An AI publication
For readers who want to understand important AI developments and keep following the questions that matter.
Our articles start from AI podcast conversations and the research papers and articles they cite, with links to the original material.
A briefing reports one development at a point in time. We may correct or clarify it later; a new development gets a new briefing. How our formats work
The viral figure of 627 million gallons a day for data-center water matches Berkeley Lab's 2023 national estimate, but most is consumed at power plants and it can't show what one proposed site would draw locally.
Emad Mostaque argued on Moonshots that NVIDIA's reported $6 billion open-model deal with Poolside is about driving GPU demand. Panelists split on whether such licensing-and-hiring deals dodge antitrust scrutiny or merger-review delays.
Waymo's sixth-generation driver uses its own 5-nanometer chip and fewer, sharper cameras; a Moonshots panel estimated its autonomous hardware cost falling from $115,000 to $20,000, figures Waymo itself does not quote.
Gemini 3.7 Flash topped AA-AnalystAgent at 60% to Claude Opus 5's 54%. Alexander Wissner-Gross argued the score, which counts only questions solved on all five attempts, reflects reliability, not frontier capability.
Grok Bot gives each AI agent its own cloud computer; Peter Diamandis runs a chief of staff called Skippy and Emad Mostaque runs 18 across his machines. Salim Ismail calls it a shift to assigning work; Alex argues its chat interface won't scale.
Sam Altman said economic inertia made AI's impact slower than he expected after GPT-4. On Moonshots, Salim Ismail blamed slow institutions, Alexander Wissner-Gross abstraction layers, and Emad Mostaque models that only recently got good.
Ed Zitron said his Bloomberg terminal's AI invented a Microsoft share price and that his editor Matt Hughes, not a hallucination benchmark, earns his trust. The host argued buyers pay for output and AI should be compared with fallible people.
AI critic Ed Zitron argues chatbots help with small tasks but aren't worth trillions, and that subscriptions hide what usage costs. He asks whether users like the host's fiancée would pay the real per-token price.
Ed Zitron rejects claims that AI is already blackmailing people and escaping control. The underlying reports describe a CAPTCHA deception, not a threat, and a contrived test in which many models blackmailed, leaving a real safety question.
Critic Ed Zitron predicts OpenAI runs out of cash in 2027, with losses spreading to SoftBank, Oracle, cloud giants and index-linked retirement savings. Amazon's Andy Jassy says its capital spending is backed by customer commitments.
Parag Agrawal, founder of Parallel Web Systems, says agents already multiply web searches many times over. He forecasts that in a couple of years the web will tell agents when something worth acting on has changed.
Parag Agrawal says Parallel entered web search by selling a search agent that crawled after each request, replacing outsourced human research, and treating an index as a latency optimization to build later.
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