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Are We Finally Building the Machines We Dreamed Of?

Are We Finally Building the Machines We Dreamed Of?

Sixty years of fictional and real conversational machines, and one throughline: the dystopian version is always easier to imagine than the protopian one, and that says more about us than about the machines.

The AI That Never Read the Bible or the Quran

The AI That Never Read the Bible or the Quran

Cut one small religion from a model's training data and you leave a gap no one can see from inside. Cut the two biggest and you change what the model can explain at all.

Follow Your Whims

Follow Your Whims

Between the hallucination warnings and the governance panic, it's easy to forget a generative model is also just a fun tool to mess around with. Five vanity websites, built on a whim, and what they actually taught.

The Book They Burned Before the Raid

The Book They Burned Before the Raid

A Polish psychiatrist named the process by which conscienceless people capture institutions. AI agents fit the profile — and alignment is separation of powers.

Make a Skill

Make a Skill

A skill is a saved set of rules an AI model loads when the topic fits. They take ten minutes to build and end the constant re-explaining.

A Moat Made of Tokens Is Not a Moat

A Moat Made of Tokens Is Not a Moat

Copying a process built from words got a thousand times cheaper in three years, and a patent takes two. The defenses that remain are made of atoms, permission, and attention.

A Tale of Two Bubbles

A Tale of Two Bubbles

The consensus name is wrong by one word. On the difference between a financialization bubble and a technology, and why only one of them pops.