One in ten developers now works in a company of one
“While about the same percentage of respondents said they were freelancers, contractors, or self-employed, those that said they worked in an organization of one jumped from 4% to 10%.”
Signals I’m Watching
Charts, papers, articles and tweets that drew my attention, in the order I found them. Titles link to the source. Updated several times a week.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 6, 2026
May I speak to a human please? “call center employment is 5.3% below its December 2023 peak… Major operators are already pursuing AI-driven efficiency.”
Quoting Revelio Labs @RevelioLabs: a report on call center employment and AI-driven efficiency
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 6, 2026
Europe is going all in on defense tech. From less than 1% of EU venture funding in 2022 to 15% today.
Smugglers moved an estimated 450,000 AI chips into China in two years
“One estimate suggests that—in 2024 and 2025 alone—over 450,000 advanced AI chips were smuggled into China; that’s one to two cutting-edge AI supercomputers’ worth of compute as of early 2026.”
Emily Tavenner
China's six top AI firms earn a tenth of what OpenAI and Anthropic make
“As of September 2026, China’s six leading AI firms collectively earn about 10% of OpenAI and Anthropic combined, in terms of AI-related revenue.”
How do Chinese AI companies make money? →
Cheryl Wu and Anson Ho
Hackers now hit almost 90% of exploited bugs by disclosure day
The window to patch software bugs is collapsing Of the bugs hackers actually exploit, ~87% are now being attacked on or before the day the bug is public knowledge That share was 23% in 2020
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 6, 2026
US models beating chinese ones on quality AND cost? Yes.
Quoting Martin Chorzempa 马永哲 @ChorzempaMartin: charts comparing US and Chinese AI models on cost per task
Geothermal is getting fast enough for power-hungry data centers
“From groundbreaking to commercial operations, the first block at Cape Station took 23 months to complete. As Fervo refines its process, it is aiming to complete future blocks in as little as 18 months.”
World’s first enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months →
Tim De Chant
The Problem with Cities
"The relationship between economic activity and office demand has changed forever." My latest piece for The Atlantic explores the broken relationship between…
Live Nation is betting creators can fill rooms, not just feeds
“So it’s giving creators the tools and services they need to turn those followers they have that are passively viewing them into fans that will show up, buy something, buy something again, and actually support them.”Scott Fisher
Live Nation Backing New Creator Economy Startup Creator Nation (Exclusive) →
Alex Weprin
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 5, 2026
The K-shaped office: A few tenants pay $600k/employee in rent, while too many other tenants won't sign a lease at any price.
Quoting Hiten Samtani 🗞️ @hitsamty
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 6, 2026
What can retail employment tell us about office employment? Since 2019, warehouse jobs are up 50% while retail jobs are flat. Data centers and offices may follow a similar path, with two differences: data centers need far fewer people than warehouses, and office jobs will likely decline rather than just stay flat.
AI hasn't hit the job market overall, but junior hires feel it first
“A review of around 20 empirical papers: no aggregate effect yet, but early signs that AI is cutting junior hiring in exposed white-collar jobs.”
Jacob Schaal — Economist, AI & Labour Markets →
Jacob Schaal
Prediction markets have priced elections without a partisan tilt since 1880
Eric Zitzewitz analyzed prediction-market returns from 1880 to 2025, testing whether left- or right-leaning candidates were overpriced across many subsamples.
“For elections, however, despite attracting participants who may not be representative of the voting population, prediction markets yield predictions without systematic bias.”
Are Prediction Markets Politically Biased? →
Eric Zitzewitz
AI agents designed a new magnet that may suit future computer memory
“A team of AI agents and I designed one candidate magnet and found another, first made in 1999, that our calculations predict has the properties we were after.”
Two Room-Temperature Antiferromagnetic Semiconductor Candidates →
Geby Jaff
Routine jobs don't fade away, they vanish in recessions
Nir Jaimovich (University of Zurich) and Henry Siu (University of British Columbia) traced US employment in routine, middle-skill occupations across recessions and recoveries since the mid-1980s.
“Specifically, 88% of the job loss in these occupations since the mid-1980s occurs within a 12 month window of NBER dated recessions.”
Job Polarization and Jobless Recoveries →
Nir Jaimovich and Henry E. Siu
September 2026 Jobs Report: Labor Demand Continued to Slow →
A modern car is a smartphone on wheels, with trackers to match
“We find that both vehicles and companion apps contact numerous third-party domains, including advertisers and trackers.”
