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

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

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

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

Nvidia reportedly just agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. And the more I sit with it, the more familiar it feels. Like GitHub familiar. I live in Hugging Face now. But I've certainly spent my share of time on GitHub too. Not casually. I use this stuff daily. That's why this deal immediately made me think of Microsoft buying GitHub. GitHub Was Never Just GitHub When Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for GitHub in 2018, a lot of people looked at the deal and saw code repos

There's a growing class of AI commentary that sounds very sophisticated. The hyperscalers are overspending. The financing is getting circular. OpenAI sits in the middle of a giant web of capital commitments. Data centers are expensive. Power is constrained. Valuations are stretched. Therefore: AI bubble. I think that conclusion is increasingly coming from people who understand pieces of the technology extremely well while still not understanding what the technology is actuall

A few years ago, this was bourbon-and-nerd-shit conversation. You know the kind. A few technically inclined people sitting around, talking about where AI might go if you just kept pushing the line forward. Dude, what if AI could actually design chips? Not autocomplete some Verilog. Not help an engineer find a bug. Actually get deep enough into the problem to meaningfully participate in designing the silicon itself. Then somebody takes it another step. What if the AI helped de

A few months ago, I wrote about Visa giving AI agents controlled access to payment cards. That was a big moment because it removed one of the last obvious barriers in agentic computing: money. An AI could already research, compare, negotiate, make decisions and execute workflows. But eventually it hit a checkout screen and needed a human. Visa started fixing that. Now a startup called Natural is taking the idea several steps further. Natural just raised a $30 million Series A

There's a new AI model on the internet called Ox Alpha. Or maybe 0x Alpha, if you're a developer and your brain automatically reads anything beginning with O-X as hexadecimal. Nobody seems to know how we're supposed to pronounce it. More importantly, nobody officially knows who the hell made it. Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter on August 20 under the wonderfully reassuring model identifier stealth/ox-alpha. OpenRouter describes it as being developed and operated by an unnamed

Well. That escalated quickly. I keep saying I'm not an "I told you so" guy. I promise I'm not that guy. It's just getting harder to make that argument with a straight face. Because this is now the second time in about a week I've put "I told you so" in a headline. And the first article already had me saying it again inside the article. So, yeah. This is getting a little silly. A few days ago I wrote "I Told You So: McKinsey Just Proved the Value of Everything You Know." The p

An 8-gigawatt OpenAI compute deployment in Ohio looks like a data-center story. It's actually a story about how AI infrastructure is becoming bankable — and what happens when credit, not capital, becomes the bottleneck.

We spent decades asking how much smaller a transistor could get. IBM just changed the question: how high can we build? IBM's NanoStack technology goes vertical, and the semiconductor story becomes one story.