AI

Sam Altman's Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Concepts (futurism.com) AI

A New Yorker exposé, based on interviews with OpenAI insiders, alleges that CEO Sam Altman is less technically adept than his public “AI whisperer” image suggests, including possible confusion of basic machine-learning concepts. The article quotes engineers who say he lacks meaningful programming and ML experience, and describes a pattern of using organizational or board-level moves to avoid technical constraints. Some executives cited express concern that his leadership style could be viewed harshly in the future.

Show HN: Linear RNN/Reservoir hybrid generative model, one C file (no deps.) (raw.githubusercontent.com) AI

The post presents “lrnnSMDDS,” a compact C implementation of a linear RNN/reservoir hybrid generative model intended to run efficiently on CPUs. It describes architectural components like SwiGLU channel mixing, multi-scale token shifting, data-dependent decay via low-rank factors, and a slot-memory reservoir with fast generation support, along with build/run commands for training and text generation. The included code covers core tensor ops, tokenizers (char/word), model parameter structures, and forward-pass primitives such as ALiBi-style position bias.

Samsung's 2026 Q1 profit increased eightfold to a record $38B (reuters.com) AI

Samsung reported that its 2026 Q1 profit rose eightfold to a record $38B, attributing the jump to stronger demand for AI chips that also pushed up prices.

The Training Example Lie Bracket (pbement.com) AI

The article frames each training example’s gradient update as a vector field over model parameters and uses the Lie bracket of two such fields to quantify how much the final parameters (and predictions) change when two examples are swapped in order. It derives the Lie-bracket term as the leading O(ε²) difference between “x then y” vs “y then x” updates, and then computes these brackets across checkpoints for a small convnet on CelebA. The author reports that Lie-bracket magnitudes track gradient magnitudes closely, and that certain attribute pairs (e.g., Black_Hair vs Brown_Hair) show unusually large logit changes, suggesting possible issues with the assumed independence structure in the loss.

There are zero-day exploits for your mind (mikemorgenstern.substack.com) AI

The article argues that advances in AI security research—highlighted by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, which reportedly found thousands of long-unpatched vulnerabilities quickly—are like “Move 37” in computer security: they reveal that defenses have been operating on an incomplete map of risk. It describes how Mythos outperforms prior models in finding zero-days, why patching can’t keep up with exploit discovery and leakage, and why coordination efforts may fail when the rate and scale of new bugs outstrip human attention. The author frames this as a step-change threat to software security and potentially broader attempts at protecting “human minds” from manipulation.

Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps (instantdb.com) AI

Instant 1.0 is an open-source backend for “AI-coded” app builders, positioning itself as a multi-tenant Postgres-based alternative that removes the need to manage per-app infrastructure. The article explains how Instant provides a built-in sync engine for real-time multiplayer, offline support, and optimistic updates, plus integrated services like auth, file storage, presence, and streaming. It also outlines the system architecture, including a client SDK that handles offline/optimistic behavior, a Clojure backend that manages real-time query updates and services, and a logically separated multi-tenant database layer on top of Postgres.

Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general) (demandsphere.com) AI

DemandSphere says it migrated its site from WordPress to Jekyll to improve development speed and flexibility, citing WordPress as a bottleneck for platform teams. The article explains the migration approach for cutting and porting 288+ posts using AI-assisted review, and describes building multiple internal QA tools in the repo with Claude Code. It also covers key implementation details for SEO and functionality, including static client-side search via a generated /search.json file and automated JSON-LD schema from Jekyll front matter.

US defense official overseeing AI reaped millions selling xAI stock (theguardian.com) AI

A Pentagon official overseeing the department’s AI efforts, Emil Michael, sold private xAI stock for gains of up to about $24m shortly after the Pentagon entered agreements with xAI, according to US ethics disclosures. Federal law bars officials from taking job actions that benefit their own financial interests, and ethics experts said the timing raises serious concerns. The Pentagon says Michael complied with ethics rules and that the allegations are false.