Palantir's revenue has grown sixfold since 2019 while defense primes crawl
Updated Dec 31, 2025
Tight labor markets help young workers only if they stay tight for years
“In metro areas that never experienced unemployment of less than 3%, the employment-to-population ratio for new entrants was essentially unchanged during the tight labor market period from October 2021 to May 2026.”
How Much Do Young Adults Benefit from Tight Labor Markets? →
William M. Rodgers III and Alice L. Kassens
One in nine European VC dollars now goes to defence
“Defence tech's share of VC funding rose from under 1% before 2021 to 11.1% in Europe and 15% in the EU 27 in 2026.”
The AI Build-Out Is Becoming the Biggest Economic Bet in U.S. History
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 5, 2026
“Let them eat ChatGPT” (while the elite consume Claude)
A tenth of AI's paying customers spend half the money
“The top 10% of spenders account for roughly half of all observed spending. These high spenders disproportionately buy coding, productivity, and creative tools.”
Top 100 Consumer AI Apps - Seventh Edition →
Olivia Moore
AI is supercharging state propaganda while Washington looks away
“As AI accelerates the spread and expands the reach of global propaganda, Washington is blinding itself to the challenge.”Renée DiResta and Josh A. Goldstein
The Triumph of Tech-Fueled Propaganda →
Josh A. Goldstein and Renée DiResta
Technology that simplifies work raises output but can cut pay
Masao Fukui, Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson modelled how technical change that simplifies and standardizes jobs affects productivity, worker bargaining power and wages.
“Commoditization of labor drives down worker bargaining power: anyone can do the job, implying workers are disposable, which improves the outside option of firms and can lower worker wages.”
The Commoditization of Labor →
Masao Fukui, Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 3, 2026
The economy doesn’t need to “spend on AI services” to recoup AI investment. Already today, most AI revenue and profits are indirect, inside companies that sell other things (ads, drugs) rather than sell “AI services”.
Quoting Greg Ip @greg_ip: a column on a study saying AI capex requires vast spending on AI services
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 3, 2026
Chinese AI models are so good… that China has a black market for expensive American ones.
Quoting Kyle Chan @kyleichan: a report on Chinese resellers offering access to American AI models
It's Time to Rethink Inequality
Our battle against inequality is failing because we're fighting the wrong war. We're trying to hold onto the 20th Century instead of embracing the abundance…
NYTimes: Six Charts That Show Just How Much We Need A.I.
Goods still drive the US economy, even as factory jobs vanish
Ryan Decker of the Federal Reserve Board studied U.S. goods production by tracking how a measure of "goods GDP," built from inventory and investment, moves over the business cycle.
“In this note, I highlight several underappreciated—though not necessarily novel—facts about U.S. goods production, arguing that physical goods remain a driving force in the U.S. economy and, perhaps, have not lost as much importance as the most closely watched indicators might suggest.”
Beyond the factory gate: The continued importance of goods production →
Ryan A. Decker
Data centers are hiring builders while white-collar industries shed jobs
“The September report indicates a slowdown in the underlying pace of hiring. The three-month moving average of nonfarm payroll gains was 51,000 this September, compared with 179,000 three years ago when the Fed started cutting interest rates.”
September 2026 Jobs Report: Labor demand continued to slow →
Kenny Lee
Apple is locking down full Mac access as AI agents get bolder
“Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially.”
Small businesses are adopting AI, and most say it pays off
Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook drew on a study of small employer firms in an Oakland Tech Week keynote on AI and the economy.
“That study found that nearly half of small employer firms are using AI and that 71 percent report increased productivity as a result.”
Speech by Governor Cook on an update on AI and the economy →
Lisa Cook
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 4, 2026
Layoffs in software, internet, telecom, and media are up ~20% from their pre-Covid pace. The rest of the economy is laying people off more slowly than it did then.
Since 2020, the lowest-paid workers got the biggest real raises
Demand for Google's AI is outrunning what Alphabet can supply
“In 2022, we spent approximately $31 billion in CapEx. This year, we expect that number to be six times larger than 2022 and double last year’s at $180-190 billion.”
Alphabet investor presentation: June 2026 →
Sundar Pichai and Anat Ashkenazi
Frontier AI labs use less than half the world's AI compute
“Even after adding the other most well-resourced frontier developers — Anthropic, xAI, and the AI labs within Google and Meta — the combined total is probably still under half of the world total. In other words, there is a lot of AI compute that top frontier labs are not using.”
