“For now, roughly half of the university system’s ChatGPT licenses have been activated, suggesting that at the very least C.S.U. paid for tens of thousands of logins that have gone entirely unused.” This is the scandal in plain sight. Why is CSU paying for a product that is free?
Who's Who of AI
Benjamin Riley
Founder of Cognitive Resonance, a new venture dedicated to helping people understand human cognition and generative AI. Advocate for humans.
Newsletter: https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/
What they're sharing
A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It’s Tearing Itself Apart. nytimes.com
Opinion | What A.I. Did to My College Class nytimes.com
Opinion | This Could Be the Winning Issue for Democrats nytimes.com
cdn.openai.com
wsj.com
bloodinthemachine.com
interconnects.ai
OpenAI and Khan Academy Made a Chatbot. What Can We Learn? nytimes.com
axios.com
washingtonpost.com
Punk is anti-AI buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com
stratechery.com
Articles & links
“Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college…In our tech-enabled, newly A.I.-powered world, students were increasingly fudging just about everything.” A very God & Man at Stanford vibe here, but a…
“Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them…The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.” - @tressiemcp…
Source document here, just let your eyes glaze over the math equations: cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085...
www.wsj.com/tech/ai/esto...
Fantastic, @bcmerchant.bsky.social takes on the bullshit propaganda machine that is Anthropic, saving me the trouble (and doing it better than I ever could). They are the worst. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-anthro...
Anthropic has been “unnecessarily antagonistic to open weight models [and] open research. [The company] has a specific view of AI, but such a powerful technology will never have its final equilibrium be one of singular control by a private company.” - @natolambert.bsky.social …
This article is surreal from start to finish. The author, a full-throated AI enthusiast who’s written a book titled AI for Good, waits until paragraph 52 of 53 to reveal that Sal Khan & team are basically abandoning the AI-as-tutor model — after Sal declared, in his book, it w…
www.axios.com/2026/05/26/d...
AI Weekly's analysis
→
- Hassabis moved his AGI floor from 'shortly after 2030' to 2029 in the week of Google I/O, coordinated with Gemini 3.5 and agentic product launches.
- He admitted the framing was intentionally provocative, targeting governments and economists, treating an AGI timeline prediction as a direct policy pressure tool.
- Seoul Economic Daily reads Hassabis closing Google I/O instead of Google's CEO as a signal that DeepMind now governs core Google services.
Read full analysis →
"The White House is increasingly grappling with backlash to artificial intelligence within Trump’s base, as voters grow concerned the technology could eliminate jobs and increase electric bills." Memo to the Washington Post: by "Trump's base" you actually mean "most Americans."
What is punk? Punk is that ineffable human quality of raging through art. Which is something AI will never do. Inspiration this week from @brianphillips.lol @tressiemcphd.bsky.social @ali-alkhatib.com @gregpak.net @eryk.bsky.social, the Pope, some Cali 8th graders, and others.
This likely paywalled but if you don't have a subscription DM me.
Their own posts
Recent commentary
A new report on AI in education from Australia refreshingly dispenses with the “but it holds so much promise!” verbiage and instead goes straight to cataloguing its many harms. More of this please! (Link to follow)
This is, as best I can tell, not a satirical Dada-ist experiment aimed at revealing the dystopia of an agentic AI future.
The fun thing about this sort of mistake is that it’s understandable if you have a basic mental model of how LLMs work. Not conscious beings. Just token samplers capable of generating — wait for it — hallucinatory output.
Just a remarkable paragraph this morning from Ben Thompson of Stratechery (an unabashed AI enthusiast, mind you). I’ve written previously that OpenAI reminds me of Enron. But Anthropic? The only analogue that comes to mind is Gattaca.
OpenAI is running a massive randomized control trial on 20,000 Estonian high school students. They apparently are not thrilled.
I'm going to call this a win in my battle to ensure comments to my Substack remain exclusively human. BE GONE AI SLOP, DEMONS OUT! (More detail in the alt-text for those curious.)
Their network
In Benjamin Riley's orbit
Center = Benjamin Riley. Left = members they follow (green edges). Right = members who follow them (blue edges). Top = mutual follows (orange edges, slightly larger). Drag any node to reposition; click to open that profile.