The New York Times has reported on the collapse of Kenya's academic ghostwriting industry, which at its height supported more than 40,000 people in Nairobi writing essays for students at foreign universities. Chatbots do the same job now, instantly, for a fraction of the price. The work is gone, and the piece finds few paths back for the people who did it. The moral status of … [Read more...] about Collapse of Kenya’s academic ghostwriting industry
AI
OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki Says No Lab Has Solved Alignment Well Enough to Scale at Full Speed
OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki has said, publicly, that no lab has solved alignment to a degree that would justify scaling at maximum speed, and that he hopes voluntary slowdowns become a normal part of how the industry operates. Coming from the person who runs research at the company that set the pace, that is worth pausing on. It is also, read carefully, a statement … [Read more...] about OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki Says No Lab Has Solved Alignment Well Enough to Scale at Full Speed
Anthropic Has Contracted at Least 14.8 GW of Compute and May Spend $517B Over the Next Decade
Valida Pau's analysis in The Information puts numbers on how far Anthropic's infrastructure commitments have run since October: agreements covering at least 14.8 GW of compute capacity, with total spending over the next decade potentially reaching $517 billion. Start with the power figure, because it is the one that converts into physical reality. 14.8 GW is grid-scale. It is … [Read more...] about Anthropic Has Contracted at Least 14.8 GW of Compute and May Spend $517B Over the Next Decade
Retail Investors Are Vibe-Coding Trading Algorithms With Claude and Codex
The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Hannah Erin Lang on ordinary US investors wiring their brokerage accounts to agents built with Claude or Codex, then letting the resulting code trade for them. No quant background, no firm, no risk desk. A prompt, a broker API key, and a strategy that exists because a model wrote it. Retail algo trading is not new. Backtesting platforms … [Read more...] about Retail Investors Are Vibe-Coding Trading Algorithms With Claude and Codex
UBS Now Requires AI Skills From Junior Investment Banking Hires
Simon Foy reports in the Financial Times that UBS has made AI skills a hiring requirement for junior investment bankers, which by the FT's reckoning makes it one of the first large financial institutions to write AI literacy into the spec rather than treating it as a nice-to-have. Banks have been quietly using models for two years in research summarization, document review, … [Read more...] about UBS Now Requires AI Skills From Junior Investment Banking Hires
OpenAI Says It Hit Its Automated Research Intern Goal at 3.1 Agent-Workdays Per Human Workday
OpenAI says it has reached the "automated research intern" milestone it set for itself, and it has put two numbers behind the claim. Its researchers are now running 3.1 agent-workdays for every human workday, and the heaviest external users are spending upward of $7,000 a day on tokens. Agent-workdays is a new unit, and it is a smart one to publish. It sidesteps benchmark … [Read more...] about OpenAI Says It Hit Its Automated Research Intern Goal at 3.1 Agent-Workdays Per Human Workday
OpenAI Quietly Revised Its GPT-6 Astra Evaluation Metrics After Launch
Emily Forlini reports in Fortune that OpenAI has quietly changed how it evaluates GPT-6 Astra, in ways that appear to flatter the model, and that it has continued revising other metrics since launch. Changing a measurement after you have seen the result it produces is the oldest problem in empirical work. It is not automatically dishonest. Evaluation suites do get saturated, … [Read more...] about OpenAI Quietly Revised Its GPT-6 Astra Evaluation Metrics After Launch