AI in 2026

The phonograph was blamed for stripping the life from real, human, soulful performances; to paraphrase critics at the time, recorded music would kill the amateur musician and destroy musical taste entirely. (Hate to imagine what those critics would say about Suno.) Television, meanwhile, is probably the most famous example of controversial... See more

This is the next stage of search, which includes contextual discovery that’s based on what the system understands about each user, and which provides more tailored, personalized overviews of the most relevant responses.

Both AI Mode and Ask YouTube are initial moves towards this, which will eventually also integrate more agentic elements that can,... See more

Now A.I. companies are attempting to hitch themselves to a similar aura of artisanality, even as their core products promise to automate all that is human into obsolescence. Last year, Anthropic hosted a pop-up café in Manhattan (what could be more hipster?) and gave away baseball caps embroidered with the word “thinking.” OpenAI’s recent Super... See more

Ever since their ‘Thinking’ caps and cafe activation, I realized that Anthropic is positioning its brand as the Apple of the AI era. Back in January, they updated Claude’s “Constitution,” adding values-based constraints in effort to prevent dangerous behavior in the absence of government regulation. Anthropic’s recent refusal to accede to the... See more

Here’s my point. Some people think that writing is merely the process of picking the right words and putting them in the right order, like stringing beads onto a necklace. But the power of those words, if there is any, doesn’t live inside the words themselves. On its own, “Love the questions” is nearly meaningless. Those words only come alive when... See more

The belief that doing takes more resources than deciding what to do has been the default operating mode for basically all of human life. The how has always been so expensive that the what barely matters. You didn’t need to be good at wishing because you were never going to get most of what you wished for anyway. That’s why ‘default to action’ (vs

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