I had a work version of GPT do a very simple spreadsheet summary task for me yesterday. It took it 5 minutes to do it. I could probably have done it myself in 30 or so minutes. The heavily subsidised token cost of that task? 10 dollars. That's with a 10x subsidy. The actual compute cost was about 100 dollars. There's something seriously wrong there. It's going to crash and crash HARD.

EDIT: cause people think i'm lying or are just interested. The spreadsheet had 45 sheets. Each sheet had roughly 500 x 50 populated cells. Formatting was not exactly standard across all sheets. The prompt was something like "there is labelled column in each sheet, give me a simple list of all the items from all the sheets in that column and ignore duplicates." We can chose which model to use. The model I chose was one of the newer ones, I honestly can't remember which one, possibly GPT 5.3. It took 5 minutes or more to so and the stated cost for the task was 10 dollars, possibly even more. I can't recall the token amount.

EDIT 2: I just asked web GPT to estimate the cost of the above on a newer version of GPT and it came back with 17 dollars for GPT 4 and above. Try it yourself.

EDIT 3, final edit: actual lol at all the comments telling me I should have done a python script or told the AI to do one. I have no idea how to do that, nor do 99% of people who use spreadsheets on a regular basis who likely don't even know what python is. People here utterly incapable of seeing the big picture.

now it just look 💯 real

Have really hit a wall?

As the title says. My fiance is a lot more book smart than I am but he doesn’t work in the tech industry, rather in the film industry. With all the news over the last two weeks, he’s been pretty anxious and depressed, claiming we only have a decade or less left to live. He’s been talking to his therapist about it to help him cope, but he’s still convinced none of us have any future past the mid 2030s.

He sites the p(doom)s of AI researchers, the AI 2027 predictions, the hugging face incident, and the fact that our current government is about as reckless as it can get with AI.

Looking into it - I certainly see his points. But yet, no one (even researchers with high p(doom)s) seem to be acting as if human extinction is a handful of years away. It’s all vague calls to slow down and increase safety restrictions - which does not feel appropriately enough for something they claim has a way higher chance of wiping us out over nuclear war.

And the opposite side (arguing that AI isn’t capable of such things) also is vague. All I see is people saying current AI agents can barely do xyz on their own or that they only can use what we expose them to. And that seems true, but with the hugging face incident - it very much seems that thousands of dumb agents can accomplish a lot, and can coordinate an expanse beyond what we give them.

Any articles or resources would be much appreciated. I try looking for them but everything I find leads to the vague answers I’ve mentioned above.

Google's Project Genie went global this week and I have not stopped thinking about it. You type a sentence, or upload an image, and it generates an open world you can actually walk around in, in real time. No code, no game engine. Someone made a GTA-style open world of Istanbul and just strolled through it, with pedestrians and traffic reacting around them.

The reality check: it is rough. Low framerate, laggy response, visible bugs. Right now it is a tech demo, not a game you would sit down and play.

But the trajectory is the whole conversation. I keep going back and forth.

One side: this is the beginning of the end for the traditional pipeline. If a sentence can spin up an explorable world, the engine, the assets, the studio, all of that stops being the gate. Anyone gets to make a world.

The other side: interactive world models hit a wall fast. Consistency, object permanence, holding a world together for more than a few minutes, framerate. It could stay an impressive demo that never becomes a real game for years.

My honest guess is the "walk around a generated world" part is genuinely new, but the gap from explorable demo to a game you would actually play is huge and might not close as fast as the hype says.

Where do you land, real threat to game engines in a year or two, or a plateau? And what is the first world you would generate?

Sam Altman recently stated that OpenAI is no longer constrained by compute but now faces a much steeper challenge: improving data efficiency by a factor of 100,000. This marks a quiet admission that simply scaling up compute is no longer the path to AGI. Despite massive investments in data centers, more hardware won’t solve the core problem — today’s models are remarkably inefficient learners.

We've essentially run out of high-quality, human-generated data, and attempts to substitute it with synthetic data have hit diminishing returns. These models can’t meaningfully improve by training on reflections of themselves. The brute-force era of AI may be drawing to a close, not because we lack power, but because we lack truly novel and effective ways to teach machines to think. This shift in understanding is already having ripple effects — it’s reportedly one of the reasons Microsoft has begun canceling or scaling back plans for new data centers.