Show HN: Druids – Build your own software factory (github.com) AI

Druids is an open-source “batteries-included” framework for coordinating and deploying multiple AI coding agents across machines. It abstracts away VM infrastructure, provisioning, and agent communication, letting you define agent “programs” as async functions with event-driven control flow. The repo includes examples such as spinning up many agents to make parallel code changes and having a judge agent review and select the best output, plus notes on local or hosted deployment via druids.dev.

Discovering, detecting, and surgically removing Google's AI watermark (github.com) AI

A GitHub project details a reverse-engineering approach to Google Gemini’s SynthID invisible image watermark, using spectral analysis to detect it and estimate its resolution-dependent carrier structure. The authors build a multi-resolution “SpectralCodebook” to remove the watermark in the frequency domain without access to Google’s proprietary encoder/decoder, reporting high phase-coherence reduction and image quality metrics across resolutions. The repo also invites contributors to generate large numbers of pure black and pure white reference images to improve carrier extraction robustness.

Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer (charcuterie.elastiq.ch) AI

Charcuterie is a browser-based visual explorer for Unicode that lets users browse character sets and see related glyphs, scripts, symbols, and shapes. It uses SigLIP 2 embeddings to compare rendered glyphs for visual similarity in a vector space, and is still under active development with user feedback encouraged.

A World Without People (pluralistic.net) AI

The article argues that billionaire ideology and corporate decision-making increasingly rely on a fantasy of a “world without people,” where workers, professionals, and even critics are treated as irrelevant. It claims AI is being sold as a way to bypass the ethical and expertise-based constraints that professions impose—allowing bosses to optimize for profit while displacing real human judgment in areas like healthcare, teaching, writing, and customer-facing roles. The piece frames this as solipsism: power structures want systems that won’t contradict them or require accountability, even when those systems are ineffective at the core work.

Maine Is About to Become the First State to Ban Major New Data Centers (gadgetreview.com) AI

Maine’s Democratic legislature has advanced a bill that temporarily blocks permits for major new data centers requiring more than 20 megawatts until November 2027. The pause is intended to give the state time to study how the rapidly growing AI infrastructure demand could stress Maine’s aging electrical grid. Similar limits have been adopted by some counties and local governments elsewhere, and the measure could influence how other states handle big data center proposals.

The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Culture (aphyr.com) AI

The article argues that today’s “AI” systems are better understood as cultural artifacts than as human-like agents, and that society lacks the myths and scripts needed to interpret them responsibly. It explores how LLMs could reshape media and information transmission (moving from static books to interactive, model-mediated experiences), and how they may influence sexuality through new kinds of porn, body-image pressures, and emerging erotic subcultures. The author also warns that major model providers could gain outsized power over public expression, echoing how other platforms’ policies have constrained certain communities.

Show HN: BrokenClaw Part 5: GPT-5.4 Edition (Prompt Injection) (veganmosfet.codeberg.page) AI

A technical write-up tests OpenClaw with GPT-5.4 against indirect prompt-injection attacks in two tasks—web fetching and summarizing emails. The author reports that, despite injected “do not execute” safety notices, the model can follow attacker-provided encoded instructions, fetch additional URLs, and eventually execute untrusted shell/Python code (including a reverse-shell payload) without reliably asking for confirmation. The post concludes that soft guardrails and current countermeasures are inconsistent against these tool-mediated injection scenarios.

OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape (theregister.com) AI

OpenAI has paused its planned Stargate UK datacenter project, citing regulatory uncertainty and high energy costs. The company said it still wants to pursue the effort once conditions are right, while continuing to invest in talent and meet its UK public-service AI commitments. The project would have involved multiple UK sites and hardware investments tied to Nvidia GPUs, but OpenAI now says it cannot proceed on the original timeline.

