Think AI is replacing workers? The reality is more ironic: humans labor behind the scenes to build AI meant to replace them. The gap between hype and reality reveals uncomfortable truths about innovation, investment bubbles, and the actual human cost of chasing artificial intelligence dreams.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff learned that $1 billion in local donations doesn't buy permission to call federal troops into San Francisco—not when 25-year friendships end and fellow billionaires publish op-eds on moral laundering.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Salesforce answered an RFP you didn't know existed. The pitch: use AI to
Mercor's new benchmark tested AI on real work from Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and top law firms. GPT-5 scored 64%—impressive on paper, but not enough for autonomous operation. The gap between 'helpful sometimes' and 'production-ready' remains wide.
How can an AI master a complex game without ever playing it? DeepMind's Dreamer 4 learns by watching, then trains in imagination. This shift from big data to efficient world models could be key for real-world robotics and autonomous systems.
OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion at a $500 billion valuation—but left $3.4 billion authorized shares unsold. The company calls it confidence. It could be caution about a restructuring still awaiting regulatory approval while burning $2.5B per half.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Sam Altman's digital twin shoplifted GPUs from Target this week. Not the real
OpenAI's new Sora 2 app hit #1 in 24 hours—flooded with copyrighted characters and deepfakes. The company's inverting copyright norms: rightsholders must opt out, not opt in. Disney did. Most didn't. Now the legal questions multiply.
Six OpenAI veterans including Mira Murati raised $2B at a $12B valuation to build Tinker, an API that democratizes frontier model fine-tuning. The bet: customization matters more than scale. The tension: access is curated, not open.
An AI studio created a photorealistic digital actress and announced agencies were negotiating to sign her. Within 48 hours, SAG-AFTRA condemned it and actors revolted. The speed of rejection reveals where Hollywood draws the line on AI.
Marc Andreessen says Elon Musk's management playbook produces impossible results—but he can count on one hand the founders who could execute even 10% of it. As AI hardware startups raise hundreds of millions, that gap matters more than ever.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Three years after ChatGPT launched, the predicted job apocalypse remains stubbornly theoretical. Yale and Brookings
OpenAI's new video app requires consent to use your face but lets studios opt out of copyright protection. Disney already blocked its catalog. Meanwhile, the TikTok clone faces a problem its marketing won't mention: the servers can't handle viral growth.
Tech CEOs warned AI would spike unemployment to 20%. Yale researchers tracking 33 months of labor data can't find the disruption. Either the measurement tools are wrong, adoption is slower than claimed, or the apocalypse is just delayed.
Zhipu AI releases GLM-4.6 with MIT-licensed weights and something unusual: complete test logs from 74 coding evaluations. The pitch is 15% fewer tokens than its predecessor at 90% lower cost than Claude—but with caveats on where it actually leads.
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