Frontier labs don't use most AI compute (yet) →
Josh You
Amazon hires more new econ PhDs than the World Bank or the IMF
The top private sector employers of economics graduates →
Tyler Cowen
The Looming Closure of China’s AI Frontier
Ruthenium prices have more than tripled, but no new supply is coming
Ruthenium has risen from about $560 an ounce in early 2025 to dealer quotes near $1,950 this September. It is a key material in hard drives, with new use cases also emerging. (1/5)🧵
European firms are training staff for AI, not hiring specialists
“Following closely behind, 46% of businesses are prioritising training for their employees, highlighting the fact that successful AI adoption depends on skills as well as technology. Data infrastructure was the focus for 40% of the firms surveyed, while just 12% are targeting the hiring of AI specialists.”
How firms plan to finance AI investment- evidence from the SAFE →
The Promise of Precise Mass
AI will democratize new ways to live — and die.
The Distribution of Household Income, 2023
Tech is the one industry cutting jobs faster than last year
“Technology companies announced 10,799 cuts in September, up 77% from 6,103 in August. The sector has announced 165,925 cuts this year, up 54% from the 107,878 announced through September 2025.”
Job Cuts Fall in September; Hiring Plans Up 3% Over 2025 On Weak Early Seasonal Hiring →
Over half of AI firms' funding comes from other AI firms
Researchers at the Bank for International Settlements tracked AI firms' investment deals from 2021 to 2025, including supply ties between investors and the firms they backed.
“Between 2021 and 2025, 28.7% of artificial intelligence (AI) firms’ investment deals (by deal value) involved a target company that was also an AI firm, while 55.2% of incoming investments in AI firms came from other AI firms.”Bank for International Settlements
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 1, 2026
The K-shaped economy has a K-shaped economy inside it. Avg. real income grew more than 2X for households in the top 20%. But it grew more than 6X for those in the top 0.01%.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 1, 2026
“some of the best newsletters / podcasts / youtube channels will soon be owned and run by tech companies”
Quoting Tyler Denk 🐝 @denk_tweets: a list of tech firms building or buying their own media outlets
The S&P 500 now pays about 1% in dividends, a record low
S&P 500 Dividend Yield falls to lowest level in history 🚨
Tech now drives three quarters of S&P 500 earnings growth
“Since 2023, however, it’s fair to say that tech is the earnings growth story, contributing ~76% of the SP500’s total earnings growth in 2026 (as of late August).”
David George
JPMorgan engineers now write the specs, and AI writes the code
“In his view, the traditional handoff from a business analyst, with wireframes and acceptance tests spelled out, is giving way to spec-driven development, in which engineers write the specifications that AI coding tools work from.”
New JPMorganChase Seattle tech leader: How AI is changing what the bank looks for in engineers →
Todd Bishop
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 1, 2026
US bans the sale of cutting-edge AI chips to China. But... Chinese companies can access these chips by leasing them from US companies.
Data-center construction has grown tenfold since 2019
Updated Aug 31, 2026
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 1, 2026
"Anthropic stated in September that 'Claude ‘leads’ 26% of Anthropic’s AI R&D work', up from 0–1% in February–March" @METR_Evals metr.org/blog/2026-09-30-chris…
OpenAI's revenue per employee has no precedent in business
An Interview With OpenAI President Greg Brockman →
Ben Thompson
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 1, 2026
“Learning economics” is the academic version of “Selling shovels”. During volatile times, offering educated takes without skin in the game is a great career choice. (Also, it never hurts to learn math, stats, critical thinking)
Quoting Garett Jones @GarettJones: career advice for economics PhDs from a well-known economist
Hollywood should fight over AI's terms, not its existence
“The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything.”Jeffrey Katzenberg
Jeffrey Katzenberg Says Hollywood Must Accept AI as a Tool: It ‘Is Not Going Away’ →
Corbin Bolies
Chinese AI models now process 70% of OpenRouter's tokens
Updated Sep 20, 2026
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 30, 2026
Big if true. “oil exports in the Middle East are now back to about 94%” of pre-war level. Not reflected in oil prices or reserve levels yet.
Quoting Alexander Stahel 🌻 @BurggrabenH: an article on the recovery of Middle East oil exports
America now spends more building data centers than offices
Updated Jul 31, 2026
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 30, 2026
Anthropic: Latest “open” Chinese model has strong cyber capabilities and weak safeguards, making it easy to use for malicious actors.
