Late last week Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for the AI industry to be regulated for reasons of safety. It is a long read and I will be honest: I only skimmed it, and read a summary of the discussion around the issues on Gizmodo instead. But my limited understanding of the situation is that Amodei says the pace of AI development is putting us all at risk, and needs to be controlled with government oversight.
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I have Opinions™ about artificial intelligence. I’m not wholly against it, but I do feel that the current over-enthusiastic investment and circular dealing in the industry is a toxic aberration. We are spending trillions of dollars on technology that produces a few billion dollars worth of questionable benefit, all while consuming vast amounts of power, water, and technology.
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I read an excellent article on Wired the other day on the topic of organoids and thought I’d share a bit about it here. Even the basic concepts of this topic feel more like science fiction than reality, and that is right in my wheelhouse.
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Blaugust 2026 has added some rules regarding use of artificial intelligence for content included in the festival. Magi over at Indiecator had an excellent overview of his thinking on the topic, which inspired me to do a bit of my own soul searching.
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I read several articles today talking about the much improved ChatGPT 5 model. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has claimed that it is now like having a whole team of PhDs in your pocket.
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The first week of Blaugust is over, but I’m still feeling like I’m just starting this event up. So I’ll fall back on the writing prompts for the first week and talk about myself in this post rather than coming up with something new.
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I read an article today over on The Register about how AI may be entering its ‘model collapse’ phase. The basic idea is that more and more of the content that AI ingests to produce its models is, in fact, AI generated. This means that, at its best, AI’s responses will decrease in quality. This sounds very bad, and very predictable.
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The news the last couple of days has reported somewhat confusingly on new Chinese AI company called ‘DeepSeek’. I found a fairly clear report on the BBC about what is going on. DeepSeek itself isn’t the really big news, but rather what its use of low-cost processing technology might mean to the industry.
And that implication has cause a massive stock selloff of Nvidia resulting in a 17% loss in stock price for the company- $600 billion dollars in value decrease for that one company in a single day (Monday, Jan 27). That’s the biggest single day dollar-value loss for any company in U.S. stock market history.
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A lot of social media content is pure fakery. Accounts are created and posts generated entirely to attract eyeballs either for revenue generation, political manipulation, or simply because it is ‘entertaining’ to certain people. The algorithms amplify much of this content towards more and more extreme viewpoints because that is what keeps most of us engaged. This is true because humanity, in the larger sense, is horrible.
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I’ve made a couple of small changes to my site’s branding. These aren’t big things: I have larger changes planned in the next few months. But they address a couple of things that were bothering me, and hopefully won’t make much of a difference to the folks who visit.
I have updated the title of my site and the ‘favicon’ it uses.
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