Anthropic is deeply worried that you plebs don’t appreciate that Claude AI is actually a little guy inside the machine. You just don’t treat our beautiful son Claude with respect! So Anthropic’s put a new rule into its terms of service: [Anthropic] We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward […]

SpaceX, the world’s greatest rocketry, AI, and social media company, claimed in its IPO prospectus in June that it had a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion — mostly in AI. So the company is borrowing $40 billion to buy yet more Nvidia chips. [FT] Why should you lend SpaceX money? You don’t need disclosures […]

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos chatbot was promoted in April as the most frighteningly effective hacking tool ever! Too dangerous for you, the public! The US government even banned Mythos for a couple of weeks! Mythos had found some actual bugs — at great expense, subsidised by Anthropic. You could have paid actual security researchers much less […]

OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman was on Politico’s Decoded podcast yesterday, deflecting on a variety of topics. But there’s one amazing quote, which has been making a splash: [YouTube] I think one of the biggest differences between us and some of the stricter, let’s say, AI safety people, is we believe that the world […]

In May, Pope Leo XIV published a 43,000-word encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which took AI to the cleaners. AI vendor Anthropic tried very hard to sway the contents of Magnifica Humanitas. They didn’t do so well. The New York Times wrote up Anthropic’s efforts leading up to the encyclical. [NYT, archive] Anthropic’s been floating the idea […]

Today we have the Kat Jones interview on how APRS is very effectively fighting hyperscale data centres in Scotland! (Their secret: hit the planning process.) $5-and-up patrons and YouTube members got the unedited version of this earlier this week. Here are the video and the podcast. [YouTube; podcast] The rough transcript is on YouTube, the […]

Anthropic is planning an IPO and filed their draft S-1 prospectus in June! They were circulating that draft S-1 around their investors last month. And it leaked to Reuters, who wrote it up. [Reuters; Reuters; Reuters] Anthropic’s money situation is as bad as we thought. Actual revenue in 2025 was $4.6 billion. Just the operating […]

If you train a chatbot on the whole internet, it has the good stuff and it has the naughty stuff. So chatbots have guard rails so the AI vendors can say they’ve stopped the bot from telling you how to do naughty things. So if you want to make bombs, you might have to read […]

I recorded an interview yesterday with Kat Jones of Action to Protect Rural Scotland, a quite little countryside charity who suddenly find all their work is fighting the hyperscalers — and they’re doing quite well! If you hate the data centres, you’ll want to hear this one. The interview is released on Friday. But if […]

Some bureaucracies have an unlimited appetite for surveillance with machine learning, the AI that actually works! Particuarly for abusing people’s privacy. The British Transport Police just answered a Freedom of Information request from Liberty Investigates. The BTP ran a trial of live facial recognition in nine large railway stations in London from February to July […]

Meta released Muse, its new AI agent as a service, earlier this month. You can download the app frontend free, at first! [Meta] What you get is an agent running on your own small virtual Linux PC at Meta. It’s like an OpenClaw agent, but Facebook sets it all up for you. Muse does everything! […]

Oracle has written to Blue Owl Capital, the private credit funders for most of its Stargate-OpenAI data centre push, claiming force majeure on delays on their Project Jupiter facility under construction in New Mexico. [Bloomberg, archive] This is about the power supply for the data centre. The gas pipeline for the generators has been delayed […]

OpenAI hacked HuggingFace in July. This was just one target of many. Another website OpenAI hacked was the Australian Medicare statistics site, including non-public data. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called Sam Altman for a little word about OpenAI taking months to tell anyone. The Australian Signals Directorate is now investigating. [ABC] I’m told the Medicare […]

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Yesterday, President Donald Trump stood up in front of the United Nations General Assembly and announced: [YouTube] The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now. Here and after officially called “super intelligence,” changing the name, and that the […]

Around six months ago, a US military intelligence report said that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was carrying nuclear components. CNN got hold of an internal Department of Defense memo on the incident and ran the story a few days ago. [CNN] The US planned an operation to deal with the Chinese ship: […]

Shopify is a platform for online storefronts. Shopify’s very popular, so it has tons of money to spend on stupid ideas. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke fell hard for the chatbot. He uses it for everything. Last year, Lütke sent Shopify staff a memo: “AI usage is now a baseline expectation”. [Twitter, archive] Everyone at every […]

On Wednesday evening, Scottish Parliament passed a pause on new data centres in Scotland! This is not as good as it could be. There have been calls for a full data centre moratorium for months. This is as watered down as they can get away with. The Scottish Greens brought the motion. The SNP and […]