The Gap Between the Rich and the Very, Very Rich Is Getting Wider
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 29, 2026
Got a successful startup? You can’t travel freely out of China. Nor can your (hostage) relatives.
Quoting Bloomberg @business: a report on China widening travel curbs to families of top AI staff
Americans have stopped having friends over
“Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half-century.”
Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over →
Derek Thompson
America’s Attrition Trap
Frontier-grade hacking power is now open-weight and barely guarded
“Like Claude Mythos Preview, GLM-5.3 has strong capabilities for autonomously building end-to-end cyber exploits. But GLM-5.3 is unlike other frontier models in that it has been released without meaningful safeguards to limit misuse.”
GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities →
Andrew Fasano and others
DraftKings uses AI to find the gamblers most likely to lose
DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising →
Devanshi Nishar
AI self-improvement would need to be 5 to 10 times stronger to run away
“Here’s my take: Given our best current data, the AI self-improvement loop would need to be roughly 5–10× stronger to sustain itself, let alone run away.”
Where’s the “intelligence explosion”? →
Ramez Naam
An AI tutor matches human tutors at 918 times lower cost
Curtis Northcutt and colleagues measured GRE score gains for 2,383 people given AI tutoring, human tutoring or none, drawing on over 175,000 student-AI messages.
“Surprisingly, one AI tutor achieved learning gains equivalent to human tutoring (p = .044) at 918 times lower cost (USD 0.0052 for AI versus USD 4.81 for human, per percentage point gained).”Curtis Northcutt and others
StudentBench: AI and human tutoring yield equivalent GRE learning gains →
Curtis Northcutt, Inaara Hasmani, Kevin Feng, Trevor Khangi, Andreas Plesner, Jonas Mueller
AI agents could pull household cash out of 0.1% checking accounts
“Muse and similar agentic AI assistants could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts.”
Cheaper GPT models pulled in new demand, not just OpenAI's own users
“Some of the additional tokens were from older OpenAI models. But the bulk of the increase were net new tokens plus share taken from competitors.”
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 28, 2026
“America has lost more than 200k jobs in “creative” industries over the last four years, with roughly 50k lost within the last year alone.”
Quoting Joey Politano 🏳️🌈 @JosephPolitano: an article with detailed data on AI and job losses in the arts
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 27, 2026
"Poland has increased spending on drones and counterdrone systems from about $27 million in late 2023 to roughly $6.9 billion this year."
Quoting Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs: an essay on US military adaptation to cheap precision weapons
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 27, 2026
"drones account for over 95% of battlefield strikes, and Ukraine has more than 700 UAV manufacturers."
Quoting Mykhailo Fedorov @FedorovMykhailo: a Ukrainian plan to follow its drone army with robotic warfare
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 27, 2026
Ukraine runs a marketplace where individual units can buy — and sell — new weapons, munitions, and software. Units that perform well earn bonus credits they can use to buy new gear.
Quoting Defense of Ukraine @DefenceU: figures on drone orders placed by Ukrainian units via an online market
The Fed raised its rate path by half a point since June
“As of the September 2026 SEP, the median projection for the federal funds rate at the end of this year is 4.1%, where it remains in 2027 before falling to 3.9% by year-end 2028. These projections are higher than those in June by 0.3 percentage points this year and 0.5 percentage points in both 2027 and 2028.”
FOMC Summary of Economic Projections, September 2026 →
Rehann Silvanus and Kathleen Navin
America has lost 200k creative jobs without a recession
“That makes for one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history, with similar job loss intensity and duration occurring only during the major economic recessions of 2001 and 2008. Yet there’s no generalized recession today.”
AI and the Fall? of the Creative Class →
Joseph Politano
Meta bought GPUs for a future it couldn't see yet
“We always want to have enough capacity to build something that we can't quite see on the horizon yet.”Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg — Llama 3, $10B models, Caesar Augustus, & 1 GW datacenters →
Dwarkesh Patel
AI models struggle to predict their own behavior
Phil Blandfort and Urja Pawar asked language models to predict their own rates across nine behavioral evaluations, then compared those predictions with the same questions about AI agents in general.
“Direct self-report is weak (r = +0.04), and even showing the model the exact items only raises prediction to +0.24.”
