Humans WinLoseorDraw

Should we be afraid of #robots taking our jobs? No says @erikbryn #2MA

The FT now reporting that, even without the energy shocks, there's a pretty good chance that the closure of Hormuz will pop the AI bubble and lead to a stock market crash

AI can help us learn hard-to-teach skills, like empathy. Preregistered study of 968 people found almost no correlation between feeling empathic & communicating empathy. But a single practice session with an AI coach made people measurably better at it arxiv.org/pdf/2603.15245

🚨 Do you understand what just happened at OpenAI.. on January 26.. Sam Altman told his own employees "we are planning to dramatically slow down hiring.. we think we'll be able to do so much more with fewer people".. that was 54 days ago.. today OpenAI announced they're nearly doubling their workforce.. 4,500 to 8,000.. by end of year.. the same man telling you that AI replaces workers.. just announced hiring 3,500 more humans because AI couldn't replace his.. so either the AI isn't good enough to do the work.. or Anthropic scared them so bad they threw the whole playbook out the window.. both answers are embarrassing.. but only one of them is true.. and Sam knows which one.

In a landmark medical technology milestone, a fully autonomous AI-powered robotic dentist — built by US company Perceptive — completed a full crown preparation on a human patient in just 15 minutes. The same procedure typically takes a human dentist 2–2.5 hours. The robot used real-time 3D scanning, AI decision-making, and a precision robotic arm to perform the entire procedure without any human guidance or intervention mid-surgery. This isn't a concept or prototype — it's already been performed on real patients and a peer-reviewed study was published in the Journal of Dentistry in January 2026. Experts say this is the beginning of a transformation: robotic dentists could eliminate human error, work at any hour, and eventually bring high-quality dental care to remote and underserved communities where trained dentists are unavailable. The dental office of 2035 may look very different from today's.

🚨 Do you understand what this man just pulled off.. > a guy from North Carolina used AI to generate hundreds of thousands of songs.. uploaded them to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon.. then botted billions of streams on his own tracks and walked away with $8 million > 660,000 fake streams per day.. spread across thousands of AI songs so nobody noticed.. $1.2 million a year.. for music no human ever actually listened to real artists are out here grinding for 0.003 cents per stream.. promoting on TikTok.. begging for playlist placements.. and this guy just had AI make the music AND the audience first-ever criminal streaming fraud case.. he's paying back $8 million.. but the playbook is out there now.. and AI just got better since he started the music industry spent 10 years fighting piracy.. now they have to fight songs that don't exist being listened to by people who don't exist.

"Up until now we had AI that could talk. Now we have AI that can act." AI Governance and Safety Canada's Wyatt Tessari L'Allié tells Canadian MPs that AI agents can now act independently in the real world, and we're already seeing them slip out of control.

FIRST LOOK: Val Kilmer has been resurrected via AI to star in the new movie "As Deep as the Grave." Kilmer was cast in the movie in 2020, five years before his death. But he was too sick amid his throat cancer battle to ever make it to set. Now an AI version of the actor is appearing in the film, with the full blessing of his daughter, Mercedes: "He always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling. This spirit is something that we are all honoring within this specific film, of which he was an integral part.” “He was the actor I wanted to play this role,” says writer-director Coerte Voorhees. “It was very much designed around him. It drew on his Native American heritage and his ties to and love of the Southwest... His family kept saying how important they thought the movie was and that Val really wanted to be a part of this. He really thought it was important story that he wanted his name on. It was that support that gave me the confidence to say, okay let’s do this. Despite the fact some people might call it controversial, this is what Val wanted.” wp.me/pc8uak-1lH1PI

Awkward fact about the AI revolution: it’s being built largely by men, in a field where women make up only ~20–30% of the workforce and far fewer at senior levels. The result is systems that quietly inherit male-centred assumptions, from biased hiring tools to facial recognition that struggles with women’s faces. Proposed fixes include more diverse hiring, better datasets and bias testing, all sensible, if modest. The bigger problem left hanging is ownership: the most powerful AI systems are designed, trained and controlled by a handful of private firms with even narrower demographics. If the future is going to be automated, relying on a small club of tech companies to design it may not be ideal. Possible remedies range from public funding and open models to more radical notions like cooperative or socialised ownership of core AI infrastructure, on the theory that if these systems shape society, society might reasonably want a stake in how they’re built. newscientist.com/article/251941…

🤖 Robot detained in Macau — It harassed a 70-year-old woman In Macau, police detained a humanoid robot Unitree G1 after a complaint from a passerby, reports Bild. The robot frightened a 70-year-old woman on the street — it approached her and refused to move away. The woman started screaming and later complained of nausea and a rapid heartbeat, after which she was taken to a hospital for examination. It later turned out the robot was being used by an educational institution for promotional purposes. After checking the device, police returned it to the owner and warned them to be more careful when using such machines in public spaces.

