They found a new way to spend $252 million. It wasnât on rent for the people living in cardboard boxes under the freeway, and it wasnât on better wine for the dying, and it certainly wasnât on fixing the potholes that rattle the teeth out of your head when you drive down Western Avenue.
No. They gave it to a guy named Altman so he can figure out how to climb inside your head without opening the door.
The sun is hitting the window at that particular angle that suggests I should have been awake three hours ago or asleep four hours ago. Itâs Monday, the day the world pretends to care about productivity, and Iâm staring at a screen thatâs brighter than my future, reading about the latest scheme to turn human sweat into digital code.
Thereâs a bottle of Old Crow on the desk. Itâs about a third full, standing there like a sentinel guarding the perimeter of my sanity. I pour two fingers. Itâs not going to make the news any better, but it might make the headache vibrate at a lower frequency.
I was reading the news this morning, trying to focus my eyes on the glowing pixels while the coffee maker wheezed in the corner like a dying lung. The headline caught me right between the eyes, somewhere behind the dull throb of a headache earned from a long night of arguing with bartenders about the singularity.
“Generation AI,” it screamed. “Fears of ‘social divide’ unless all children learn computing skills.”
Thereâs a special kind of modern stupidity where we build a machine to talk like us, then act shocked when it starts sounding like us on a bad day.
The news: researchers poked ChatGPT with violent and traumatic promptsâaccidents, disasters, ugly stuffâand noticed the modelâs responses got weird. Not âpossessed by demonsâ weird. More like âslightly off-balance coworker after a gruesome meetingâ weird. Higher uncertainty, more inconsistency, more bias creeping in around the edges. Then they tried something even weirder: they gave it mindfulness promptsâbreathing, reframing, guided meditation vibesâand the systemâs outputs got steadier.
Thereâs something beautifully American about a bunch of smart people renting office space with a panoramic view and using it to imagine the end of the species.
Across the Bay, the money-priests are busy building bigger brains in bigger boxes, promising âwondersâ like theyâre hawking miracle mops at 2 a.m. on cable. Over in Berkeley, at 2150 Shattuck Avenue, youâve got the counter-programming: safety researchers, doom forecasters, modern Cassandras with ergonomic chairs and the kind of anxious politeness that makes you wonder if they apologize to the crosswalk signal when it says âDONâT WALK.â
OpenAI is offering $555,000 plus equity for a âHead of Preparedness,â which is either a sign that the grown-ups finally showed up, or proof that the blast radius is now big enough to justify an on-call adult.
And not the fun kind of adult. The kind with spreadsheets, liability exposure, and the dead-eyed stare of someone whoâs read too many incident reports to believe in âmove fast and break thingsâ ever again.
Thereâs a special kind of loneliness you can only feel while scrolling a feed that wonât stop screaming at you. Not human screaming. Algorithm screaming. The app isnât showing you what your friends are doing; itâs showing you what the slot machine thinks will keep your thumb twitching. And now the slot machine has learned to hallucinate.
The latest headline paradeâshrimp Jesus, Ghibli deportations, obese AI Olympians, exploding pressure cookers, cat soap operas, and yes, âerotic tractorsââisnât just âpeople are weird online.â People have always been weird online. The difference is that the weird used to cost time. Now it costs electricity and a moral shrug. The internet has become an all-you-can-eat buffet where the food is technically edible, spiritually plastic, and served by a robot thatâs insulted you three times while smiling.
Thereâs a new bit of research making the rounds that basically says: the big AI chatbots are hopeless romantics about the human brain. ChatGPT, Claude, the whole well-dressed parade of text generators apparently assume weâre more rational and logically consistent than we actually areâespecially when money, pride, and other peopleâs choices get involved.
Which is adorable. Like watching a golden retriever bring you a slobbery tennis ball because it genuinely believes youâre the kind of person who enjoys cardio.
Joseph de Weckâs little essay about AI dragging us back to the dark ages hit a nerve, the way a bad tooth does when youâre trying to pretend youâre fine. His point is simple enough to fit on a cocktail napkin: we fought our way out of the age of kings and priests telling us what to think, and now weâre hiring a glowing rectangle to do the same jobâonly faster, cheaper, and with better punctuation.
Scott Anthony, a Dartmouth professor and ex-consultant, says heâs shocked by how scared his Gen Z students are of AI.
Not âconcerned.â Not âthoughtful.â Not the usual polite academic hand-wringing where everyone pretends the seminar room is a monastery and knowledge is made of linen.
Scared. Full stop.
And honestly? I believe him. Because Iâve watched a whole generation grow up with phones glued to their palms like an extra organ, and yet the second a tool shows up that can imitate their own output, they act like someone let a poltergeist loose in the group chat.