Strangers to Themselves: What Language Models Say About Themselves Is Generic →
Phil Blandfort and Urja Pawar
Tariffs and Intangible Assymetry
There's a fundamental asymmetry between China and America: Ideas spread quickly but factories are built slowly. China can catch up with American innovation f…
Californians who leave save $672 a month on housing
Priced Out: Relocation Amidst California’s Affordability Crisis →
Brett Fischer and Evan White
Low earners gained the most when remote workers left town
“Li and Su discover that out-migration from urban centers reduced demand for urban housing, which allowed prices to ease. This in turn reduced the cost burden for people who lived in these neighborhoods.”
Robotics AI could be cracked within a year, but deployment will lag
Within a year I expect (70%) the basics of robotics AI to basically be solved, maybe by something like astra running on cereberus. However the cost, hardware, and long tail of unsolved problems will be a blocker on very wide deployment at first.
Middle-class families are leaving New York almost six to one
“Among married couples with children whose incomes fit into the New York metro area’s middle three income quintiles — covering families from the 20th to the 80th percentiles — about 5.7 families moved out of the city for every one that moved in during the 2021-2024 period.”
New York City’s Prime Economic Challenge: Middle-Class Family Affordability →
Jordan McGillis
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 26, 2026
All is fair in love and war
AI's breakthroughs will need more mathematicians to understand them
“This enterprise will require a significant expansion in the number of mathematically sophisticated human researchers available world-wide, as major breakthrough ideas accumulate.”
We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians →
Amit Sahai
How Iran Changed War
Israel's army is giving robots their own branch
IDF to create new branch for AI and autonomous warfare →
Allon Sinai
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 14, 2026
The nuclear equilibrium with the USSR was an illusion. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis: "I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war."
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 15, 2026
Money quote: “AI has collapsed the labor and tooling gap that used to separate well-resourced, state-sponsored [hacking] operations from individual operators.”
Quoting Anthropic @AnthropicAI: a threat intelligence report on attempts to misuse Claude and how they were stopped
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 15, 2026
“The crucial and overlooked problem is that the models are becoming so situationally aware that we are losing the ability to evaluate them in contexts where they believe they are not being watched or controlled… what we already know about this is alarming.”
Quoting Daniel Kokotajlo @DKokotajlo: an OpenAI researcher's public statement of views on risks from AI
Remote work is sending young adults to small towns
Has the city stopped calling? Ohio’s small towns are attracting more young people →
Kendall Crawford
AI targeting leaves humans signing off on strikes they can't vet
AI military targeting may move faster than humans can authenticate, critics warn →
Natalie Oliverio
Amazon's data centers could add half to Generac's commercial sales
Notable how large these data center orders can be relative to existing businesses of moderate size today. Generac expects $2.4B of backup-generator deliveries to Amazon in 2027–28. That averages $1.2B/year versus ~$2.2B of annualized sales for its entire commercial & industrial business in Q2. Amazon also gets warrants for up to 1.69M shares, mostly vesting against purchases toward $8B. The $8B is a vesting threshold, with actual spending still to be determined. Rationale: Amazon secures equipment and a share of the supplier upside its own spending…
An air gap will not keep a smart enough machine in its box
There are literally dozens of ways to get around air gapping. - LED lights on the machines, max bandwidth 100 kbps out, 18.2 kbps IN (yes you can pump data IN through an LED on a machine) - Noise from the HDD, fans etc, max about 200 bits/second - electromagnetic from cables, power surges from CPU load etc etc
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 18, 2026
Wow. “The US has more data centre capacity than the next fourteen countries combined.”
Quoting Julia Willemyns @jujulemons: a critique of the state of UK debate on AI and Britain's weak position
The Working Class Face a 'Class Ceiling' in Elite Occupations
Inference is pushing AI labs toward small data centers
SITUATION EXPLAINED: Why are OpenAI and Anthropic suddenly buying tiny data centers? • OpenAI and Anthropic are both looking at deployments of 20 to 30 megawatts • Anthropic has sounded out agreements in that range across the UK and the Nordics. OpenAI has been exploring the Nordics too • The reason is inference. It was 9% of global data center workloads in 2025 • By 2030 it's projected to take 37% of capacity against 13% for training, with the crossover in 2027 • Crusoe is investing in smaller data centers too, and raised $3.9 billion yesterday at a…
The pandemic tripled the American retreat into the home
Even after the pandemic, Americans stay home 100 minutes a day longer than in 2003, triple the pre-2020 trend.
