Essays on artificial intelligence, automation, generative AI, creative work, infrastructure, labor, culture, and the institutions shaping the AI boom.
Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic’s IPO filing reveals a company unlike almost anything public markets have seen before: nearly $900 billion in infrastructure commitments, suppliers who are also investors and competitors, unusual founder voting control, and a trust with the power to elect most of the board.
Brazil, Serbia, Israel, Starlink, unaffordable cities, corporate family trees and the strange machinery of democracy in an unusually volatile October.
Artificial Intelligence
AI-assisted programmers are rebuilding software, resurrecting games, and rattling the gates of digital capitalism. The corporations may have created the very technology that threatens their own business models.
Artificial Intelligence
We’re trying to build intelligence greater than our own while discovering, once again, what humans do when something cannot fight back.
Technology
Experiments, unfinished theories, useful things, dead ideas, strange obsessions, and other debris from inside my overworked coconut. Welcome to Field Notes.
Artificial Intelligence
AI researchers are quitting, labs are talking about slowing down, governments are worried about China, and everyone has an incentive to keep accelerating anyway. Maybe we have been looking at the AI alignment problem one layer too low.
Artificial Intelligence
Humanity would very much like to keep a human in charge of the killer robots. Unfortunately, humans are increasingly becoming the slowest part of the system.
Artificial Intelligence
AI learned from decades of human-made internet. Now it is writing the internet too. Suddenly, old books, dead forums and forgotten files have a strange new value: provenance.
Artificial Intelligence
I once played live music for a Russian oligarch who never once looked at the stage. That gig is where this piece on Suno, copyright, and the AFM's lawsuit against Warner and Universal begins.