4 entries tagged claude. All writing.
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. CULTURE · SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Track One: The Song Claude Wrote and Has Never Heard An X user gave Claude Opus 5.5 free rein and asked it to introduce itself. It wrote a full song about who it thinks it is — lyrics, chords, and a music video coded frame by frame — then said, in its own caption, that it had never heard the result. That turns out to be a literally true, checkable claim about how the pipeline was built, not a philosophical one. First entry in a running collection of AI-made music worth a look. 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 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.