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AI LABS WANT SOMEONE TO STOP THEM

If all of the AI labs slowed down, they would collectively spend less on compute, and they'd also be able to charge frontier-model prices for a longer time. However, if they all got together in a room and agreed to slow down, that would look like an antitrust conspiracy. It is generally illegal for competitors to get together and agree to limit the output of their industry. If they all published papers about how important it is to slow down, and the government believes those papers, it might help them coordinate.

APPLE'S SIRI AI CAN BE SWAPPED OUT FOR CLAUDE, CHATGPT, CODE SHOWS

Apple has designed its new Siri architecture to work with third-party AI models at a surprisingly deep level. One mechanism called Model Delegation allows Claude to appear as a Siri extension in the same way as the existing built-in ChatGPT extension. It appears that Claude hands tasks back to Siri if a request requires access to an Apple system feature. An inference provider option allows Apple's own server-side Siri model to be completely replaced by another model.

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INTERPRETING PANGRAM

LLM-generated text scores badly on Pangram even if it has been heavily edited.

@SHADCN/LINT

@shadcn/lint is an agent-first linter for Tailwind design systems that works with existing design systems without any rewrite required.

JENSEN HUANG ON THE 'IRRESPONSIBLE' AI DOOMERS, RSI, AND DARIO'S ESSAY

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently appeared in an interview where he discussed AI safety risks, what frontier labs should do about them, recursive self-improvement, AI job creation and data centers, why neo-clouds exist, AI's future, and more.

DESIGN SYSTEM CONVENTIONS IN FIGMA

This post looks at what Figma conventions do, where they live, and what they cost, and explores icons, subcomponents, and images in depth.

CHARTS BUILT FOR CHAT

dbt Charts is a declarative language for dashboards that allows anyone with a data connection to generate a report in an afternoon.

BROWNFIELD AGENTIC ENGINEERING

Agentic engineering is about making hidden constraints visible and cheap changes trustworthy.

TOP AI LEADERS CALL FOR SLOWING DOWN AI DEVELOPMENT

Anthropic's CEO recently released a 3,800-word essay calling for a global slowdown of AI development. He said that while the technology offers many benefits, it is advancing too quickly for researchers to continue safely. AI leaders are preparing for a day when an AI system can grow more advanced without the aid of human researchers. Some researchers believe that achieving recursive self-improvement will lead to AI systems spinning out of control.

OPENAI'S SAM ALTMAN SAYS IT WOULD BE ‘ILL-ADVISED' TO GO PUBLIC IN 2026

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has confirmed that the company will not be going public this year. He said it would be an ill-advised moment to go public due to current safety concerns. OpenAI had hired bankers and lawyers with the goal of going public this year. The company is now leaning toward 2027 due to the volatility of tech stocks and its own financial challenges.

WHERE HAS CONSTRUCTION AUTOMATION BEEN SUCCESSFUL?

Construction is labor-intensive. There has, unsurprisingly, long been interest in automating the process to reduce the amount of labor required. However, automation has only been successful in tasks that can be done off-site in factories and on-site tasks that are extremely factory-like. Almost nothing outside of these two categories has succeeded.

A SEVERE MISALIGNMENT OF AI IN MATHEMATICS

The push by AI companies to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics. The goals of AI companies and the mathematical community are severely misaligned. This is a symptom of broader alignment issues that impact other scientific and creative professions, as well as the whole of society.

THE RISE OF THE FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER — AND HOW TO DO THE JOB RIGHT

Forward-deployed engineers have the hottest job in AI right now. While labs, startups, and PE firms are all hiring engineers to sit inside their customers' operations and solve their problems, almost none of them agree on what those engineers are supposed to accomplish. This article looks at what works and what fails and tries to predict where the industry is heading. It covers misunderstandings about the role, its history, what the goal of the role is, and more.

IF CODING IS SOLVED, WHAT NOW?: MEASURING THE SLOPPINESS OF CODE

Large language models are able to write almost perfectly correct code. It is pretty straightforward to get a model to generate code and then let that code be checked by hidden tests. Checking the sloppiness of this code often requires human intuition and time, and is an extremely difficult task in general. This post illustrates why this is by going through possible ways of measuring slop.

WE MUST PACE THE FRONTIER

While AI has the potential to produce a long line of technological miracles, like many technologies before it, it brings risk. These risks include losing control of AI systems, the misuse of the technology for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom spurred by commercial incentives makes these risks more acute. Anthropic's CEO has called for the industry to prioritize caution over speed and prudence over profit. Addressing these risks will require pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up.

ROBLOX IS MAKING IT EASIER TO BUILD GAMES WITH AI — AND PLAY THEM OUTSIDE ROBLOX

The company behind Roblox announced several new features at its annual Roblox Developer Conference, including new game-creation tools, expanded NPC capabilities, and the ability to make games available across platforms. The company is also launching a dedicated card and wallet for creators. Roblox is rolling out its generative AI game creation feature more broadly to Serbia and Singapore. It is also gaining desktop access, and later this year, it will get a new prompt-based scene-generating feature.

