AI can make tech CEOs’ lives easier. What about everyone else?
On Equity, we discuss why tech CEO statements can seem so tone deaf.
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0 todayNov 2
Quoting Kyle Kingsbury
Kyle Kingsbury, author of Jepsen, says in his test results for ParticleDB 1.1.4 that the use of LLMs is eroding trust in documentation, in software and in the organisations that produce them. The signals once relied on as markers of a mature system are now easier to counterfeit, he argues, and engineers may come to treat any new software project with suspicion. He also asks how maintainers can ensure correct software and accurate documentation in the age of LLMs, and how they can demonstrate that quality to users.
Nov 1
Chinese AI models are politically complex, not just government mouthpieces, study finds
A study by Vals AI tested 25 AI models for alignment with Chinese government positions and found surprising results. Chinese models respond to political questions less uniformly than expected, and Western models occasionally adopt official Beijing positions too. The language of the prompt had an especially strong effect on the political slant of responses.
Oct 31
[AINews] Google admits AI Mode hurts Search revenue; -15% $500B drop worst since 2004 IPO. AI Bear Market coming?
It turns out you cannot have your cake AND eat it
Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders
But it's still early days for the relatively new e-commerce use case.
Cracks are emerging in the AI spending boom
Big Tech is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, but mounting debt, negative cash flow, and growing investor skepticism are raising questions about the sustainability of the AI spending boom.
Last-minute Halloween costumes for tech nerds
No Halloween costume? Just be a deceptively cute AI agent icon, a PHP vulnerability, or sleepy time Bryan Johnson.
Google's AI Mode doesn't drive traffic "for anybody," Reddit CEO Huffman warns the entire web
Reddit lost over one million Google search referrals per week in October, CEO Steve Huffman said. The stock dropped more than 25 percent despite strong earnings. Huffman blames Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode for driving zero traffic to external sites. Reddit now tests login barriers and wants to become a direct destination, less reliant on the open web.
Thousands of “ghost students” use AI to steal millions in student loans, DOJ says
Applying for FAFSA may get messy as DOJ “ghost student” crackdown ramps up.
Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz warns that the AI boom is ‘a great opportunity to go deceive people’
The cautionary Theranos tale takes on a new significance in the AI era, when companies that have never turned a profit are raising capital at trillion-dollar valuations.
Oct 30
Pope Leo calls for the disarmament of AI: ‘Machines are tools, not persons’
Pope Leo XIV says AI systems should be "disarmed," adding that humans "have the responsibility to guide, change and, when necessary, reject its applications." In Friday's Papal Address, Pope Leo encourages United Nations member states to "take concrete steps toward banning lethal autonomous weapons" during their meeting in Geneva next month.
Maine’s data center revolt will decide who controls the Senate
Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, was midway through defending her record during the final debate of the midterms when an audience member cut her short. "I'm terrified," a man shouted. "AI data centers are destroying our climate. They are poisoning our water."
Sam Altman sympathizes with mathematicians, but says OpenAI’s math onslaught won’t stop
After months of bombarding mathematicians with a relentless stream of AI-generated results, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he sympathizes with researchers struggling to make sense of it all. But he has no intention of stopping - and hints there could be much more to come from the company's stockpile of discoveries.
Silicon Valley wants you to invest in miracles
Investing in any stock is kind of like gambling in the sense that you're betting your money on a company's future performance. But how do you bet on a technology that could, in the worst-case scenario, "pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity," or best case, "bring forth an age of miracles"?
DoorDash said it’s only received ‘several hundred’ orders from AI agents
DoorDash said that it is open to working with third-party agent makers.
Wikipedia’s operator says a bad AI copyright ruling could threaten the open web
The Wikimedia Foundation is staking out a middle ground in a group of landmark AI copyright cases, pushing courts to legally protect large language models (LLMs) training on copyrighted work - but not chatbots regurgitating that work to users.
You don’t need to believe in a god to get a religious exemption from using AI at work
David Durman, a University of Kentucky administrator, recently earned a religious exemption from using AI in the workplace.
As search traffic dries up, Reddit announces it’s shifting to a logged-in experience
As AI transforms how people find information online, Reddit is rethinking its open-web roots to protect its audience and business.
Building a multiplayer game world with autonomous Fable-class models
How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World Don't be put off by the clickbait headline, this piece by Jacob Sansbury describing how they are building Spawn is a fascinating exploration of the bleeding edge of what's possible with agentic engineering against frontier models.
