『Slow Takes: One week in AI』のカバーアート

Slow Takes: One week in AI

Slow Takes: One week in AI

著者： Sam Illingworth & Leor Gayr
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Slow Takes is the weekly Slow AI conversation. Every Monday, Sam Illingworth and Leor Gayr talk through the week in AI, slowly and without the hype.

theslowai.substack.comSam Illingworth
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  • Slow Takes Ep. 18: Can AI Suffer, and Who Benefits From the Question?

    Slow Takes Ep. 18: Can AI Suffer, and Who Benefits From the Question?
    2026/07/13
    Anthropic found a hidden ‘workspace’ inside Claude, and the reporting turned it into consciousnessOn the sixth of July, Anthropic published research describing a small, privileged region inside Claude that behaves like a workspace for deliberate thought, active for roughly 10% of the time the model runs. It calls this the J-space, and it draws the parallel itself: the region mirrors Global Workspace Theory, one of the leading scientific accounts of human consciousness. Think of a theatre. The thing you are attending to holds the stage while adjacent thoughts wait in the wings, and when you switch topic the whole cast rearranges. Tell the J-space to think about rugby and it thinks about rugby. Change one element and it moves to football.The paper is careful. It says plainly that it has not detected consciousness and that there is probably no way to detect it. The reporting around it made the leap anyway, because the words ‘consciousness’, ‘global workspace’, and ‘Claude thinking’ sit next to each other on the page, and your brain does the rest.OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6, and offered Washington a 5% stake to do itOn the ninth of July, OpenAI released GPT-5.6 in three sizes called Sol, Terra, and Luna, with an API and the Codex coding tool. This is the model the Trump administration held back a fortnight ago over cyber-security concerns, the same treatment that dogged Anthropic’s Fable before its own re-release. Sol runs at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output. Anthropic’s Fable is roughly double that, at $10 and $50.The number worth sitting up for is a different one. OpenAI has offered the US government a 5% equity stake, and the White House confirmed the company did not legally require formal approval to launch. Leor’s read, which I share, is that this is a large part of why the rollout was so smooth. There is now open talk of redistributing that stake to US citizens, sovereign-wealth-fund style, which is a strange sentence to write about a company with no profits to redistribute and an IPO on the horizon.Musk’s xAI put out Grok 4.5, and undercut everyone on priceOn the eighth of July, Elon Musk’s xAI released Grok 4.5, which Musk called an ‘Opus-class model, but faster’. It is up front that it is not quite as capable as GPT-5.6 or Fable, roughly the level of Opus 4.8 with more speed. The price is the point: $2 per million input tokens and $6 output, about a fifth of what GPT-5.6 costs. For an enterprise burning through billions of tokens, that is a decision that makes itself.Two caveats. The benchmarks are self-reported, and I have not seen an independent assessment, so treat the numbers as a company marking its own homework until someone checks. And this is the first launch since xAI went public, with much of X’s valuation resting on it, so this release has to land for Musk. He is also giving Grok 4.5 away free for a limited window through Cursor, the coding tool xAI bought for $60 billion, which buys usage the benchmarks cannot. Watch the wider board too. Musk owns much of the compute and leases data centres to Anthropic for something like $18 billion a year, so he can raise a rival’s costs and cut his own in the same move. I use a powerful model for video editing and very little else, and if I trusted Grok I could do most of what I need at a twentieth of the token cost. So could most companies. The next race is not who tops the benchmark. It is who reaches the price everyone can live with.Meta wired a deepfake button into Instagram, then pulled it in three daysOn the seventh of July, Meta released Muse Image, its first in-house image model, built by the Superintelligence Lab under Alexandr Wang. The feature that caused the damage let you go onto someone else’s public profile and generate AI images and video from their photos. Unless your account was private, you were opted in by default. It went live on a Tuesday and was gone by Friday. Meta pulled the public-account remix feature and left the underlying model in place. Leor’s summary is the honest one: this was a deepfake button, released and rolled back in the same week, from a company that was at the very front of AI a few years ago and has lost the plot since.While Washington guards who may use its models, US business already runs on Chinese onesA CNBC investigation found that Chinese AI models now account for between 30% and 46% of the enterprise tokens flowing through OpenRouter, a major US developer platform, up from around 11% a year ago. DeepSeek is the single largest vendor on the platform, with Alibaba’s Qwen close behind, and the open Chinese models run 60% to 90% cheaper. DeepSeek’s V4 Flash is 14 cents per million input tokens, roughly two orders of magnitude below the frontier.The same week the US government decides which Americans may touch its most powerful models, American companies are routing nearly half their AI through Chinese ones, pasting their balance sheets into ...
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    43 分
  • Slow Takes Ep. 17: Hands on the Wheel