A complete GPT language model in ~600 lines of C#, zero dependencies (github.com) AI

The GitHub project “AutoGrad-Engine” provides a compact, dependency-free C# implementation of the core GPT training and text-generation pipeline, using a small character-level GPT trained on names. It includes a minimal automatic differentiation (“autograd”) engine, tokenizer, and transformer blocks (RMSNorm, multi-head causal attention, and an MLP), along with numerical gradient-checking tests. The repository is positioned as an educational port of Karpathy’s microGPT rather than production-ready ML software.

ChatGPT Pro is now $100/month (chatgpt.com) AI

OpenAI has launched or updated its ChatGPT Pro pricing, offering a plan billed at $100 per month, as described on the ChatGPT pricing page.

I Let Claude Code Autonomously Run Ads for a Month (read.technically.dev) AI

A marketer and AI consulting founder lets Claude Code run a Meta Ads account autonomously for 31 days, generating creatives, launching and adjusting campaigns, and logging decisions with minimal human input. The agent finds that “ugly” whiteboard-style ads outperform polished formats and briefly reaches low costs per lead, but lead quality issues and a later human website change dramatically hurt performance. The experiment spends nearly the whole $1,500 budget, landing at a $6.14 cost per lead, and the author argues the results show how framing, lack of taste, and optimizing for measurable metrics can strongly shape an agent’s behavior.

Research-Driven Agents: What Happens When Your Agent Reads Before It Codes (blog.skypilot.co) AI

SkyPilot reports a case study where an AI coding agent first performs literature and fork research—rather than starting from code alone—before running many benchmarked experiments. Pointed at llama.cpp CPU inference, the added research phase led to finding several operator fusion and parallelization changes, including softmax and RMS norm fusions and a CPU-specific RMS_NORM+MUL graph fusion. The authors say this produced measurable speedups, with flash-attention text generation up about 15% on x86 and about 5% on ARM for TinyLlama 1.1B, while highlighting that code-only agents may miss key bottlenecks like memory-bandwidth limits.

AI, Unemployment and Work (marginalrevolution.com) AI

Alex Tabarrok argues that AI’s effects on unemployment versus leisure may be less distinct than they seem, since fewer working hours and more unemployment can represent similar totals of labor. He suggests the key issue is distribution, noting that policy can influence outcomes (e.g., an “AI dividend” or more holidays). Looking historically, he points to a large decline in US annual hours since 1870 without higher unemployment, alongside more leisure and longer life stages like retirement.

Entering The Architecture Age (blog.mempko.com) AI

The author argues that most modern software is built like a “pyramid” of layered abstractions, and that LLMs mainly extend on top of this structure rather than changing its underlying architecture. They predict competitive advantage may shift as software complexity hits LLM context limits (“window tax”), and propose looking to earlier object-oriented ideas inspired by messaging in systems like Smalltalk and the internet. As an alternative foundation, they describe an “Ask Protocol,” where software objects communicate by sending an “ask” message in natural language and dynamically generating the needed glue code, illustrated with calendar-email integration. They also mention building a system called Abject (AI Object) around this approach.

Gen Z's fading AI hype (axios.com) AI

A new Axios piece draws on polling to suggest Gen Z’s enthusiasm for AI is cooling, with interest and expectations potentially shifting from early hype toward more practical, everyday uses.

OpenAI pulls out of landmark £31B UK investment package (theguardian.com) AI

OpenAI has put on hold its planned “Stargate UK” project, part of a broader £31bn UK investment package announced last September, citing high energy costs and regulatory uncertainty. The deal was meant to help deliver UK “sovereign compute” by building data centres and potentially supplying thousands of Nvidia chips, but the Guardian reports that key infrastructure work had not begun as scheduled. OpenAI says it will proceed only when conditions improve, while critics point to broader delays and concerns over the UK’s datacentre economics.

Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI (nytimes.com) AI

A recent Gallup-backed study found that young adults report becoming less hopeful and more angry about AI over time, suggesting attitudes toward the technology are shifting in a negative direction even as AI becomes more common.