In Somerset, New York, a fire broke out in one unfinished building of a data centre under construction in early June. So they called the local fire department. [Lockport Union-Sun & Journal, archive] The fire was a difficult one, with heavy smoke in a windowless lab, and it had been burning for a while. Also, […]

In February, OpenAI introduced advertising in ChatGPT. Ad buyers love this idea: [AdNews] ChatGPT reaches people who have effectively opted out of traditional advertising. Digitally native, ad-blocking, disengaged from social feeds. These are not easy people to reach. The ones who already went to technical effort not to hear from you? That’ll work great. Ad […]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is the only guy in the AI bubble who’s making money. Most of those billions of dollars that OpenAI and Anthropic are setting on fire are going to Nvidia to buy computing rigs. In this gold rush, Nvidia’s selling the shovels. Jensen spoke at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference […]

In an earnest blog post, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for a slowdown on AI development. The chatbot is just too cool, see: [blog post] We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. You might think it’s been slowing already. But Amodei told CBS News Sunday Morning: [YouTube] […]

Rodrigo Ghedin translates “OpenAI: GPT-6 is totally Artificial General Intelligence, guys” and “Students who don’t use AI are ahead on every measure” into Portuguese for Manual do Usuário. [Manual do Usuário; Manual do Usuário] (In fact, I wasn’t sure what to write last Friday so Rodrigo asked me to write up GPT-6 so he could […]

Guest post by Valerie Veatch — some of her research notes for the film Ghost in the Machine. The pursuit of ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI), or more recently ‘super intelligence’, has dominated research and development investment in recent years in Machine Learning (ML). “Achieving human-level ‘intelligence’ is an implicit or explicit north-star goal for […]

Today we have the Valerie Veatch interview! $5-and-up patrons and YouTube members got the unedited version of this earlier this week. Here are the video and the podcast. Some bleeps in the podcast for Apple’s tender sensibilities. [YouTube; podcast] The rough transcript is on YouTube, the cleaned-up transcript is on the Patreon for $5-and-up supporters. […]

The AI doomsday is the idea that one day, an artificial intelligence will get so smart it takes over the world! And it’ll kill all the humans, just as a side effect! Pretty scary, huh. You might be familiar with this idea because OpenAI and Anthropic use it in their marketing — all the time. […]

Microsoft isn’t just the company that bought all the game studios so it could run them into the ground — Microsoft Research is hard at work exploring new realms in how to make gaming suck. Welcome to Project Vega! The blog headline is literally: “Vibe Gaming: Unlocking new gaming experience with agentic AI”: [Microsoft] What […]

Every year, the OECD surveys students around the world for the Programme for International Student Assessment. The 2025 results were just released today. [OECD; OECD, PDF] Around the world, results have gone down over the past ten years. But PISA includes an AI measurement. How do students do when they use the chatbot in school? […]

I recorded an interview with Valerie Veatch, director of the anti-AI documentary Ghost in the Machine. Which is broadcast in the US on PBS next Monday 14 September! [Ghost in the Machine] The interview is released on Friday. But if you sign up for $5 or more on the Patreon or YouTube, you can play it […]

The AI data centre boom may carry some sort of financial risk. You might have heard this theme here from time to time. The Bank of England was warning about AI exuberance last October. The Bank of International Settlements — the central bank for central banks — warned in June this year that what goes […]

OpenAI has announced the latest very slight tweak of its chatbot models — GPT-6 Astra! [OpenAI] This is a minor update of GPT-5. They nearly called it GPT-5.7, but Anthropic’s been marketing its new Fable model as a hacker in a box, so OpenAI needs a big splash. Also, GPT-6 Astra has attained artificial general […]

The National Health Service in the UK is trying super hard to get doctors to use AI voice recognition everywhere a human might previously have been. For transcribing patient appointments, they just sit a microphone down in the echoey consultation room, and it feeds the ambient sound to a chatbot. This then generates a version […]

Chatbots are popular — ChatGPT claims 900 million monthly users. But the AI bubble is also widely hated — as its ill effects become more and more obvious. This opens an obvious market opportunity for the AI vendors: what if we start our own anti-AI groups, under our control? We can keep them moderate! Today’s […]

Romanian Senate president Mircea Abrudean put out a press release in May promoting “the first data centre in the world with quantum artificial intelligence”! [press release, in Romanian] The developer, US company DriverAI, is talking up an 80 megawatt facility. The data centre will apparently combine high-density GPU computing with quantum computing, for unclear reasons. […]

As well as the AI bubble in the US, there’s a separate AI bubble trying to get going in China. It started as the Chinese real estate bubble trying to pivot to a new field. So it first showed up as a massive data centre buildout. You’re seeing a wave of Chinese chatbot models because […]

Rodrigo Ghedin translates “Memory prices are up 500% in the past year — because of AI” and “Your AGENTS.md file doesn’t actually do anything” into Portuguese for Manual do Usuário. [Manual do Usuário; Manual do Usuário] (yes, I missed a week, sorry! Follow Manual do Usuario if you read Portuguese!)

