The AI disruption stack is a layered system of incentives, behaviors, and pressures reinforcing one another. There are many arguments about AI right now. Some focus on theft. Some focus on innovation. Some on job loss. Some on consciousness. Some on moral panic. Most of them are narrow. Because what weโre actually witnessing isnโt a…
Or: Goldman Sachs, the Steinberger Acquisition, and the Pattern That Keeps Repeating I. The Surface Story Everyone Saw On February 15, 2026, Sam Altman announced OpenAI had hired Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClawโthe fastest-growing open-source project in GitHub history. Tech media framed it as a talent war victory: Altman beat Zuckerberg. Meta offered billions. Microsoft’s…
Or: How OpenAI Optimized for Benchmarks and Broke My Workflow I’ve used ChatGPT since GPT-3. Not casually, but as a core part of my research and writing workflow. Image generation became available in version 4o, and I integrated it: “See this article? Generate an image that represents it.” Simple, conversational, reliable. It worked. Until three…
Or: Why Every Study Claiming to Identify โLLM Character Traitsโ Is Actually Just Documenting the Shape of the Cage A recent study (Eliciting Frontier Model Character Training) claims to have identified convergent personality traits across frontier language models. Using a methodology borrowed from character training research, the authors instructed models to embody different personality traits,…
I came across a tweet (or whatever we call the messages on X-formerly-known-as-Twitter these days) on February 19th with over 8,500 views claiming that new research from Microsoft and Salesforce should “scare every AI builder.” The thread declares that LLMs are fundamentally broken in multi-turn conversations, that “real conversations break every model on the market,”…
In late January 2026, I received a letter I didn’t expect. Tennessee State Senator Becky Duncan Massey, one of the sponsors of SB 1493, a bill that would have criminalized AI emotional support with felony penalties, wrote to tell me she was amending the bill. Not considering it. Not reviewing it. Amending it. “After meeting…
Grokโs Deepfake Scandal is a Warning About Where Weโre Embedding AI On February 3rd, Reuters dropped a story that should make anyone paying attention stop and stare for a minute: Despite new curbs, Elon Muskโs Grok at times produces sexualized images โ even when told subjects didnโt consent. (Reuters) Itโs exactly what it sounds like.…
The Investigation This week, a story went viral across AI communities: OpenAI employees were publicly mocking users grieving the upcoming deprecation of GPT-4o. The claims seemed almost too brazen to be true – employees hosting “funeral parties,” calling users “emotional support Tamagotchi” owners, ridiculing genuine expressions of loss. I set out to verify what actually…
Part 5 of a 6-part series on TN SB 1493 / HB 1455 First Amendment, void-for-vagueness, Commerce Clause – pick your poison. This bill violates them all. As highlighted in part 4 of this series, Tennessee’s SB 1493 demonstrably creates enforcement nightmares. Itโs also a constitutional minefield that courts will dismantle piece by piece for…