noahpinion.blog

America is still beating China in the AI race

Imagine if China were to gain a big lead in AI models that gave it the power to easily hack into American banks and brokerage accounts and erase people's wealth. It would cause absolute chaos in American society, but how could the U.S. retaliate? Launch nukes?

upstartsmedia.com

SCOOP: Conflict With Instinct Knocks Index Out Of Town’s Buzzy New Raise

Index Ventures, reported by Newcomer last week to be leading the raise, is no longer investing at all in Town, per the sources, despite reaching a signed term sheet in recent days. The about-face comes after another AI assistant startup in which Index was reported to be co-leading a large-sized investment round, Instinct, complained to the investor about potential conflict of interest, the sources add.

ai-supremacy.com

Visions of AI: An Inflection Point in Robotaxis in 2027

At a time when robotics is being hyped but lacks real world demand, the space economy is being built by a NASA with big promises, and U.S. datacenters and manufacturing is being pushed (even on other parts of the world and with trade tariff diplomacy) - the advent of the American robotaxi is being a little, overshadowed. But it's actually a big deal.

wired.com

Smart Toilets Are Already Using AI to Analyze Your Poop

While companies promise they can help users monitor gut health, experts suggest that smart toilets provide little in the way of benefits to the average person.

honest-broker.com

Wendell Berry’s Nine Rules

What makes this especially revealing is the fact the public intensely dislikes AI— surveys make this absolutely clear. So tech companies are destroying the environment solely to increase their dominance and control—not to please you and me.

ai-supremacy.com

China’s AI Rally Is Real. Most Global Investors Are Missing It.

Over the past 18 months, the Shanghai Composite Index has risen 17.3 per cent. That is a respectable return, but it has not beaten the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq. The real gains have happened elsewhere, among the technology companies listed on ChiNext, Shanghai's STAR Market and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

upstartsmedia.com

I Went On An AI Show. It Made Me Feel Better About Human News.

"The avatar is really good at talking, but it's not as good at listening, because it's not trained on it," Misra says.

lennysnewsletter.com

AI’s third era: the rise of persistent AI coworkers | Tara Seshan (OpenAI’s product lead)

Ambition is the new bottleneck for companies, and elevating others' ambitions is now the key part of the PM job.

noahpinion.blog

Here’s how we’re all going to die

Off the top of my head, I'd give AI-enabled bioterror about a 10% chance of bringing down civilization, and about a 30% chance of causing truly world-changing levels of destruction. Climate change is a big deal, but AI bio risk is a lot bigger — it's more catastrophic, it's nearer-term, and we have much less of an idea about how to deal with it.

ai-supremacy.com

Visions of AI: the advent of world models

A world model is an internal mental simulation constructed by an AI system that represents the physics, spatial relationships, geometry, and dynamics of the real world.

platformer.news

The website that created an AI clone of its editor in chief

I think there is a real dirty secret right now, which is that almost every writer is using it. Just, most of them are not saying so.

ai-supremacy.com

We’ve never seen an Anthropic before

Anthropic's revenue for the second quarter surged to $11.5 billion, up from $787 million a year ago. Nobody grows 14x at this scale, nobody. By the time OpenAI goes IPO, Anthropic won't be a comparable company — it won't have a peer competitor, do you understand what that means?

whyisthisinteresting

The Unwillingly Courteous Edition

I know in fact that to chatGPT transcendence is just a word. I had become unwillingly courteous. A friend told me I was being illogical and irrational. But everyone needs a caress, even chatGPT, even me.

stratechery.com

2026.33: The CapEx Train Keeps Rolling

If AI is as valuable as it seems, then it should pay for itself, but that hasn't happened yet. This sort of financial engineering, along with Google leading the way in tapping equity, may build the bridge to sustainable AI revenue. It also expands the blast radius of a bubble in the service of Nvidia's threatened margins.

oneusefulthing.org

An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff

One sign of how far AIs have come is that every one of the AI's notes was accurate and there were no hallucinated page numbers

platformer.news

Town's CEO on the self-organizing company

Pool everyone's private files too carelessly and the AI might put "people's salaries in a spreadsheet by mistake," he said. "Then you've got big egg on face." Over the next five years, though, he predicts that we will come to trust specially trained models to enforce company privacy policies on their own — and that small, high-trust companies will embrace unified company knowledge bases long before the enterprise does.