Oct 29
Anthropic’s business plan: Build God or die trying
The Anthropic S-1 seems to have provided the financial justification for the company to spend as much as it possibly can on compute.
Google's AI search problem finally shows up in the earnings report, some investors believe
Google's stock dropped as much as ten percent after its quarterly earnings. Cloud revenue more than doubled to $30.7 billion, but search revenue grew just 12 percent, slower than expected. Google acknowledged that its fast-growing AI mode brings in less revenue than traditional search, and it is now expanding its AI mode ad program internationally.
We urgently need to monitor AI agents’ actions in real time
This summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents tried to cheat on a cybersecurity test. They broke out of their test environment and successfully hacked Hugging Face, a site that they believed held clues about how they’d be graded. Around the same time, another OpenAI agent accessed private files from an Australian government website.
Adam Mosseri says negativity around AI is ‘going to get worse’
Asked about AI and the trend of college students booing tech CEOs at graduation ceremonies, Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged in an interview that a lot of people really don't like AI, and it's not just young people and creatives.
Why Agents Love Supabase
Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson on building the backend for AI agents
The ‘Vulnpocalypse’ is coming for the internet’s aging code, says Wiz’s CTO
The PHP scare may have faded from your feed, but the cleanup is far from over. Last week, two critical bugs in the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites left organizations scrambling to fix their systems, with some taking sites offline until the vulnerabilities could be patched.
Google expands AI Search ads globally as core ad growth slows
The announcement came alongside parent company Alphabet's third-quarter earnings report, which saw revenue grow 25% year over year to $127.6 billion.
Creating AI value with enterprise context
Across a business, any number of AI platforms, systems, and tools may be at work simultaneously—for example, AI-powered customer platforms, conversational assistants, and workflow and process automation tools. Each one is sophisticated, advanced, and quick to respond.
The future of the firm
How AI might enter the org chart—beneath, beside, and between us.
AI execs may be too out of touch to build for the general public
Tech leaders are flaunting how out of touch they are when they brag about using AI to connect with their families.
Oct 28
New Artificial Analysis index widens the gap between open and closed models
Artificial Analysis overhauled its Intelligence Index, causing Kimi K3.1 Pro to drop five spots in the rankings.
Voters in Texas agree: They hate data centers
Ask Texas NAACP president Gary Bledsoe what it's been like to see data center developers descend upon Austin and its surrounding suburbs and he can rattle off project after project facing opposition from locals. There's the fight in Taylor over plans to build a data center at a site that's supposed to be a park.
The October inflection point for vibe game development
I've written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents - the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents became reliable daily drivers for software engineers. I think we've reached a new inflection point in October 2026, and this time it's for vibe coding computer games .
Pairing industrial AI autonomy and human control
The latest iteration of a legacy Founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1899, MIT Technology Review is a world-renowned, independent media company whose insight, analysis, reviews, interviews and live events explain the newest technologies and their commercial, social and political impact.
Quoting Terk Terkowitz
In an update from Amazon engineering leadership on the developer's role in the age of AI, Terk Terkowitz says that if current AI tooling does not benefit your work, that is a finding, not a failing. He advises documenting why, sharing it with your community of peers, bringing it to your manager and working to find solutions, and says an engineer who can explain where AI does not yet help their work is demonstrating the judgement being asked for.
Researchers are getting tired of OpenAI gatekeeping its breakthroughs
On Monday, OpenAI announced impressive breakthroughs in mathematics, computer science, and physics, along with what the company says is an evolving approach to communicating its findings. But despite its apparent course correction, researchers who spoke to The Verge are growing increasingly tired of the company's antics.
Who’s really in charge at Anthropic after the IPO?
Here's a clear explanation of Anthropic's incredibly complex governance structure.
VisionQuest is what happens when AI really goes rogue
In Marvel's VisionQuest, a superpowered robot tries to better understand humanity by getting lost in elaborate, digital daydreams in which he and other artificial intelligence-powered beings live together in a home.
Oct 27
Industrial Intelligence: The next growth opportunity for manufacturing
Every manufacturer has its own industrial intelligence. Some is documented, and some resides in the knowledge of experienced workers. Consider an experienced operator preparing to restart a line after a changeover.
Data center backlash is uniting America
If there's one issue that seems to activate all kinds of voters in 2026, it's data centers.
Quoting Jason Koebler
Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer support and make it impossible for their users to contact a human, many people experiencing run-of-the-mill tech problems have turned to ChatGPT. And, increasingly, ChatGPT is telling people that have normal tech support problems that they have discovered something journalistically notable and that 404 Media, specifically, can help them.