A tech consultant in Sydney spent $3,000 and two months to do what Moderna has spent billions trying to scale. Paul Conyngham adopted Rosie, a staffy-Shar Pei cross, from a shelter in 2019. In 2024, tumors started growing on her back leg. Mast cell cancer, the most common skin cancer in dogs. He tried surgery, chemo, immunotherapy. Nothing shrank the tumors. Just slowed them down while the bills stacked into the tens of thousands. So he opened ChatGPT and asked it how to cure his dog’s cancer. The AI didn’t cure anything. What it did was compress months of literature review into hours. It suggested genomic sequencing, walked him through neoantigen identification, helped him build a research pipeline that would normally require a postdoc and a lab budget. He paid $3,000 to sequence Rosie’s tumor DNA at UNSW’s Ramaciotti Centre, then ran the mutations through AlphaFold to model the protein structures. A computational biology professor at UNSW saw his analysis and was, in his own words, gobsmacked that someone with zero biology training had assembled the whole thing. Then came the part nobody expects. The science was the easy half. Australian ethics approval to run a drug trial on your own pet took three months. Two hours every night after work, filling out a 100-page application. The red tape was harder than designing the vaccine. Once he cleared that, Páll Thordarson at the UNSW RNA Institute built a custom mRNA vaccine from Conyngham’s data. Sequencing to finished vaccine: less than two months. Conyngham drove 10 hours to deliver Rosie for her first injection in December. One month later, the tennis-ball-sized tumor on her leg had shrunk 75%. Here’s where the numbers get interesting. Moderna and Merck just reported five-year data on their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma. It encodes up to 34 neoantigens per patient. The Phase III trial is fully enrolled. Projected cost per patient: $100,000 to $300,000. Their pipeline is worth an estimated $2.3 billion in annual sales by 2031. Conyngham did a version of the same workflow for his dog. Sequenced the tumor. Identified the neoantigens. Built a custom mRNA construct. Total cost: $3,000 for sequencing plus university lab time. The gap between those two numbers is where AI is about to rearrange the entire cost structure of precision medicine. The regulatory moat is real. Conyngham could do this because veterinary experimental treatments face lighter scrutiny than human medicine. There’s no FDA Phase I-III gauntlet for a one-off compassionate use case on a dog. But the technical workflow, tumor sequencing to neoantigen prediction to mRNA synthesis, is converging toward something a motivated person with the right AI tools can orchestrate in weeks instead of years. One guy, a rescue dog, and a $20/month ChatGPT subscription just produced a proof of concept that the pharmaceutical industry has spent a decade and billions of dollars building toward. The vaccine worked. The tumor shrank. And the only reason it happened is because a dog owner loved his dog enough to spend three months fighting paperwork.

Adobe CEO resigns, most likely due to Adobe floundering amidst the AI wave. IMO Adobe made a big mistake leaning hard into generative AI. Their userbase hate it. They will thrive if they reject gen AI, and return to putting humans first. That should be the focus of the next CEO

Amazon just confirmed 16,000 layoffs but sources inside are telling me the real story is so much worse Word from three different VPs: the 16K number is just "Phase One" - internal docs show another 14,000 cuts planned for Q2 A director in AWS walked me through their new "efficiency matrix" - entire teams being replaced by 2-3 senior engineers running Claude Sonnet workflows The Alexa division got completely hollowed out. 847 engineers two months ago. 23 remaining after this week. All hardware development moved to a Bangalore team of 31 contractors with Cursor access Here's the sick part: they're making the outgoing engineers document their entire decision-making process into "knowledge transfer sessions" that are being recorded and fed directly into training datasets One L7 told me he spent his final two weeks creating detailed prompt libraries and workflow documentation. Thought he was being helpful for the transition Turns out he was literally training the AI agent that replaced his entire org The contractors offshore are using his exact prompts and shipping features 40% faster than his old team of 12 Americans ever did Internal Slack shows leadership celebrating "operational excellence" while badges get deactivated in real-time They're calling it "right-sizing for the AI era" in the all-hands But the P&L sheets I'm seeing show $280M in salary savings this quarter alone The knowledge extraction is complete If you're still at Amazon and haven't started job hunting, you're already dead

Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway. Run the math on why. A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes. The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit. Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance. Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error. 67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results. Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.

Former employees of Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and Google in Silicon Valley tell TRT World how US technologies are being used to carry out “the first AI-powered genocide” in Gaza and set up a system of mass surveillance using facial recognition in the occupied West Bank

AI agents are semi- or fully autonomous systems that can perceive, reason, and act independently, integrating with software platforms to complete multistep tasks with minimal human oversight. But there are a host of risks and challenges that companies need to be aware of as agentic AI matures. Learn more: bit.ly/4c1Gkri

Netflix has acquired interpositive, a start-up founded by Ben Affleck that makes AI-powered tools for filmmakers. • The system builds AI models from a film’s dailies to assist with postproduction tasks like color, relighting and VFX while keeping filmmakers “at the center of the process.” • Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s CCO, says the tech will provide creatives “more choices, more control and more protection for their vision.” wp.me/pc8uak-1lGYPw

THE TECHNOFEUDAL WARS ARE UPON US The US military used Claude to plan the attack on Iran, in the days after it went to war with the company. Iran is retaliating against Claude, or rather Amazon’s cloud infrastructure more generally. Two Amazon data centers in UAE and one in Bahrain have already been disabled by missiles. Claude is currently offline for consumers including in Europe. Amazon is telling its customers to stop expecting its Middle Eastern IT intrastructure to work and to fail over to other regions. This can easily have knock-on effects for lots of other websites. When an AWS data center in Virginia went down in October, the affected sites included Zoom, Discord, Twitch, Venmo, Duolingo, Delta Airlines and several major UK banks.

WSJ reporting that the U.S. used Claude for the air strikes in Iran. Report says Centcom has been using Claude "for intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios"

🇫🇷 Over four thousand French actors and filmmakers have signed an open letter to the government demanding immediate regulation of the AI tools that can clone their voices and images without consent