The pope becoming an insightful AI pundit is really a fascinating thing to see. He's not buying the hype, but he's not being a hater either. Magnifica Humanitas is the kind of work that only intellectually serious religions can make. Reactionary Christianity makes human slop, …
Who's Who of AI
Matthew Sheffield
🟦 Cognition, AI, philosophy, science, politics, embodiment
🟦 Writing @flux.community, but frequently quoted or published in NYT, WaPo, NBC, Variety…
🟦 Easy intro to my cognitive framework: https://flux.community/like-this
Signal: matthewsheffield.01
What they're sharing
Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026) vatican.va
You’re about to feel the AI money squeeze | The Verge theverge.com
newrepublic.com
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braddelong.substack.com
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zdnet.com
Articles & links
Are AI companies burning cash too quickly to last? Critics often say that, but they don't present full numerical analysis. This is one of the better critical ones I've seen in a while:
AI Weekly's analysis
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- Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are simultaneously deploying rate limits, paywalls, and price hikes in 2026, ending subsidized AI access.
- Anthropic's June 15 print-mode repricing, OpenAI's guaranteed-capacity tier, and Google AI Ultra are concrete signals of the industry-wide monetization shift.
- Labs spent years using investor capital to subsidize access and build user habits; the payback phase has now arrived across the industry.
Read full analysis →
Matthew Sheffield reposted
Rather than exalt American hegemony, Leo has sharply challenged and criticized it within the teachings of the church. His new encyclical pulls no punches in attacking tech billionaires—and the politicians who enable them. trib.al/1cVG6ve
Matthew Sheffield reposted
We scaled “attention is all you need” into an industrial‑scale stochastic parrot farm, then bolted on agents and tools until it started to look somewhat more like thought. Now the engineering reality—fabs, power, and eye‑watering token bills—is asking whether what we are doing…
Linus Torvalds has released his most extensive comments on AI and software development. -Doesn't think LLMs will kill programmer jobs -Says some LLM code is good enough for inclusion in the Linux kernel -Thinks vibecoding is for quick fixes -Says LLM bug hunting validates open…
Their own posts
Recent commentary
1/2 In the latest "Theory of Change," I argued that Pope Leo XIV's repeated rejection of reactionary and anti-democratic politics was explicitly modeled after Leo XIII's "Rerum Novarum." Lo and behold, today, Leo's new AI encyclical was dated explicitly to the earlier Leo's document.
Most things people think are bad about AI are actually problems with unregulated capitalism, which naturally transitions into monopoly.