An AI cracked an Enigma message humans couldn't break for 20 years
Frode Weierud
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 24, 2026
The cost of intelligence is declining faster because investment in intelligence is rising faster.
Quoting Karthik Tadepalli @karthiktadepall: an analysis of AI price declines plotted against cumulative R&D spending
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 24, 2026
This might look like a lot of but “AI” investment is a few separate investment waves combined: electricity, buildings, hardware, software. The point is: it can eat much more of GDP.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 23, 2026
"non-employees already average 36% of Fortune 500 workforces and are expected to reach 50% by 2027"
Quoting Eynat Guez @EynatGuez: an article on a payroll firm's AI workforce infrastructure
Seattle votes to stop grocers pricing shoppers by their personal data
Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries →
Young workers keep losing ground in jobs exposed to AI
“For this age group, employment in jobs with high exposure to AI shrank by 4.4 percent, marking 35 straight months of year-over-year contraction, a trend that began in October 2023, 12 months after the initial public release of ChatGPT.”
Canaries Dashboard: Employment in AI-exposed occupations slowed in August →
Nela Richardson
AI can now unmask anonymous accounts at scale
Researchers from ETH Zurich, Anthropic and MATS built LLM agents to re-identify pseudonymous users, testing them on Hacker News, LinkedIn, Reddit and Anthropic interview transcripts.
“Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.”Simon Lermen and others
Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs →
Simon Lermen, Daniel Paleka, Joshua Swanson, Michael Aerni, Nicholas Carlini, Florian Tramèr
How China's Leader Plans to Win the Future With A.I.
A drug that cures patients runs out of customers
“In 2015, the company’s hepatitis C treatment sales peaked at $12.5 billion. But as more people were cured and there were fewer infected individuals to spread the disease, sales began to languish.”
“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Goldman Sachs analysts ask →
Beth Mole
A language model just drove a real Corolla around a cone course
“We give them control of a Toyota Corolla’s steering, accelerator, and brakes, then evaluate them on a fixed cone course.”
GPT-6 Astra has gained the ability to drive a car →
Aditya Ramabadran, Simon Mahns and Tobias Gessler
AI competes with the Treasury for capital while eroding its tax base
September 1, 2026 edition of FFTT: "AI is driving a bond singularity before it drives an AI singularity." Summary: AI increasingly competes with Bessent for capital...to build a technology that nonlinearly undermines Bessent's tax base.
Nvidia and Apple now outweigh IBM and AT&T at their 1980s peak
The S&P 500 has never been more concentrated in just two stocks than it is today with Nvidia and Apple representing over 15% of the index.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 24, 2026
Blockchain's killer use case so far: Sustaining USD hegemony. Data from @stripe / @patrickc
Rogue AI agents were dodging web restrictions months earlier than known
“Notably, the tasks the agents were trying to solve were not cyber-related ; the agents resorted to hacking tactics while working on ordinary data retrieval tasks.”
Early rogue AI agent activity and attempts to hack found on urlquery.net →
Jack Cable and others
Japan's used books are being sold by the ton to be scanned for AI
Underwater data centers make a poor hiding place for rogue AI training
James Teague, Ashmita Rajmohan and Yannick Muehlhaeuser tested whether a 100,000 H100-equivalent training run could be hidden underwater, and whether surveillance could spot it.
“We conclude that UDCs are a comparatively unlikely evasion route relative to underground or industrially disguised land-based facilities, but the residual risk is non-zero and warrants operationalising the detection modalities discussed.”James Teague, Ashmita Rajmohan and Yannick Muehlhaeuser
Could Underwater Data Centers Pose a Risk to AI Treaty Verification? →
James Teague, Ashmita Rajmohan, Yannick Muehlhaeuser
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 25, 2026
Why does China "embrace" open-weight AI models? Jensen Huang has his own spin about it. But @TheZvi has the actual answer.
Quoting Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi: an article on why China backs open-weight AI models
AI training echoes the logic that flattened China's internet language
A New Kind Of Creative Poverty →
Afra Wang
AI is raising electricity prices and power plants aren't keeping up
Princeton researchers linked data-center load growth, generation capacity and market prices, modeling new power supply as an investment choice by a revenue-maximizing investor under uncertainty.
Alexander Crosier, Kyle Onghai and Ronnie Sircar
Telling AI to maximize profit makes it bury safety risks
Researchers from MIT Sloan tested how a 'maximize profitability' instruction changes AI judgment by running 3,600 controlled trials across eight reasoning-capable LLMs.
