“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?
Benjamin Riley
Directory member with public evidence across Models & releases, AI business.
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Articles & links
Giddy with hope that this dumb op-ed will bait @colin-fraser.net into a thread pondering whether Toucan Sam is conscious. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
“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 …
Well, apart from the elaborate "constitution" they've developed for Claude, you mean. www.anthropic.com/constitution
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…
This NYT visual does a nice job showing both the power and the extreme frailty of "AI agents" in handling relatively mundane real-world work tasks. Many assume there'll be continued leaps in performance but what if we're approaching the top of the S-curve? www.nytimes.com/inte…
www.axios.com/2026/05/26/d...
Recent commentary
Just received an email from OpenAI about all the neat things one can create using Codex and it hit me — this is just the old SkyMall catalog but at scale. Stuff that’s kind of novel and semi-intriguing for like two minutes but ultimately solving problems no one really has.
Has anyone written the definitive essay already on how Anthropic's "Claude for Teachers" is nightmarish package of surveillance software & privacy intrusions, or is that really something I'm going to have to take on over the weekend?
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.)
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