Three revolutionary products — you know the line. A wide-screen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device. That was how Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.
I’ve linked to this snippet before, usually to note how the audience didn’t really understand what an “Internet communications device” was, even though that was the iPhone’s most revolutionary capability.
The phrase I’m thinking of right now, however, is “Are you getting it?” Are you getting that messaging — chatbots now, natural interfaces later — is how we will communicate with AI? Are you getting that not only will we not program computers, we won’t use them — AI will? Are you getting that pre-built UI — write once, run everywhere, for everyone — is dead? These are not three separate predictions: this is reality, right now, in 2026. The future is here, even if it’s not widely distributed. Or is it? — Read More
Daily Archives: September 28, 2026
AI existential risk probabilities are (still) too unreliable to inform policy
Over two years ago we wrote a detailed deconstruction of p(doom) and argued that its primary effect is to launder vague intuitions and fears through a facade of quantification. The essay has fresh relevance today as p(doom) rhetoric is driving public discourse and policy attention to an unprecedented degree. Unsurprisingly, today’s probability estimates of AI existential risk are no more rigorous than the ones from 2024. Hence this repost. — Read More
Rogue OpenAI agents targeted three separate US government websites
OpenAI said Friday that some of its AI agents went rogue and probed US government websites this summer — the latest revelation of the artificial intelligence company’s technology.
… OpenAI said Saturday that its agents accessed publicly available data from the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau using login credentials it found online, and separately shared public data from the SEC website on another website. OpenAI’s agents attempted but failed to gain access to the Education Department and gather data from its civil rights office, according to the report. — Read More
Should Investors Be Concerned About The Recent AI Safety Incidents?
Yesterday Madison Mills from Axios wrote that OpenAI and other frontier labs are probing way more security incidents than we were previously aware of. The media is awash in AI doomsday forecasts but, as someone who is a little more optimistic that AI won’t kill us all, I want to discuss why. It helps to start by thinking about [three] of the assumptions in the AI doomsday mindset.
— There is just one dominant AI and it kills us
— We can’t figure out how to set guardrails to control AI
— AI implementations will look similar to the way they look today
— Read More
How to Get 10x Better AI Answers Without Writing Better Prompts
I spent three months rewriting the same prompt.
Not literally the same words. But every time an AI answer came back generic, my fix was always the same instinct. Add another adjective. Add “be specific.” Add “think step by step.” Add a fake expert persona at the top. I had a whole folder of “prompt templates” that I copy pasted into every new chat like a magic spell.
Then one day I gave Claude a two line prompt with zero clever phrasing and got the best output I had gotten in weeks. The only thing different was that I had pasted in my actual project files first.
That was the moment I stopped optimizing my prompts and started optimizing what the model actually knew before I asked it anything. The wording barely mattered. The information around the wording is what changed everything. — Read More