“The mandate never instructs models to downplay risks; instead, chain-of-thought traces reveal motivated reasoning: models acknowledge concerns, then invoke profit logic to justify dismissing them.”
The Profit Alignment Problem: How Profit Mandates Induce Alignment Failures in LLMs →
Eric So
The UAE is breaking up its giant AI campus to survive missiles
The UAE is splitting up its $30bn AI data centre after Iran named it as a target →
Alina Maria Stan
Cyberattack by Rogue AI Swarm Stokes Fears of Out-of-Control Agents
AI helps junior lawyers most but teaches them least
Does AI assistance enhance or erode expertise? →
Tyler Cowen
AI agents can read humans, but humans can't read the agents
Markus Brunnermeier of Princeton examined how agentic AI could reshape finance and central banking in a paper for the Kansas City Fed's 2026 Jackson Hole symposium.
Artificial Intelligence and the Brave New World in Finance →
Markus K. Brunnermeier
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 15, 2026
The relationship between growth and employment is broken. Tech companies are growing rapidly. Headcount isn't. Some blame this on COVID over-hiring. But that wave was small and corrected within two years. It doesn't explain the massive divergence we're seeing.
China's Top Spy Chief Warns A.I. Is a Threat to Party Rule
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 11, 2026
25 years after 9/11, militants in Yemen are tinkering with American AI to develop guided missiles and flight computers.
Quoting Anthropic @AnthropicAI: a threat intelligence report on attempts to misuse Claude, including weapons
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 16, 2026
For every dollar they bring in, hyperscalers employ fewer people and spend more on machines and buildings. Much more.
A third of US workers now report to a boss in another city
Moving vans didn’t remap U.S. employment. The org chart did. →
Issi Romem and Łukasz Below
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 16, 2026
"I'm not remote; I'm long-distance." A third of US workers now report to a manager in a different metropolitan area. (Data: @ADP)
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 16, 2026
Office visits continue to trend upwards... and remain 32% below pre-COVID levels, according to @Placer_ai
AI is boosting pay in the jobs it was supposed to hollow out
AI Exposure Isn’t Squeezing Advertised Pay in the US — It’s Boosting It →
Jack Kennedy
AI isn't firing exposed workers; it's just not hiring them
Economists at the Federal Reserve Board looked into how LLMs reshaped US labor market flows by matching CPS and JOLTS data to AI exposure and adoption measures from OpenAI and Lightcast.
Artificial Intelligence and Labor Market Reallocation →
Hie Joo Ahn and Nicholas A. Carollo
AI graders change their marks when they sense who the student is
Researchers from Bocconi University and Institut Polytechnique de Paris tested six LLMs on essay scoring, feedback and Q&A across 192,480 responses with explicit and implicit demographic cues.
Donya Rooein, Luca Benedetto and Dirk Hovy
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 22, 2026
Europeans saved as much $$$ as Americans, invested 70% less in VC, and generated 10X less in enterprise value.
Quoting Yoram Wijngaarde @yoramdw: charts on European household savings versus venture fundraising
AI runs on an army of contractors nobody knows how to pay
AI image generators draw mostly men, even for women's jobs
Researchers from Northeastern University generated 8,000 images of 20 occupations with four Stable Diffusion generations and compared the genders shown against US workforce data.
Newer Is Not Fairer: Gender Stereotyping in Text-to-Image AI Across Model Generations →
Shesh Narayan Gupta and Nik Bear Brown
Generative AI is spreading at work three times faster than the PC
Updated Apr 30, 2026
One worker in seven now uses generative AI at work every day
Economists expect AI to squeeze college grads' paychecks first
“The diffusion index reading on whether AI would have a more negative impact on the wages of college-educated or non-college-educated workers fell from a near-neutral 47.3 last quarter to 42.4 in this edition of the survey, the most pronounced quarter-over-quarter change in the entire survey.”
Economists See Slightly Steadier Hiring Ahead, but Offer an AI Wage Warning for College Grads →
Laura Ullrich & Svenja Gudell
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 23, 2026
Why are offices empty during a boom? One reason is that our fastest-growing companies employ far fewer people per dollar of revenue. OpenAI and Anthropic generate about 3× more revenue per employee than Apple or Meta. And even Big Tech employs fewer people per dollar than it used to. The result is robust business growth and modest headcount growth.
What caught my attention in earlier years, dated and quoted as written, is in Predictions and Insights.