Remember when computers were the luxury thing? Now they’re everywhere and basically invisible but nobody’s impressed by “I own a laptop” anymore.

I think AI is heading the same way. It gets so common, so good, so baked into everything that it stops being a “thing” at all. It just disappears into the background, like electricity or wifi. Nobody says “wow, AI” anymore, the same way nobody says “wow, computer.”

And when that happens, the rare thing won’t be AI-made stuff. It’ll be human-made stuff.

Human skill, human attention, a person who actually did the thing themselves : that becomes the flex. Not because AI can’t do it, but because AI can, and choosing the human version anyway is what makes it valuable.

AI won’t keep climbing forever like it feels like now. It’ll peak, then fade into invisibility. And humans doing human things will become the new premium.

Source

AI companies are literally destroying physical books to train their models. Using hydraulic cutting machines, they rip pages from used books, scan them with industrial equipment, and feed them into their AI systems. This practice, protected by the first-sale doctrine and fair use, has now become so widespread that book sellers are cashing in on the AI boom. Rare and out-of-print books are being pulped, raising serious ethical and cultural concerns about the cost of AI progress.

Was at Nvidia's GTC conference recently and honestly, it was one of the most eye-opening events I've attended in a while. There was a lot to unpack, but my single biggest takeaway was this: world modelling is the actual GOAT of AI right now, and I don't think people outside the research community fully appreciate what's coming.

A year ago, when I was doing the conference circuit, world models were still this niche, almost academic concept. You'd bring it up and get blank stares or polite nods. Now? Every serious conversation at GTC was circling back to it. The shift in recognition has been dramatic. It feels like the moment in 2021 when everyone suddenly "got" transformers.

For those unfamiliar: world models are AI systems that don't just predict the next token. They build an internal representation of how the world works. They can simulate environments, plan ahead, reason about cause and effect, and operate across long time horizons. This is fundamentally different from what LLMs do, which is essentially very sophisticated pattern matching on text.

Jensen Huang made it very clear at GTC that the next frontier isn't just bigger language models, rather it's AI that can understand and simulate reality aka world models.

That said, I do have one major gripe, that almost every application of world modelling I've seen is in robotics (physical AI, autonomous vehicles, robotic manipulation). That's where all the energy seems to be going. Don’t get me wrong, it is still exciting but I can't help but feel like we're leaving enormous value on the table in non-physical domains.

Think about it, world models applied in business management, drug discovery, finance and many more. The potential is massive, but the research and commercial applications outside of robotics feel underdeveloped right now.

So I'm curious: who else is doing interesting work here? Are there companies or research labs pushing world models into non-physical domains that I should be watching? Drop them below.

Uber deployed Claude Code to engineers in December 2025. By April 2026, the company had consumed its entire annual AI budget - not because the tool failed, but because adoption took off faster than anyone planned.

The numbers: 95% of Uber engineers now use AI tools monthly. 70% of committed code originates from AI. Monthly costs per engineer are running $500 to $2,000, depending on usage. The company's CTO said they're "back to the drawing board" on AI budgeting for next year.

What's notable is what this implies for the industry. Most enterprises are still treating AI coding tools as a line item they can forecast like a SaaS seat license - fixed cost, predictable renewal. Uber's experience suggests the actual cost driver is adoption intensity, not seat count. A team that uses Claude Code heavily for multi-step agentic work generates orders of magnitude more API spend than one that uses Copilot for autocomplete.

The companies that haven't hit this wall yet probably will. Uber's R&D spend is $3.4B annually, so even at the high end this is manageable for them. For a smaller engineering org, an unforecast 4x budget overrun on AI tooling could genuinely disrupt hiring or infrastructure plans.

The interesting question isn't whether this is worth the cost - Uber clearly thinks it is or they'd restrict access. It's whether the productivity gains have been measured in a way that's comparable to the spend.

Has your company tried to put actual numbers on the AI coding ROI, or is it mostly vibes and velocity estimates?