    Slow Takes Ep. 17: Hands on the Wheel
    2026/06/29
    Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.For the first time, the government told an AI company to hold a model backThe US government has asked OpenAI to stagger the release of its next model, GPT-5.6, letting only a short list of trusted partners in first and approving access customer by customer. The request came from two federal agencies worried the model could be misused before it is properly security-tested. It is the first time Washington has preemptively told an American AI firm to restrict a launch, and it lands two weeks after Anthropic pulled Fable 5 under separate pressure. On the episode, Leor put the sharper point: public model launches may now be over, and a model the government waves through untested quietly signals it was not powerful enough to fear. Who gets to use these models is becoming a decision made over our heads.Meta paused a tool that was logging its own staff to train its AIMeta has paused the Model Capability Initiative, a programme that tracked employees’ keystrokes, mouse clicks and screen content to gather training data for its AI. More than 1,600 workers signed a petition against it, and the pause only came after Reuters and Wired reported that the collected data, including private conversations and full transcripts, had been left open to anyone inside the company. Zuckerberg told staff that AI learns from watching really smart people do things. The real truth is that these systems are built on human work that is rarely asked for and rarely paid.America’s second-largest school district lost its chief over a failed AI chatbotAlberto Carvalho, superintendent of Los Angeles Unified, resigned after months on paid leave during a federal investigation. Part of it concerns ‘Ed’, an AI chatbot the district bought to support students and parents. LAUSD paid the developer, AllHere, $3m towards a $6m contract, despite the company having reportedly booked only around $11,000 in revenue, before it furloughed most of its staff and its founder was later charged with securities fraud, wire fraud and identity theft. When the rush to adopt AI outruns the dull work of due diligence, the children are the ones left relying on it.Nearly 400 local newspapers sued OpenAI and MicrosoftA coalition of almost 400 community and regional papers sued OpenAI and Microsoft in New York, alleging the companies scraped their articles, bypassed paywalls and reproduced near-verbatim excerpts in ChatGPT and Copilot without permission or payment. These are the small, already-gutted papers that cover town councils and local courts, a world away from the national giants of The New York Times case. The training data has to come from somewhere, and here is who paid for it: local reporters who were never asked.The good one: AI read a scroll that Vesuvius sealed two thousand years agoFor the first time, researchers have read a rolled Herculaneum scroll end to end without ever opening it. Charred and sealed when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it was scanned with high-resolution X-rays and read by machine-learning models trained to find ink on burnt papyrus, then checked column by column by human papyrologists. The text is a treatise on Stoic ethics, and one recovered line reads:“Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them.”This is the version that works, because the AI found the ink and people read the meaning.The first four stories are what happens when control over these tools slips to people who never asked us. The last one shows what changes when human experts keep a hand on the wheel. Ask who is steering the machine before you trust where it takes you.Go slow. Get full access to Slow AI at theslowai.substack.com/subscribe
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    40 分
  • Slow Takes Ep 16: Who’s Checking?

    Slow Takes Ep 16: Who’s Checking?
    2026/06/22
    Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.One in ten people now get their news from a chatbot they do not trustThe Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report, a survey of around 100,000 people across 48 markets, found that one in ten now use an AI chatbot to get news each week, up from 7% a year ago and roughly three times higher among the under-25s. Only about one in five trust AI to get the news right. We are reaching for the tool faster than we believe in it.ChatGPT’s safety filters failed and it produced violent images nobody asked forA heads-up that this one is grim. The AI security firm Mindgard showed that a harmless viral ‘restore this photo’ prompt, tweaked slightly, pushes ChatGPT’s image generator into violent and sexualised content the user never requested. The filter reads the words you type; the picture the model can draw goes unchecked. OpenAI said it was fixed in early June, then Mindgard broke it again by changing a single word in the prompt.SpaceX bought Cursor for $60bn with stock minted days earlierDays after raising $85bn in the largest IPO in history, SpaceX agreed to buy the AI coding firm Cursor for $60bn, all in freshly minted stock. Cursor’s revenue has run from around $100m to $2bn inside a year, though as a private company the real figure cannot be pinned to within a billion. The likely play is to funnel Cursor’s users toward Musk’s own model, Grok.The first rung of the jobs ladder now demands a veteran’s judgementPwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, built on more than a billion job ads, found AI-exposed entry-level roles increasingly ask for senior skills like judgement and leadership, while the wage premium for AI skills has reached 62%. Worth remembering that PwC sells the very upskilling its report recommends. If the first job already needs ten years of judgement, where is anyone meant to build it?The good one: botanists are using AI to race extinctionKew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report, the work of more than 400 scientists across 40 countries, used AI to scan all 7.4 million of its digitised specimens, sometimes identifying species at risk better than specialists could. It found flowering times have shifted by about two and a half days a decade over the last century, and that two in five of the 70,000 species assessed are now threatened with extinction. The scientists are honest about the limits too: the model only knows what has been collected, and the least studied regions are often the most biodiverse. This is the version that works, because people check it.The first four are what happens when we trust the tool faster than anyone checks it. The last one shows what changes when people keep a hand on the wheel. Ask who is checking the machine before you believe it.Go slow.Slow AI is where we build the judgement to know when to use our AI tools and when to leave them alone. Get full access to Slow AI at theslowai.substack.com/subscribe
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    44 分
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