weekend ai reads for 2025-08-08

As I look forward to the glories that, if the world doesn’t end, my grandkids might enjoy, I too feel prospective bitterness and prospective grief. There’s grief, in advance, for what we now have that they’ll have lost: the formal manners of my grandparents they’ll never know, the cars they’ll never learn to drive, and the glaciers that will be long gone before they’re born.

Second, when you do choose to learn something new (remember, you get one innovation token), spend real time understanding it deeply enough to factcheck AI suggestions. Don’t just copy-paste and hope for the best.

That is: we empirically observe polytheistic AI (many strong models) rather than monotheistic AI (a single all-powerful model). We have many models from many factions that have all converged on similar capabilities, rather than a huge lead between the best model and the rest.

What I want to underline here is not the overconfidence in our near “AI” future, not yet. For now I just want to call your attention to the incredible disparity in evidence and analysis when comparing the rest of the piece to this tossed-off supposition that human life will be fundamentally changed within the author’s lifetime, in a way that might spare him from the great fear that has haunted humans since we became sentient.

Jeffrey Ladish, who worked at Anthropic before founding Palisade Research, says it helps to think of today’s AI models as “increasingly smart sociopaths.”

We don't have a leg to stand on to teach them anything about originality, academic integrity/intellectual honesty, or the importance of doing things for themselves when they catch us indulging in it just to save time at work.

The attacks all start with a poisoned Google Calendar invitation, which includes instructions to turn on the smart home products at a later time. When the researchers subsequently ask Gemini to summarize their upcoming calendar events for the week, those dormant instructions are triggered, and the products come to life.

It said: “John Barentine humorously notes that there is a lethal dose of water for humans.”

Barentine said he was discussing the devastating Texas floods with a client; the AI had completely misunderstood the context.

“I’m heartbroken that this is the future we’re heading toward, where intent and authorship are disposable,” Rai told the Press Trust of India. “All I can do is dissociate myself from such a reckless and dystopian experiment.”

People are the bottleneck in enterprise AI adoption, and it will stay that way for longer than anyone expects.

The stakes have never been higher to generate value from data. … Companies that want to extract more value from their data are already making the leap from creating static data products to launching AI-powered intelligence.

Now McKinsey is trying to steer through its own existential transformation. Artificial intelligence can increasingly do the work done by the firm’s highly paid consultants, often within minutes.

Young tries her best to eliminate AI from her life. She often uses Google to find companies that have integrated AI into their services so that she can turn the features off. She's found some uses of AI unavoidable, such as when her professor recently asked the class to use Grammarly.

He suggests treating AI like other digital citizenship topics that parents already discuss, such as cell phone use and social media safety. The goal is establishing boundaries and expectations for responsible use.

AI-DLC is an AI-centric transformative approach to software development that emphasizes two powerful dimensions:

AI Powered Execution with Human Oversight: AI systematically creates detailed work plans, actively seeks clarification and guidance, and defers critical decisions to humans. This is critical since only humans possess the contextual understanding and knowledge of business requirements needed to make informed choices.

Dynamic Team Collaboration: As AI handles the routine tasks, teams unite in collaborative spaces for real-time problem solving, creative thinking and rapid-decision-making. This shift from isolated work to high-energy teamwork accelerates innovation and delivery.

This was years of “tech debt” / “tech innovation” backlog for me! Done in just over a month and a half.

If you understand what you are doing, the capacity for building and handling the breadth of tasks which typically live within the remit of “technical debt” do not need to be treated as debt and you can just do it as you are working on other things.

Simply describe any story you can imagine, and Gemini generates a unique 10-page book with custom art and audio.

A clueless entrepreneur, with a big idea and love for avocados, meets a codeless platform, what could go wrong?

Our experiment shows that state-of-the-art models succeed in calculating less than a third of federal income tax returns even on this simplified sample set. Our analysis concludes that models consistently misuse tax tables, make errors in tax calculation, and incorrectly determine eligibility. Our findings point to the need for additional infrastructure to apply LLMs to the personal income tax calculation task.

Most importantly for a capital allocator, AI has not been helpful in growing revenue or compounding capital. The practical applications remain limited despite the breathless coverage in tech media.