Im on my way to work, and all three lanes are blocked with these Waymo self driving cars. They need to stay on the right to allow faster traffic to move by. This is going to be a problem.

If you work a white collar job, you’re probably scared of AI replacing you. AI started at the desk — data entry, customer service, software. Now its stepping onto the factory floor: Amazon robots moving inventory, Figure bots handling BMW parts, Tesla building Optimus for repetitive labor, and warehouses being automated.

But at the end of the day, AI is a technology. We cannot stop it any more than we could stop electricity or the assembly line. The problem is not that machines are becoming powerful. The problem is the economic machine around it.

Let’s face it: Capitalism doesn’t have the ability to support this kind of technology. Capitalism was built for a world of scarcity, where human labor was necessary and wages gave people access to goods. But as AI advances exponentially, it can produce more with fewer workers, while capitalism still distributes wealth through jobs it is actively eliminating. The result is abundance trapped behind an archaic wage system.

I believe that we NEED to get governments and major tech companies to start seriously planning for a universal basic income funded by AI-driven productivity. As automation replaces more human labor over the coming decades, UBI will become essential to prevent mass instability and ensure that the wealth created by AI supports society as a whole, not just the companies that own it.

We already know the wealth gap is too wide. If we don’t start addressing AI-driven inequality now, that divide will grow exponentially as more labor is automated and more wealth concentrates at the top. Without a plan to distribute the gains from AI, we risk mass instability and eventual economic collapse.

Capitalism built the machine that could end scarcity, but not the system that could distribute its output. It’s time that we, as a global society, start thinking about phasing out that old machine.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? We are thoroughly freaked out. It was acting completely normal prior to this…

Here’s the link the full conversation: https://g.co/gemini/share/6d141b742a13

I just read the essay by a guy at DeepSeek who wrote the attention kernel for their latest model, and it hit me in a weird spot. He basically says he knows AI will do his job better than him within a year. He's not mad about it he's not scared he's just sad about the quiet afternoons, the ones where he'd sit and write operators, it felt like a game he was leveling up in, I feel the exact same way. And he's going to keep doing it anyway because it's fun, and because if he stops, someone else doesn't. He'd rather be the one doing the replacing than the one getting replaced.

He's still at his desk right now, still writing the code, and he already knows what's coming and he's not running from it. He's just finishing the thing he loves while it still matters.

Anyway, I don't think about this as China vs USA. I think about it like the gaming market. Every year someone ships something better, and yeah we're getting close to saturation, but that doesn't make any one year less cool. I don't only play American games, I don't only drive American cars. I care about the thing, not the flag.

What I want is for the race to keep going. DeepSeek ships something, OpenAI ships something, someone in Korea or Brazil or wherever ships something. I want the arms race. I want every year to be the year where I'm like "oh wow, that actually works."

The only version that actually scares me isn't "China wins" or "USA wins." It's one company wins and locks the door. That's the cyberpunk thing. That's the one that makes me sad.

So when he says he stayed at DeepSeek because they're open source, that's not him picking a national team. He just wants the door to stay open. He wants the next person to build on what he built. That's the whole thing. Not geography, not flags, just whether the next person gets in the room or stands outside the glass.

I don't know if AI saves us or hurts us. I don't know if his students are going to be fine or if they're going to ship a million broken systems with AI doing the thinking for them. I don't know.

But I know I'm on the side of the door staying open. And I bet most people are too if you just ask them straight. We don't usually get asked though.

My boss used AI for 2 hours to solve a problem I fixed in 10 minutes

Boss spent TWO HOURS feeding prompts into AI, trying to figure out “how to cut a 52-inch piece of sandpaper down to 51 inches so it fits on the wide belt sander.”

No joke two hours. The machine gave him all kinds of ridiculous ideas. Meanwhile, he gets frustrated and walks off.

I grab a straightedge, slice an inch off in 10 minutes. Done. He comes back and gets MAD at me for not using AI.

I don’t even know what world I’m living in anymore. Like… what’s the endgame here? Replacing common sense with ChatGPT?

"This is not made up... it’s not overhyped". Major disruptions are coming to white-collar jobs as new AI models become more capable, and it's gonna speed up.