ai
The Assistant That Changes Your Music Is Really Rearranging the Room
Spotify shipped an assistant that can reach back through everything you have played and change the song that is on right now. That is the whole feature. You ask for something, it searches years of your listening, and it quietly rewrites the queue. On paper it is a skip button with a memory, a small…
The Enthusiasm Is Not the Product
Every genuinely new technology arrives with the same small, loud crowd out front. First the innovators, then the early adopters: a thin early market flush with enthusiasm, willing to forgive the rough edges because they can already see where the thing is headed before it gets there. They buy the 1.0. They tolerate the crashes.…
The Machine Learns to Make Small Talk
The newest change to ChatGPT has almost nothing to do with intelligence. It is about timing. The update tunes the model to be quicker with a joke, lighter on its feet, better at reading the temperature of a conversation and matching it. In the release notes it sounds like a small thing, a personality tweak,…
What a Distillation Attack Actually Steals
Alibaba told its employees this week to stop using Anthropic’s Claude, citing what it called a “distillation attack,” the practice of querying one company’s model enough times to train your own on its answers. CNBC’s account of the decision described a company that had banned a rival’s AI for its employees on exactly that reasoning,…
Everyone Is Quietly Building Their Own Escape Route
Microsoft is building its own coding models. Not licensing them. Building them. The Information’s reporting that Microsoft is launching an AI offensive with its own coding models made it sound like a campaign, but what it actually is, is a renovation. The company is pulling out the load-bearing wall that used to be OpenAI and…
Bank Accounts and Whole Countries
Cerebras priced its offering this week and the headline writers reached for the obvious comparison: a rising tide for SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Three names that did not, in any meaningful sense, need a rising tide. They are the ocean. What the moment actually surfaced is that the AI capital pool has narrowed enough that…
What Cerebras Pays For
Cerebras priced its IPO this week with the kind of demand that bends the usual math, and the number on the tape is the least interesting part of it. The capital it raised, and the much larger pool of capital it pulled out of the queue behind it, is doing more than funding one chip…
The Year the Open Companies Stopped Being Open
Somewhere in San Francisco this week, a company that put the word “Open” in its name is squaring up against the company that put its product on a billion phones. TechCrunch reports that OpenAI is preparing to move against Apple, and notes in the same breath that Apple has left partners feeling burned before. That…