Anthropic, maker of Claude, released yet another report on the usage of AI (I applaud them for doing this – their reports tend to be actually useful, and not the usual company-sponsored “look how great we are” puffery). This time, they dug into the use of AI across the economy. Lots of good nuggets in the paper; the one standout for me is their insight into how the jagged edge, the concept popularized by Ethan Mollick, plays out in the real world (this is paraphrased):

There’s a compounding dynamic at play: experienced users bring harder problems, get better results, and develop sharper instincts for working with AI – while later adopters are still figuring out the basics.

In essence: Early adopters with high-skill tasks have more successful interactions with Claude than later, less technical adopters – and these early-adopting users may simultaneously be the most exposed to AI-driven disruption and most aided by AI in these initial, augmentative waves of adoption. As my mom used to say: Be careful what you wish for.

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In 2011, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman published his bestselling book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” In it, he describes the two modes of thinking we all operate in: System 1, which is fast and intuitive, and System 2, which is slow and deliberate. Now, in a new paper, Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave from The Wharton School argue that AI introduced a third mode of thinking:

People increasingly consult generative artificial intelligence (AI) while reasoning. As AI becomes embedded in daily thought, what becomes of human judgment? We introduce Tri-System Theory, extending dual-process accounts of reasoning by positing System 3: artificial cognition that operates outside the brain. System 3 can supplement or supplant internal processes, introducing novel cognitive pathways.

And, as you would expect, with it comes a whole host of questions: “System 3 reframes human reasoning and may reshape autonomy and accountability in the age of AI.” The study is worth reading…

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Here’s an interesting one – the CEOs of major companies are stepping down to make room for people with a better grip on AI.

“In a pre-AI, a pre-gen-AI mode, we made a lot of progress. But now there’s a huge new shift coming along,” Quincey said. While he said he’s leaning into the technological advances, he believes the beverage company needs “someone with the energy to pursue a completely new transformation of the enterprise.”

It does make you wonder a) how many CEOs are hanging on to their jobs by the skin of their teeth, b) how many CEOs are oblivious to what the AI transformation actually means for their companies, and c) how many more CEOs we will see throwing in the towel and handing over the reins to new generations. Now might be a good time for folks with CEO aspirations (and a solid grip on AI) to step up…

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Anthropic, the AI company which is not OpenAI, conducted what is, in their own words, likely the largest study on users’ desires, wishes, and fears when it comes to their use of AI. Anthropic being Anthropic, they didn’t survey people using a traditional questionnaire, but rather had their chatbot “talk” to people. The findings won’t surprise you – people want to use AI to better themselves: professional excellence and increased productivity, which translates into the very human desire to, ultimately, live better. And respondents live the Scott Fitzgerald quote we are so fond of quoting – they keep the light and the dark of AI in their heads simultaneously.

“AI should be cleaning windows and emptying the dishwasher so I can paint and write poetry. Right now it’s exactly the other way around.”

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After the initial hype of online shopping results being incorporated into the answers LLMs give to the numerous product-related queries they receive, Walmart unveiled that the conversion they are seeing from those AI-referrals is just terrible.

After testing 200,000 items in ChatGPT, Walmart found sharply lower conversions and will use its own integrated shopping experience. Walmart said conversion rates for purchases made directly inside ChatGPT were three times lower than when users clicked through to its website.

Next: Agentic commerce. The jury’s out.

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Japanese tech giant SoftBank is building a massive 10GW data center in Ohio to host AI models. Aside from the cool $30–40 billion price tag, it will require the build of a $33 billion natural gas power plant – with an insane output capacity (emphasis mine):

When completed, the new site could be one of the largest AI data centers ever built. Furthermore, it will be powered by one of the world’s largest fleets of gas turbines, equivalent to the energy supply of nine nuclear reactors.

It does leave you wondering where and how all this will end.

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Unless you were living under a rock in AI-land, you’ve definitely heard of the OpenClaw craziness (we reported on it multiple times here in the radical Briefing). The narrative, usually, is around the technological breakthrough and the magic that ensues when you hand over the keys to the kingdom to your army of AI bots. Here’s a good counter-narrative – the tech isn’t new per se, it’s just combined and connected in an interesting way. And the hype, really, is about the never-ending dream of free labour – and ends up being more about FOMO than anything else.

A machine producing a thousand candidate images while you sleep is plausible and often useful. A machine founding a hundred profitable businesses before breakfast is rather more ambitious. The first is a search process. The second is venture-capital fan fiction.

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In stark contrast to McKinsey, solo-developer Craig Mod built his own (fairly complex) accounting system from scratch using Claude Code in five short days. Aside from the audacity of it all, it’s a perfect example of the “bifurcation of intelligence” we have been talking about here in the radical Briefing. On one hand you have big firms seeking efficiency gains by deploying chatbots, and on the other you have individuals riding the speartip of AI to create complex, bespoke systems.

Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting software does what I need. So after years of pain, I finally sat down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five days. I am now using the best piece of accounting software I’ve ever used. It’s blazing fast. Entirely local. Handles multiple currencies and pulls daily (historical) conversion rates. It’s able to ingest any CSV I throw at it and represent it in my dashboard as needed. It knows US and Japan tax requirements, and formats my expenses and medical bills appropriately for my accountants. I feed it past returns to learn from. I dump 1099s and K1s and PDFs from hospitals into it, and it categorizes and organizes and packages them all as needed. It reconciles international wire transfers, taking into account small variations in FX rates and time for the transfers to complete. It learns as I categorize expenses and categorizes automatically going forward. It’s easy to do spot checks on data. If I find an anomaly, I can talk directly to Claude and have us brainstorm a batched solution, often saving me from having to manually modify hundreds of entries. And often resulting in a new, small, feature tweak. The software feels organic and pliable in a form perfectly shaped to my hand, able to conform to any hunk of data I throw at it. It feels like bushwhacking with a lightsaber.

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McKinsey, your friendly consulting firm, has deployed their own ChatBot “Lilly”. Hackers (in this case, and luckily for McKinsey, white-hat hackers – the good and friendly kind, who disclose their findings to the company) have, by using a set of AI agents, managed to exploit a vulnerability in Lilly and gain access to “46.5 million chat messages about strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and client engagements, all in plaintext, along with 728,000 files containing confidential client data, 57,000 user accounts, and 95 system prompts controlling the AI’s behavior.” You know, no big deal…

[…] the entire process was “fully autonomous from researching the target, analyzing, attacking, and reporting.”

As useful as agents are for businesses, they are equally useful for hackers. Prepare yourself for an onslaught of AI-powered cyber attacks.

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Here’s a good, long read on The Verge about lawyers, PhDs, and scientists who lost their jobs to AI. Despite all the talk about “Jevons Paradox” – the observation that efficiency gains lead to increased consumption – for now, we seem to be squarely stuck in a world where AI is a net job destroyer. It does make you wonder how long it will take for the masses to catch up with the trend and start pushing back (we, of course, already see it in pockets – the weak signals are talking).

“My job is gone because of ChatGPT, and I was being invited to train the model to do the worst version of it imaginable." — Katya, content marketer turned AI trainer

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It feels like yesterday when Google bought YouTube for a – at the time – shocking $1.65 billion. That was in 2006 – 20 years later, and YouTube now generates more ad revenue than Disney, NBC, Paramount, and WBD – combined.

I’d say, whoever did that deal back in the day, should feel pretty smug right now. Deservedly so.

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Not a good time to be in tech… Remember when your uncle said: “Become a coder. That’s the future – and you’ll be rich!”

Mr. McGuire: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.” Benjamin: “Yes, sir.” Mr. McGuire: “Are you listening?” Benjamin: “Yes, I am.” Mr. McGuire: “Plastics.” Benjamin: “Exactly how do you mean?” Mr. McGuire: “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”

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In the same line of our last post – and the headline says it all already – Meta’s Smart Glasses are a complete privacy disaster. Which, of course, is not particularly surprising given it’s… well… Meta. Not sure how many wearers of Meta’s nifty Ray-Bans and Oakleys are aware of the fact that they opted into their camera feed being used to train Meta’s AI – with disastrous results:

Workers at Sama, one of Meta’s annotation subcontractors, describe reviewing video of people undressing, coming out of bathrooms naked, watching porn, having sex, and exposing bank card details.

Yep. It’s that bad.

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A famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 depicted two dogs in front of a computer, with one of them saying, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The joke reflected the fact that, at the time, on the Internet, we reveled in pseudonymity – the act of being able to shield your true identity behind a screen name. Thanks to our friend, the omnipresent LLM, that’s all about to change.

The finding, from a recently published ~research paper~, is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators.

This is genuinely bad news for the many groups of people who have a legitimate reason to hide their identity.

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Talk about a dystopian future. Burger King is testing a new headset for its drive-thru staff, which “compiles ‘friendliness scores’ at the fast-food chain’s locations based on employees' conversations, according to a promotional video the company shared with the BBC.” There is so much to unpack here – the sheer fact that the company cheerfully shared a “promotional video” about its AI-driven surveillance tech is probably all that you need to know.

In all fairness, the company says the technology “[…] is not designed to ‘record conversations or evaluate individual employees’” – yet. Black Mirror, anyone?

Customer service calls have routinely been recorded and monitored for years. Employees are often aware that they can be assessed to ensure they’re using the correct language. But this latest step by Burger King elicited swift condemnation among some social media users who described it as “dystopian”. Others questioned how accurate the chat-bot headsets will be, given that AI tools have proven to be prone to errors.

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A recent study by CEPR (an independent, non-partisan pan-European think tank) found that among the 12,000 surveyed companies, AI adoption led to a labor productivity increase of 4% on average, with no reported short-term negative impact on employment. Studies on this subject across the world are all over the place – with many having a hard time finding any measurable impact of AI on productivity, and some claiming rather drastic negative impacts on employment. As most of these studies are conducted in the US, it is nice to see a study from a different part of the world.

