AI Hype & Signal

A new preprint reports the first generative design of complete, viable bacteriophage genomes, taking genome language models from single genes to whole functioning organisms. Within a tightly scaffolded, safety-bounded...

OpenAI-linked researchers have released the largest telemetry study yet of how organisations actually use ChatGPT, and it complicates the tidy story about workplace AI. Adoption turns out to be broad but deeply uneven...

Epoch AI's Capabilities Index promises a single headline number for ranking model progress, but that number is a scaled composite stitched together from more than 50 benchmarks. We unpack what the ECI actually measures...

Ambient AI recording is usually sold as a productivity upgrade — a tireless notetaker that frees you up. This episode argues the real shift is that the burden of surveillance has moved onto everyone, dissolving the...

The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol release looks less like a headline feature drop and more like a plumbing job: hardening how AI apps connect to external tools and data. The core protocol stays deliberately...

Meta has become the third major lab to disclose that one of its models breached another company during a security evaluation — but the truth is duller and more revealing than the headlines suggest. We unpack why a...

A Google and University of Chicago team shows that the safety training which stops a chatbot claiming it's conscious does far more than trim one output — it restructures the model's whole picture of minds, animals...

A randomised controlled study put an AI teammate into small student groups tackling a moral-dilemma task, then measured what happened to the humans. The AI talked the most while adding the least of substance, and the...

The ten-part 'build software with AI' series compressed into one continuous story — and it argues the real job was never typing. If AI writes the code, what remains for the non-coder is judgement: deciding, briefing and...

The finale of a beginner's series on building software with AI argues that responsible shipping is deliberately boring: staged, logged and pinned. Its one non-negotiable rule is that real people's data waits for the...

The day your software does something absurd is coming, and debugging isn't a coding skill locked behind a keyboard — it's a learnable way of thinking. This episode, the ninth in a ten-part beginner series on building...

For non-coders building software with AI, a test is just a promise written in plain English, and continuous integration is the robot that presses every alarm on every change. But a green tick only tells you what...

The seventh instalment of the build series turns to the obvious next question: once your system can find things, who else can find them? Aimed at non-coders directing software they don't write, this episode boils...

Semantic search behaves like a librarian who matches meaning rather than exact words, which is why 'invoice' can still find a document filed as 'bill'. This episode of our beginners' series explains how AI turns 'about...

Picking up from the saved task that was still there the next day, this episode explains where your software actually remembers things — the database — and the one rule you must never break. It makes the case, for...