ai-supremacy.com

Visions of AI: Personal Intelligence

We imagine a future where your AI works entirely for you and deeply aligns with your values. Compared to the corporate chatbots of today, it will feel completely different: responsible, curious, and truly yours. Most importantly, you'll own everything: the hardware it runs on, the data it learns from, and the intelligence itself.

honest-broker.com

Reese Witherspoon and Me

The ten most shorted investment grade bonds are now all linked to AI. Bonds don't get mentioned much by the mainstream media, but they will now determine the future of Silicon Valley—which increasingly spends more cash than it brings in. When you borrow too much, you lose control of your destiny.

ai-supremacy.com

AI Things, Bits and Bites

Nvidia makes a rather outrageous claim that AI factory compute is becoming an investable asset. It's a $500 Billion third-party financing gig. Nvidia has cash to spare and will backstop up to $125 billion, or 25% of the potential deals.

stratechery.com

2026.32: Earnings and Learnings

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google are all spending astronomical amounts of money building infrastructure from AI. Wall Street's reaction, however, differed markedly, based on the cost of the frontier (or not), the potential for immediate monetization (or not), and the clarity of vision (or not).

ftav

AI people need people

The intelligences we care most about are still organic, not artificial. The fortunes of the company that invented the large language model remain, perhaps more than any other in the trillion-dollar club, all about its people.

platformer.news

Replit’s CEO on building a company that can run itself

Net net, there's going to be more jobs, but also there's going to be more companies. But companies will get smaller, and they will do layoffs — 100 percent sure.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #204

Its bet is that studying how humans engage with robots produces both better interfaces and possibly a different kind of robotic brain. The public robots.online experiment lets users try text, audio, demonstrations, and other interaction patterns while the company observes how people naturally attempt to get machines to do things.

ai-supremacy.com

The Genius of Leopold Aschenbrenner

He essentially turned $200 million into $45 billion in two years, given back in a month and I'm not even clear what's left or what's next.

lennysnewsletter.com

Anthropic’s first technical PM on token maxing, the jagged edge, and living in the future | Dianne Penn

I joined in 2023 as Anthropic's first technical product manager, when the entire product team was five engineers, and has since helped ship every model from Claude 2 through Fable, and helped incubate Claude Code, MCP, Skills, computer use, tool use, and reasoning.

lennysnewsletter.com

Claude Opus 5 review: this model is brilliant (but annoying)

Why I think we've hit an intelligence overhang and what that means for which model variables actually matter now

ftav

This is nuts. When's the crash?

There is a potential '2008 real estate' analogy in AI infrastructure. Hyperscalers and neo-clouds have built data centers based on promises of future compute purchases, creating a credit-like structure tied to tenants whose long-term profitability is uncertain.

ai-supremacy.com

Datacenter Capex is Spilling over into a ChatGPT of Robotics Moment set for 2027 and this decade.

A capital frenzy period before a decade where a debt crisis will linger like a coming Tsunami. The robots and debt are coming and this introduces a new Geopolitics and pro-innovation and Defense style of Government that we have not seen in many generations (ironically becoming more like China).

oneusefulthing.org

The twilight of the chatbots

We are very bad at feeling exponentials from the inside, and we are currently inside one. I think this also explains the turbulence around AI better than the usual stories about hype. AI is not capable of being a real cybersecurity threat until suddenly it is, causing sudden and improvised policy changes at the highest level of government.

ai-supremacy.com

The Open Source AI China Problem Just got Worse

If every new Chinese model has the potential to debut in the top five best models by intelligence, that's a big problem for the AI industrial complex of the U.S. The China problem in AI for the United States isn't just there, it's getting worse.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The teenager who took on Meta (and won) & the modern athlete-turned-entrepreneur

Most companies are bolting AI onto old products. Notion did something much harder. It rebuilt itself from the inside out.

stratechery.com

2026.29: Mainframes and Main Characters

AI's ability to port the essential backend programs that run on archaic technology will mean those missed sales never come back.

ftav

A country is only as valuable as its eccentrics

The UK is the world's third-largest destination for private AI capex investment over 2013-25, behind only the US and China, according to Stanford's 2026 AI Index Report. Bank of America makes the argument that the takeover wave is a short-term facet of foreign direct investment that's shifting the UK economy in the longer term "towards higher productivity/capital intensity".

noahpinion.blog

Why I didn't sign the "We Must Act Now" statement (yet)