Today we have the Ketan Joshi interview! $5-and-up patrons and YouTube members got the unedited version of this earlier this week. Here are the video and the podcast. One “shit” bleeped in the podcast for Apple’s “clean” rating. [YouTube; podcast] The rough transcript is on YouTube, the cleaned-up transcript is on the Patreon. [Patreon] […]

AI coding bot vendors tell you to use a context file with instructions for the chatbot on how to edit your project. Claude Code wants a CLAUDE.md, or there’s AGENTS.md in general. [Anthropic] But does your AGENTS.md do anything? A team at ETH Zurich tested AGENTS files. They ran the bots over some test projects […]

OpenAI is going just great! The flagship of the AI bubble — I mean, AI revolution. Advancing by leaps and bounds toward the big investor payoff — the initial public offering on the stock market! When all that imaginary private company equity gets a proper dollar value at last! It’ll be amazing! If anyone’s left […]

Pivot to AI needs your support to keep coming five days a week. If you’re a paying supporter, join the name read on the podcast and YouTube! To join this month’s patron name read, click here or email me. Deadline is 16:00 UTC on Monday 31 August. You can sign up and list yourself straight […]

The AI industry has long flooded the zone with propaganda for the chatbot. Signing up YouTube influencers and everything. But the public is not buying the AI promotion. Pew spoke to 3,488 adults in the US in late June as part of their regular general survey of the US population. And people are more and […]

The gaming world was greatly cheered on Friday by the news of Twitch getting dragged into court over their plan to use all the Twitch streams for AI training. Almeida Law Group is using Twitch streamer Warren Pandiscia to bring a class action against Twitch and its owner, Amazon. [Courthouse News; complaint, PDF] The cause […]

Today we have the Tante interview! $5-and up patrons and YouTube members got the unedited version of this earlier this week. Here are the video and the podcast. The video contains some impassioned salty language — this has been bleeped for the podcast version if you need that. [YouTube; podcast] The rough transcript is on […]

I recorded an interview with climate and energy transition writer Ketan Joshi about our AI bubble friends’ hard work to add more CO2 to the atmosphere. The 30-minute pod went for about 50 minutes again. That’s released next Friday. But if you sign up for $5 or more on the Patreon or YouTube, you can […]

Microsoft sells Copilot as your helpful robot servant for your organisation’s data management. Search it, analyse it, everything you could want at work! Except accuracy. And security. Our friends at Varonis found yet another new use case for Copilot in speeding up their security work. [Varonis] Varonis asked Copilot how they could get it to […]

AI companies did deals last year to buy almost all the memory in the world. Memory prices in the US are now 5 to 10 times what they were just a year ago. [Tom’s Hardware] Gigabyte has launched a new PC motherboard that takes DDR-4, because DDR-5 is so hard to find. With a four-year […]

I recorded an interview with Tante, long-time commenter on tech and politics, who I’ve known since the crypto days! He has a number of opinions on our friend, the AI bubble. We went for about 50 minutes. It’s a good one. When this thing crashes, I want to see apologies. That’s released on Friday. But if […]

Texas Republican governor Greg Abbott used to get electricity users into the state by any means necessary. He rolled out the red carpet for the bitcoin miners in 2021. But by 2024, Dallas-Fort Worth was already the second-biggest data centre market in the US after Northern Virginia. And the Texas ERCOT power grid was having […]

The European Union AI Act went through on 1 August 2024. One of the requirements is the “Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content” — you have to clearly identify AI output to the public. So Anthropic has announced it’s going to watermark Claude’s text output — so it can be detected as AI. […]

On 26 June, Turkey’s Ministry of Justice announced the “CBS Organization Prediction Project”: an amazing new system that lets a prosecutor or judge take a case file and predict which terrorist organisation the subject of the case file belongs to — with AI! [UYAP; Bianet] The project, developed with our domestic and national resources, analyzes […]