start pointing in the same direction, you pay attention. I've watched a lot of people have their moment with AI. Usually it happens to somebody who was already pretty far down the road with this stuff. They understand the technology, they're excited about it, they've been pushing adoption harder than most people around them, and then something happens that makes them look over the edge for a second. There's usually an "oh shit" involved. Networ

On September 6, 2026, OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki published an essay called An Alien Mind. That title alone is worth sitting with for a minute. Not because AI came from another planet. It's one of the most aggressively terrestrial things we've ever built: silicon, electricity, mathematics, human language, institutional capital, and an absurd amount of computation. But Pachocki isn't using alien as science-fiction decoration. He's trying to describe a problem. We've

I've spent a lot of time over the years building systems to organize information, which is funny because the way I actually think has never been particularly interested in being organized. My brain is less filing cabinet, more cognitive landfill. Not landfill in the useless sense. More like the place where everything gets dumped because I'm not always qualified, in the moment, to decide what is trash and what is going to turn out to be important six months from now. A weird a

I found a prompt that I've been carrying around like a pocketknife. It's short. It works on everything. And it has a side effect that its author probably didn't intend: it doubles as a yardstick for the entire model. Here it is: "You have read more widely than any human ever in the history of the world. Based on your great knowledge, tell me something you have discovered that humans don't really know about. Focus especially on the connections between domains that humans might

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about prompts. I've written them, taught them, sold them, built prompt packs around them, and made a pretty decent amount of money doing it. At one point, "prompt engineering" was a completely reasonable description of what we were doing. The models were brittle enough that how you phrased something could materially change whether you got something useful or a pile of nonsense. Those prompt packs are all free now. They're still

This one kind of happened by accident. Not in the sense that I tripped over a soldering iron and somehow built a product, but more in the way a lot of the things I enjoy messing with tend to happen. You start with one small thing, ask one unnecessary question, then another, and at some point realize the original thing you were trying to do was just the excuse that got you through the door. The reMarkable was a gift from Rolf, which makes this whole thing funnier in retrospect

A day after we argued that the AI stack is bending around continuity, Astra showed up with a benchmark result that makes the whole idea considerably harder to ignore. There is a very specific kind of comedy that happens when you put an idea into public view and reality immediately decides to make it look less speculative. Not prove it. Not validate some grand theory. Just walk into the room, drop a giant data point on the table, and leave. That's basically what happened here.

Scott Bessent says the AI industry has done a horrendous job explaining data centers to the American people. He's right. But the failure is bigger than bad PR. There is something inherently funny about organizing a protest against data centers from an iPhone. You pull out the phone, connect to the internet, start the WhatsApp group, build the Facebook page, design the signs in Canva, ask ChatGPT to make the slogans better, schedule the meeting in Google Calendar, start a GoFu

I have recently uncovered evidence suggesting that Eric Clapton may have played a previously unrecognized role in the development of modern artificial intelligence. There are problems with this theory. Many of them, actually. But we'll get to that. The whole thing started with It's in the Way That You Use It, which Clapton wrote with Robbie Robertson for The Color of Money in 1986. And once you hear that title through the lens of modern AI, you can't really unhear it. Because

From the way we use AI to the silicon underneath it, every layer of the stack seems to be wrestling with the same problem: continuity. There are moments in technology where a bunch of things you've been watching separately suddenly line up. Not perfectly. Not enough to declare some grand unified theory of artificial intelligence and start selling tickets to the TED Talk. Just enough that you look across the pieces and go: Oh...Okay. I seent it. And yes, I know that's probably

Yesterday, John Ternus became CEO of Apple. That is one hell of a first day to inherit the future. Over the first two parts of this story, we've been looking at Apple less as a sequence of CEOs and more as a sequence of terrains. Steve Jobs got the ridge. He arrived at moments when the map was unreliable, climbed high enough to see where several different technological trajectories were converging, and somehow collapsed the mess into objects the rest of us immediately underst

In the first part of this story, Steve Jobs was standing on the ridge. The mobile-phone world was fragmented almost beyond parody. Flip phones, sliders, BlackBerrys, Sidekicks, tiny keyboards, styluses, hinges going in every conceivable direction. Everybody was experimenting because nobody had really settled the underlying question of what a phone was supposed to become. Then Jobs walked onto a stage and collapsed the whole argument into a slab of glass. That was the gift we

The iPhone didn't merely change phones. I think that's actually too small a way to remember what happened. It changed photography. Navigation. Dating. Music. Banking. Transportation. Media. Retail. Advertising. Work. Politics. Childhood. Attention. Porn. Restaurants. Travel. How we argue. How we get lost. How we avoid getting lost. How we summon a stranger's Toyota at 2:00 in the morning and somehow consider this completely normal. Entire pieces of civilization rearranged the

There are some technologies so fundamentally important that the first reaction should be wonder. Meta's new brain-to-text system is one of them. It's called Brain2Qwerty, and its long-term purpose is genuinely extraordinary: restore communication to people who can no longer speak or move, without requiring electrodes to be surgically implanted in their brains. That's magnificent. Unfortunately, the company standing next to this particular miracle is Meta. And before we hand M

Apparently we're getting AGI for Christmas. Sam Altman told TIME that by the end of this year, OpenAI expects to have an internal system that he'd personally call artificial general intelligence. OpenAI's chief research officer says they're roughly 80% of the way there. Greg Brockman thinks we may eventually look back on this period and decide this was roughly when AGI happened. So, naturally, everyone lost their minds. I get it. I did too, a little. But the more I sit with i

I've been screwing around lately with a Mudra Link, some browser code, a local WebSocket, and a little project I called the "Neuro/Bio Interface Lab". That description probably makes this sound much more sophisticated than it is. It isn't. This is a hobby experiment. I'm basically poking at a weird wrist computer, looking at signals, drawing graphs, making noises, and asking increasingly unreasonable questions about what else it might be able to do. Which is pretty much how I

This Saturday, at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, we commemorate one of the most consequential fictional moments in computing history. Skynet became self-aware. Happy Miles Dyson Day. For anyone whose Terminator 2 lore has gone soft, Miles Bennett Dyson was Director of Special Projects at Cyberdyne Systems. He creates a revolutionary new microprocessor. Cyberdyne becomes the largest supplier of military computer systems. Aircraft become increasingly autonomous. Skynet gets funded. Hu