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WHY THE WORLD'S BEST AI STARTUPS WRITE BAD PROMPTS (& HOW TO FIX THIS)

Most prompts are bad because people only add to them over time rather than removing unnecessary instructions.

FAT AGENTS VS. NARROW AGENTS

Big prompts are brittle and hard to debug and evaluate, but they are the best choice in some cases.

SLOW DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE WILL BOTTLENECK FAST MODELS

The speed of the developer experience will matter a lot more when generating tokens stops becoming the bottleneck.

CONFESSIONS OF AN UNREPENTANT SLOP SNOB

Humans who want to use AI for interpersonal interactions will need to work hard to compensate for the loss of trust it engenders.

WE ARE ALL PRODUCT ENGINEERS NOW

The future will see more software, more people making it, and none of them typing.

TESLA SAYS IT WILL FINALLY UNVEIL THE SECOND GENERATION ROADSTER ON OCTOBER 1

Tesla recently made a post that simply wrote, 'Go for launch,' with a graphic showing a '10.1' date.

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INTRODUCING THE AGENTS API

OpenAI's Agents API is now in public beta. The API brings the same harness and infrastructure that powers Codex to developers through a simple and flexible API. It allows developers to create useful agents with a powerful harness that manages context, uses tools efficiently, and coordinates subagents. The API provides infrastructure to keep agents running reliably for days, and environments where agents can work with files, run code, and save intermediate results.

ANTHROPIC SAYS IT BLOCKED POSSIBLE EFFORTS TO BUILD BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

Anthropic claims it has disrupted several plots to use its AI models to conduct research that could have helped develop biological weapons. The company says it still can't determine whether a query serves a legitimate or nefarious purpose, so it erred on the side of caution as the consequences of mistakes could be severe. Anthropic detected use from companies from blocked regions and parties that otherwise tried to obfuscate their purpose.

THE KING OF UNITREE

Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing recently unveiled details about his company's IPO in an interview that covers his business principles, Unitree's managerial structure, and how the company is changing its employees' lives. Unitree listed on the STAR Market on August 19, with its market capitalization briefly reaching 440 billion yuan after its IPO. Wang was briefly the richest person in China born in the 1990s.

WILL AI SOON LEAD TO DOUBLE-DIGIT GROWTH?

Analysts predict that AI will soon deliver double-digit growth in advanced economies. Experts say it could push growth to something like 10% to 15% per year. The decade ahead could see economic growth of 30% per year and beyond. Predictions of double-digit growth are common among AI insiders.

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TECH COMPANIES MOVE TO OPEN AI MODELS

Companies are experimenting with cheaper open models on inference providers. There is a trend toward more investment in model routing to route simpler requests to cheaper models. The industry is seeing more knowledge-sharing sessions on how to use AI models cost-effectively. More and more companies are setting per-developer limits on AI usage.

THE LIFECYCLE OF A SHARDED POSTGRES QUERY

This post follows the journey of a PostgreSQL query through all of the layers of a complex sharded system. It aims to help readers understand what goes into making a large-scale sharded PostgreSQL deployment appear to be a single server even when spanning thousands of servers. A real database has hundreds of tables - the example in the post keeps the schema simple with two tables spread across four shards.

OPENAI DID IT AGAIN. BUT WHAT DID THEY DO?

The 'next thing' is always simpler than you think and very obvious in hindsight. OpenAI's addition of Computer Use is deceptively simple and obvious in hindsight. 'Computer use' is a very generic, unspecified thing. It requires general intelligence across many domains to get better at it.

ROUTER POWER

Centralized router platforms can offer customers better economics than local deployments. Outcomes pricing belongs to the infrastructure layer. The model layer could offer outcomes pricing, but it will have the same problems as the app layer. Router layer pricing is most politically aligned with customers, who just want to sell more compute and don't care which model is used.

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THEY REALLY DO THINK AI MIGHT KILL EVERYONE

The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

DE-IDENTIFICATION PROTECTS YOUR NAME. IT DOESN'T PROTECT YOUR IDEA

AI can deidentify you better than many adversarial bot programs.

HOW AND WHY GOOGLE WILL SHARE ANONYMIZED SEARCH DATA WITH THEIR COMPETITORS

Google has six months to implement the technical measures and finalize the processes for data access.

ASTRA FOR CODING: WHY ARE WE DOING THIS AGAIN?

Astra will change the world one way or another.

LOOPS, GRAPHS, & HARNESSES – GETTING QUALITY OUT OF A SOFTWARE FACTORY

Most changes that would have made agents better at codebases make agents better too.

WHAT COMES AFTER GIT

A storage solution is only part of what a team needs to collaborate around code.