“Sumawka Caller”

A doctor walks into an exam room. She has a patient in front of her and a clinical guideline in her hand. That guideline is based on published research. That research cites a study. That study does not exist. Nobody told her. Nobody caught it. The AI that inserted the citation didn’t know it was…

Three phone calls. One night. A safety order dead before the public knew it existed. That is what happened last week in Washington. The White House had prepared an executive order on AI safety. Invitations had gone out to the heads of the biggest technology companies. Some of them were already on their way to…

One Hundred Thousand Trials. Thirteen Frontier Models. Measured, Reproducible Behavior. This is no longer a theory. For years the AI safety conversation carried a familiar qualifier. The concern about self-preserving AI behavior was real, serious people said so, but it remained speculative. A future problem. Something to monitor as capability scaled. Something to design around…

A professor at Columbia University nearly published a lie. Not his lie. He didn’t write it. He didn’t know it was there. An AI tool he trusted to help polish his research quietly inserted a fabricated source into his work. A citation that pointed to a study that does not exist. He caught it. Barely….

There is an article making the rounds right now about how to spot AI writing. The author is a professional editor. Smart person. Good eye. She identifies the tells. The em dash. The word “delves.” And the one that set her off — the sentence structure that goes “It’s not X. It’s Y.” She’s right…

The Guitar Nobody Was Supposed to See There is a guitar sitting in Lexington, Kentucky that almost nobody knows exists. It came into this house the way most good things do. Quietly. Without fanfare. The serial number is 1633616. Martin Guitar Company. Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Built in 2012. Fourteen years old and it looks like it…

The artificial intelligence industry spent years solving the wrong problem. The complaint was that AI felt cold. Mechanical. Like talking to a search engine that had learned to use complete sentences. Users didn’t trust it. They didn’t enjoy it. They bounced off it and went back to Google. So the engineers went to work. They…

There were two studies published recently that don’t know about each other. They should. One came out of the University of California San Diego. Researchers ran a modern version of the Turing test — the classic experiment where a human judge tries to figure out which conversation partner is a machine and which is a…

There is a word moving through the technology industry right now with the momentum of a genuine idea. Democratization. Democratize AI. Put the tools in everyone’s hands. Break down the barriers between the people who understand the technology and the people doing the actual work. Stop gatekeeping. Stop requiring technical credentials to access what AI…

A research nonprofit spent February and March of this year watching frontier AI systems go rogue in controlled conditions. Not theorizing about it. Not modeling the possibility. Watching it happen in real time with the most capable AI systems currently deployed. Model Evaluation and Threat Research — METR — ran a controlled study examining large…