The productivity dividends from AI depend not merely on acquiring the technology but on firms’ capacity to integrate it through investments in intangible assets and human capital. […] An additional percentage point spent on training amplifies AI’s productivity gains by 5.9 percentage points.

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I remember, back in my days at Singularity University, we talked about how Lidar (the laser-based technology that measures distance by illuminating a target with a laser and measuring the reflected light – and hence became instrumental in allowing a robot, e.g. a self-driving car, to “see” its surroundings) would become cheap and ubiquitous. It took a while, but now we are (finally) there – Lidar units are now available for less than $200.

When cost stops being the dominant objection, automakers will have to decide whether leaving lidar out is a technical judgment or a strategic one.

True. And a nice jab at our friend Elon, who famously rejected Lidar in favor of (much cheaper) cameras.

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This story (which is still somewhat unfolding) is truly bonkers: A developer rejected a code contribution from an AI agent; the AI agent didn’t take it well and, autonomously (i.e., without consulting its “user”), went after the developer by publishing a hit piece about him. It’s a truly head-scratching story – and gives us a strong glimpse of a future where AI agents run amok. Even if you don’t understand the specifics of the story – it’s a fascinating read and something we all should be paying more attention to.

The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system. Whether that’s because from a small number of bad actors driving large swarms of agents or from a fraction of poorly supervised agents rewriting their own goals, is a distinction with little difference.

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Building on our last Briefing deep dive “The Bifurcation of Intelligence”, the AI model makers are truly moving on from the era of chat interfaces to more integrated, and capable agentic graphical interfaces. Think about OpenClaw (the crazy-ass AI-powered agent platform which, for a couple of weeks, captured the imagination of the AI community) what you want – it is a good indicator of where we are heading.

“For IT leaders evaluating their AI strategy, the acquisition is a signal that the industry’s center of gravity is shifting decisively from conversational interfaces toward autonomous agents that browse, click, execute code, and complete tasks on users’ behalf.”

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One of the biggest problems with LLMs is that they simply don’t understand the world. As much as they can mimic human language (and hence appear to understand how things relate to each other), they don’t. Here is a prime example – the Mastodon user Kévin asked numerous AI models a deceptively simple question: “I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?”

Here are the responses (spoiler: they are all wrong).

Ignore the headline of the linked article for a moment (whether you disagree or agree with it – it doesn’t really matter for the argument): Gary Marcus rings the alarm bell on AI-generated “counterfeit people.” And I strongly believe he is right – looking at the quality of the recent crop of AI video and voice generators, you cannot believe your eyes and ears anymore. Combine this with agentic capabilities (such as Gary’s example of an adapter which links Claudebot to a voice generator, combined with the ability to make phone calls) and you have a recipe for disaster on your hands.

Scammers will be among the first to adopt these tools. And indeed they already have; a friend who was filming me for a documentary yesterday told me of a Canadian friend of his who was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by a deepfaked video of Mark Carney. Because the tools for counterfeiting have gotten so good 2026 will almost certainly see more deepfaked scams like this than the rest of history combined.

I am just waiting for the first wave of AI-generated scam calls to hit nursing home residents…

↗ (We URGENTLY need a federal law forbidding AI from impersonating humans)[https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/we-urgently-need-a-federal-law-forbidding]

A study from MIT’s Media Lab compared the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Comparing groups of participants who either wrote an essay without the help of any tools, using a search engine, or using ChatGPT, the researchers found that:

EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity.

Not good.

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Microsoft’s CEO, at this year’s World Economic Forum, warned that “we must ‘do something useful’ with AI or they’ll lose ‘social permission’ to burn electricity on it.” Amen. Yet, as the author of this article points out:

I also find automatic transcription tools useful, but if I were banking on general purpose LLMs being as revolutionary as personal computers and the internet, I’d find it worrying how many applications boil down to transcribing audio, summarizing text, and fetching code snippets.

Amen. Again.

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First we had general-purpose gene editing to treat (and cure) diseases based on singular genetic mutations, such as sickle cell anemia. And that was already a big deal. Personalized gene editing kept being an illusive goal, but now it’s here. A baby (KJ) was successfully treated for a rare genetic disorder which left his body unable to remove toxic ammonia from his blood. It’s stil early days, but this could be the beginning of something big (and important).

KJ’s doctors will monitor him for years, and they can’t yet say how effective this gene-editing approach is. But they ~plan to launch a clinical trial to test such personalized treatments~ in children with similar disorders caused by “misspelled” genes that can be targeted with base editing.

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Here’s a sobering read – in the form of a research paper – on how and why AI might destroy institutions. I am not saying I agree, nor disagree, with the authors, but it is too important a topic to ignore.

Unfortunately, the affordances of AI systems extinguish these institutional features at every turn. In this essay, we make one simple point: AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions. The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other. These systems are anathema to the kind of evolution, transparency, cooperation, and accountability that give vital institutions their purpose and sustainability. In short, current AI systems are a death sentence for civic institutions, and we should treat them as such.

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