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the inventors of modern AI, famously predicted the end of human radiologists within a few years, only to see a boom in hiring and salaries for radiologists when it turned out that AI actually complemented their skills. So how the heck are businesspeople and inventors supposed to 'steer' AI toward being complementary to human workers?

platformer.news

The man who tried 200 to-do apps has some advice about AI

"I think staying ahead is wildly overrated," he told me. "This idea that everyone is selling — that you have to either get on the AI train or get left behind — is pernicious and frankly wrong."

upstartsmedia.com

Exclusive: Startup Adapter Launches With $17.8M To Bring New 'Cognition' To AI Tools

"It was obvious to us that 10,000 other people were going to go do the content thing," he says. For Ghetti, those "flashiest" uses missed the most important questions: how could we use technology to truly understand our own digital footprint, our own precious data? More importantly: if we got there, how would we control those treasure troves, so that we weren't putting the big AI labs like OpenAI in charge of our own "personal worlds"?

platformer.news

The loudest warning about AI and jobs yet

The implication is clear, and worrisome: employers are increasingly turning to AI systems to do the entry-level work that their junior workers once did. For the moment, that seems to be creating jobs for more senior workers. But what will happen should AI systems be able to do those tasks, too?

upstartsmedia.com

Radical AI’s Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The ‘Waymo’ Lab For New Materials

"Regardless of what industry you care about, automotive and aerospace, manufacturing and defense, climate, energy, semiconductors, electronics, the most important industries in the world are all a direct result from materials R&D. So to us, it felt like the perfect blend where you have this technology that is completely changing the paradigm in discovery, and you have this field that's 100-something years old and hasn't had it happen yet. That's a place that we should attack."

ai-supremacy.com

Claude Fable Guide for Stock Analysis

The real version is more useful to you as an investor: the single most capable model Anthropic has ever released to the public was considered serious enough that a government reached for emergency export controls — and it's now sitting in the same app you already use.

lennysnewsletter.com

How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two

The question that best predicts how a tech worker feels about their work, in 2026, is no longer 'What do you do?' or 'Where do you work?' It's 'What has AI done to your sense of who you are?'

wired.com

British Space Startup Launches Longevity Lab Into Orbit

The lab will beam back data to train AI models to predict how proteins behind age-related diseases like Alzheimer's and certain cancers behave.

noahpinion.blog

Roundup #84: Bears on bikes

Our experiment involves 1,500 participants in 30 decision environments spanning core domains in economics and the social sciences…[W]e find that AI advice depolarizes choices on average, moving participants away from their initial leanings. This depolarization arises despite the LLM being measurably sycophantic: it disproportionately offers considerations that support users' initial leanings and uses agreeable and flattering language.

oneusefulthing.org

The twilight of the chatbots

We are very bad at feeling exponentials from the inside, and we are currently inside one. AI is not capable of being a real cybersecurity threat until suddenly it is, causing sudden and improvised policy changes at the highest level of government. Markets discount whether AI might threaten to undermine a business model until suddenly it can, leading to massive swings in stocks.

dwarkesh.com

Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math

It's bizarre to have something with this superhuman breadth that knows all the fields so well, and yet isn't finding those lightning bolts that connect them. I think we're starting to see sparks of it actually finding connections between the things it's an expert at.

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: GLM-5.2 review & How Gusto built a new product line with Claude Code

When AI does the building, coordination overhead doesn't scale the engineering; it just slows it down. The key: strip process to what the team actually needs, then let AI fill the gap.

noahpinion.blog

Will AI make companies outsource more, or less?

It raises the possibility that self-employment is the future of employment. It's easy enough to imagine a future in which relying on a group of other humans for your economic sustenance won't be as important — instead, we'll all be like little private ship captains, ordering around our crews of AI agents.

asteriskmag.com

Boarding China’s Last Bus

China's AI enthusiasm seems real. But for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside.

stratechery.com

2026.26: Summer Vibes

fretting about the future can foreclose an appreciation at how incredibly awesome this technology is, and that the possibilities really are endless. You can do anything — even organize your garage. That might sound silly, but technology, for all of its importance, is also fun, and I'm having a blast.

honest-broker.com

The Tech Backlash Gets Nastier—and Funnier

tech companies started raising millions of venture capital dollars and scraping my music without my consent. They now use his own work to generate 'shittier music with it that is inadvertently associated with my name—and then attempting to resell that in the same economy in which I make money from my music.'