As economists speculate whether the stock market is in an AI bubble that could soon burst, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has just admitted to believing we’re in one. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?” Altman said during a lengthy interview with The Verge and other reporters last night. “My opinion is yes.” — Read More
Monthly Archives: August 2025
DeepSeek V3.1 just dropped — and it might be the most powerful open AI yet
Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek made waves across the global AI community Tuesday with the quiet release of its most ambitious model yet — a 685-billion parameter system that challenges the dominance of American AI giants while reshaping the competitive landscape through open-source accessibility.
The Hangzhou-based company, backed by High-Flyer Capital Management, uploaded DeepSeek V3.1 to Hugging Face without fanfare, a characteristically understated approach that belies the model’s potential impact. Within hours, early performance tests revealed benchmark scores that rival proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic, while the model’s open-source license ensures global access unconstrained by geopolitical tensions.
The release of DeepSeek V3.1 represents more than just another incremental improvement in AI capabilities. It signals a fundamental shift in how the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems might be developed, distributed, and controlled — with potentially profound implications for the ongoing technological competition between the United States and China. — Read More
The Great Cognitive Handoff: How AI-Assisted Development is Rewiring Civilization
There’s something happening in our IDEs that nobody’s talking about.
Not the obvious stuff—everyone sees the autocomplete getting smarter, the boilerplate evaporating, the bugs caught before they hatch. I’m talking about something deeper. Something that makes my Moroccan grandmother’s warnings about djinn possession feel less like folklore and more like… documentation.
We’re witnessing the first large-scale cognitive handoff between human and artificial intelligence. And it’s not just changing how we build software—it’s rewiring how our entire civilization processes information. — Read More
Ranking the Chinese Open Model Builders
The Chinese AI ecosystem has taken the AI world by storm this summer with an unrelenting pace of stellar open model releases. The flagship releases that got the most Western media coverage are the likes of Qwen 3, Kimi K2, or Zhipu GLM 4.5, but there is a long-tail of providers close behind in both quality and cadence of releases.
In this post we rank the top 19 Chinese labs by the quality and quantity of contributions to the open AI ecosystem — this is not a list of raw ability, but outputs — all the way from the top of DeepSeek to the emerging open research labs. — Read More
35 Thoughts About AGI and 1 About GPT-5
…. Current AIs aren’t AGI. But I don’t know why.
I mean, I have thoughts. I talk about missing functions like “memory” and “continuous learning”, and possibly “judgement” and “insight”. But these are all debatable; for instance, ChatGPT has a form of memory. The honest answer is: I dunno what’s missing, but something is, because there are a lot of things AI still can’t do. Even if it’s getting harder and harder to articulate exactly what those things are. — Read More
Is GPT-5 a “phenomenal” success or an “underwhelming” failure?
It was inevitable that people would be disappointed with last week’s release of GPT-5. That’s not because OpenAI did a poor job, and it’s not even because OpenAI did anything in particular to hype up the new version. The problem was simply that OpenAI’s previous “major” model releases—GPT-2, GPT-3, and GPT-4—have been so consequential.
… So of course people had high expectations for GPT-5. And OpenAI seems to have worked hard to meet those expectations.
…. OpenAI probably should have given the GPT-5 name to o1, the reasoning model OpenAI announced last September. That model really did deliver a dramatic performance improvement over previous models. It was followed by o3, which pushed this paradigm—based on reinforcement learning and long chains of thought—to new heights. But we haven’t seen another big jump in performance over the last six months, suggesting that the reasoning paradigm may also be reaching a point of diminishing returns (though it’s hard to know for certain).
Regardless, OpenAI found itself in a tough spot in early 2025. It needed to release something it could call GPT-5, but it didn’t have anything that could meet the sky-high expectations that had developed around that name. So rather than using the GPT-5 name for a dramatically better model, it decided to use it to signal a reboot of ChatGPT as a product.
… The reality is that GPT-5 is a solid model (or technically suite of models—we’ll get to that) that performs as well or better than anything else on the market today. In my own testing over the last week, I found GPT-5 to be the most capable model I’ve ever used. But it’s not the kind of dramatic breakthrough people expected from the GPT-5 name. And it has some rough edges that OpenAI is still working to sand down. — Read More
Exploring Foundation Models’ Tool-Use Efficacy
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source framework launched by Anthropic to standardize the way LLMs use external tools. AI agents use MCP to enable multi-turn workflows, where an LLM (via products like Claude Desktop or Cursor) can select and coordinate between tools in multiple MCP servers. Since its introduction, MCP has quickly become the de facto standard for tool integrations with LLMs.
There are now thousands of official and unofficial MCP servers, each with dozens of tools! While more MCP choices are great for the tool integration ecosystem, sometimes having too many options is a curse. Products like Cursor often limit how many tools you can provide to an LLM, so you are forced to select which tools you want to utilize the most. — Read More
Doomprompting Is the New Doomscrolling.
The blank box of ChatGPT, Claude, or your large language model of choice staring back at you felt like a clean slate. Here was a remarkable new technology that put the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and all it asked of us was intention.
We would never doomscroll an LLM — right?
But even the most promising technologies have an evil twin, and the blank box of curiosity is no exception. Where social media trained us to passively consume, the dark side of AI trains us to passively “converse” and “create.” — Read More
The Hidden Key to Ethical AI Leadership (It’s Not What You Think)
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has left leaders from every industry grappling with unprecedented ethical challenges. How do we navigate decisions about AI implementation when traditional rule-based approaches to ethics seem inadequate for the complexity we face?
Mark Schwartz’s Adaptive Ethics for Digital Transformation offers a compelling alternative: virtue-based leadership that focuses not on rigid rules, but on character traits that enable flourishing in digital workplaces. In an era where AI systems make decisions that affect millions of lives—from hiring algorithms to medical diagnoses to financial lending—the character of the leaders who deploy these systems may matter more than the code itself. — Read More
10 Years of Experience in 10 Minutes — A Data Analyst’s Problem-Solving Guide
Data analytics isn’t just about crunching numbers — it’s about solving real business problems with clarity and efficiency. Over the past decade, I’ve faced countless challenges, from messy datasets to indecisive stakeholders. This guide is my way of condensing 10 years of hard-earned experience into 10 minutes of actionable insights. Whether you’re just starting or refining your approach, these lessons will help you think and work like an experienced data analyst. — Read More
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