Across AI sources
What researchers, builders and critics are saying about AI.
Their arguments, examples and disagreements, with links to the original material.
A briefing reports one development when it happens. We correct or clarify it later; a new development gets a new briefing. How our formats work
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail argued that a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory changes AI spending from a perpetual per-token bill into a capital asset, with law firms and mid-sized healthcare organizations as the likely buyers. Two other panelists agreed the machine was worth having and still called Apple's AI record a long-running software failure.
On Moonshots EP #284, the panel read out the performance figures OpenAI published for Jalapeño, the inference chip it built with Broadcom, and argued that inference is moving off NVIDIA. One panelist went further, imagining an "OpenAI Compute" cloud that rents capacity to competitors — possibly even hosting an Anthropic model. Dave Blundin explained why CUDA no longer locks buyers in at inference time, and why NVIDIA's next defense is the networking between chips.
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, the panel read out X's disclosure of a suspected 200,000-account network containing 200 accounts posting claims that AI data centers raise household power bills. The hosts set it against Quincy, Washington, where tax revenue from data centers funded a school and a hospital, and argued for a community bargain: build your own power, make local electricity cheaper, pay for the schools.
NVIDIA reported $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue and guided to $108 billion for the current quarter. On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, the panel split over what the number proves: Dave Blundin sees a company nobody can avoid, Alex wants to know how much of the demand NVIDIA itself financed, and Salim Ismail would prefer slower growth that markets have time to correct.
After losing an MIT recruit to a Princeton doctoral program, the Moonshots panel argued that the next two or three years are the last window in which humans steering fleets of AI agents will be unusually valuable — and that a PhD spends that window badly. Then the objection arrived from their own side of the table: everyone there holds the degrees they are telling young people to skip.
On the Moonshots podcast, Salim Ismail, Alex and Emad Mostaque describe the same problem from different desks: agents now produce more work than a person can review. Their answers range from designing escalation thresholds inside companies to Mostaque's decision to read his research agents' output only once a week.
A Berkeley startup called Ditto has no feed and no swiping: students fill in a values questionnaire and a Wednesday evening text arrives with a match, a place and a time. On Moonshots, the panel weighed the appeal of having the choosing removed against Emad's worry about outsourcing connection, Dave's warning that a system that knows you well is also a very good salesperson, and Alex's refusal to use it at all.
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, one speaker argued that hyperscalers could win communities over with cheaper power, school programs and better-looking buildings. A fellow panelist replied that the fight has already been politicized beyond what benefits can fix — and the viral water figures at the center of it describe the whole country, not the town being asked to host the building.
On Moonshots EP #283, Peter Diamandis introduced a reported $6 billion NVIDIA arrangement with the coding startup Poolside as America's answer to Chinese open models. Emad Mostaque argued the real driver is selling more GPUs, while Alex and Dave disagreed about whether licensing-and-hiring deals exist to dodge antitrust review or simply to hire fast — and what happens to the half of Poolside that stays behind.
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, the panel walked through Waymo's sixth-generation driver: a purpose-built 5-nanometer chip, fewer but sharper cameras, and an autonomous-hardware estimate falling from $115,000 to $20,000. Peter had ridden in the new vehicle; Alex objected that the West is now white-labeling Chinese hardware, and argued Waymo is heading for full vertical integration.
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, the panel read out a new leaderboard result: Google's Gemini 3.7 Flash on top of the AA-AnalystAgent benchmark with 60%, ahead of Claude Opus 5 at 54%. Diamandis called it proof that Google is back; Alex argued the score measures repeated reliability on spreadsheet analysis rather than frontier capability, and blamed Google Search for pushing Gemini toward speed and determinism. Emad Mostaque agreed the model was decent but said Google's problem is institutional, not a shortage of chips.
On the Moonshots panel, Peter Diamandis runs a Grok Bot chief of staff called Skippy and Emad Mostaque runs 18 of them across his own machines, installing models and making art. Salim Ismail calls it the move from asking an AI to assigning work; Alex argues the messaging-app interface cannot possibly scale.
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