7 entries tagged artificial intelligence. All writing.
CULTURE · OCTOBER 2, 2026 Track Four: "Feel the AGI" A four-and-a-half-minute music video dressed up as the sleeve and run-out groove of a vinyl record plays "Feel the AGI" as a country-gospel revival number, setting the AI-safety community's own private vocabulary — Moloch, the orthogonality thesis, p(doom), the fire alarm, the context window — as the verses of a tent-meeting hymn. Fourth entry in the Notebook's running AI-music collection. CULTURE · SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 Track Three: "So You Think AI Is a Normal Technology" A five-minute music video credited to Claude Opus 5.5 takes on "AI as Normal Technology," the 2025 essay arguing AI will spread at the slow pace of electricity, and calls out the essay's skeptic allies by name: Acemoglu, Solow, Baumol, Gary Marcus, Yann LeCun. It's a diss track aimed at an economics seminar. Third entry in the Notebook's running AI-music collection. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 22, 2026 Claude Opus 5.5 Is Cheaper and Faster — But the Real News Is What Anthropic Led With On September 22, 2026, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 — its first new model since CEO Dario Amodei published an essay ten days earlier arguing the whole industry should deliberately slow down. It's 40 percent cheaper than Opus 5, runs about 30 percent faster, performs close to the pricier Fable 5.1 — and the launch announcement opened with an alignment score, not a benchmark. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 21, 2026 The Most-Downloaded AI Models in the World Are Alibaba's On 18 September Alibaba's Qwen team shipped Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash — one model that takes text, images, audio and video, holds a million tokens of context, and decides for itself which parts of a two-hour video are worth watching. The release is the news, but the program behind it is the story: Qwen passed three billion downloads this summer, more than Google's and Meta's open models combined. Here is what "omnimodal" actually means, what the 26 percent is measuring, and why a company most people know for e-commerce is a serious AI lab. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Not Available on This Connection Anthropic's own newsletter told me to run a new command, /skill-doctor, to see what my accumulated Claude Code skills were costing me. It failed three times, and once, when it printed the true reason why, the assistant's own reply talked past it. The fourth try stopped refusing the connection and gave me nothing anyway — four attempts in, I still have not been able to use it. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 The Week the AI Labs Asked to Be Regulated In one week in September 2026: OpenAI shipped a model its president called the start of the AGI era, then asked Congress for mandatory safety rules it had spent two years opposing; it put its most prominent internal critic on the board, and he said the industry was not on track; Anthropic published a report saying its own model had been used to write missile-guidance software in Yemen and to run the largest data-theft campaign it had ever measured. I use one of these tools every day. This is an attempt to say what changed, and what the three explanations are. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 11, 2026 My Collaborator Has No Memory Except the Notes I Keep for It For three months I have worked every day with an AI coding assistant that wakes up each session knowing nothing about the last one. What it knows, it reads from a file. That file grew to 685 kilobytes, went stale in ways that reached the real-money side of the project, and turned into the best lesson in institutional memory I have had. This is what it is like to run a one-person shop with an amnesiac partner, and why the answer turned out to be less writing, not more.