Bananas www.anthropic.com/news/fable-m...
Who's Who of AI
Tim Carmody
Why they matter
Tracked through public AI activity and peer connections inside the directory.
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- 11d ago
Ex-liontamer, writer/editor/strategist.
I used to work for Wired, The Verge, The Atlantic, The Message, Adweek, and Amazon Chronicles.
I also host sometimes at Kottke.org.
Call me he/him.
PHL.
Everything changes; don’t be afraid.
https://timcarmody.com
What they're sharing
Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 anthropic.com
Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026) vatican.va
AI Is Taking Over the Most Cursed Job in the World | WIRED wired.com
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No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious theatlantic.com
To Land a Job in AI, Try Reading Kant | WIRED wired.com
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niemanlab.org
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Sports Illustrated Just Deleted Every Article by One of Its Writers After Accusation of AI Plagiarism futurism.com
MLB cracks down on using AI via dugout iPads to help shape in-game decisions nytimes.com
Boston Seizes on California Billionaire Tax to Lure AI Talent bloomberg.com
AI Coding Startup Cognition Raises $1 Billion at $26 Billion Value bloomberg.com
Pope Leo to issue text on human dignity and AI with Anthropic co-founder theguardian.com
AI as a Design Medium harvarddesignmagazine.org
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Articles & links
Tim Carmody reposted
In the interest of being a good professor, if you want to read the pertinent sections of Magnifica Humanitas on slavery, the "apology" and the implications for AI, skip to sections 172-181 of the Encyclical.
AI Weekly's analysis
→
- Pope Leo XIV's 42,300-word Magnifica Humanitas, signed May 15 and published May 25, addresses AI as the central challenge to human dignity.
- The encyclical states AI systems are 'cultivated' not 'built' and explicitly denies they possess experience, a body, or the capacity to feel pain.
- Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican's May 25 presentation alongside theologians and three cardinals.
Read full analysis →
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Tim Carmody reposted
"Their tone may be deferential, even sycophantic, but they never fly off the handle. They also never sleep. Their edge comes from persistence and scale."
I've been thinking about this for a while, but proximally, I'm riffing on this already much-discussed Ted Chiang article www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...
Tim Carmody reposted
Anthropic employs at least four philosophers. Google DeepMind employs at least TEN. When journalism fully implodes, at least my B.A. in philosophy will be put to good use. (Love this story from @joelkhalili.bsky.social about the murky motives of AI companies and their Aristotles)
Tim Carmody reposted
New by me —> Now we're getting AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news! How a fake news site splits its energy between (a) the imagined closure of real US newspapers and (b) Chinese-friendly takes on Taiwan www.niemanlab.org/2026/07/now-...
I guess big websites still let you do stuff, it's just a lot less fun futurism.com/artificial-i...
Can the rest of us have access to the special sports strategy AI models for, um, purely nerdly reasons? www.nytimes.com/athletic/744...
Funny because Massachusetts quite famously has a tax on high earners — MA taxes income, not wealth like California would, but still www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Cognition is a promising startup, but it's wild to me that new AI companies are RAISING a billion dollars in a single round. That's a whole Instagram purchase price! www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
I've never been this excited for an encyclical before www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
Tim Carmody reposted
Eric Rodenbeck on AI as a Design Medium. “In my class, the first principle is simple: Do not take what comes back from prompts at face value. Interrogate it. Iterate on it. Stay with it longer than feels efficient.” [harvarddesignmagazine.org]
Their own posts
Recent commentary
AI companies' race for compute is very scary, because: 1) data centers are going up very fast 2) there's not enough clean electricity to make them sustainable 3) the companies have to take on debt to pay for them It's all leveraging the future against the present, and it could all fall down fast
I made an app, Humanist, to convert PDFs to EPUBs and edit them, but now it has many more features: you can ask your books questions using local/open-weights LLMs, you can manage an e-book library, share between devices, read/take notes on e-books. All AI features optional. LMK if you want to test!
I wonder what the temperature around AI would look like if we’d had a few more warm-up years where companies emphasized smaller gains rather than deeply transformative ones. Eg, it makes OCR better. Remember mail merges? They’re easier now. Instant audio and visual translation. But the thing is…
I would like more people to know that AI output almost always uses straight quotes and apostrophes rather than curly ones BECAUSE 1) it's true 2) people are always looking for ”AI tells” and this is a good one 3) It’s relatively easy to fix, and I like good typography
Reading Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action and thinking about chatbots, and folks, it’s not looking good for chatbots
AI intelligences don’t need to be identical to human ones to be worthy of ethical consideration and protection from abuse. Animals are intelligent and conscious and they have a wide range of rights depending on their status. What we need is something closer to kosher law than liberal human rights
When did “the singularity” (in tech) start referring to achieving AGI and not humans uploading their consciousness into machines and living forever? Because those two may be related but they’re quite different things (Don’t get me started on how this relates to black holes and cosmology)
Today I read two different articles crediting AI with inflationary pressure: - memory costs more, so computers, phones, game systems, and *anything that uses them* cost more - big IPOs/stock market boom driving up housing, especially in California Gasoline prob hurts more but these don't help
There will be a lot of schadenfreude when companies who've laid off workers and said "we'll replaced them with AI" collapse — but this probably fails to account for how many of these companies would have collapsed anyway. AI is a hail mary at best, a fig leaf at worst.
OK here's the question: Is LeBron James (even 40+ LeBron) the biggest sports star in Philadelphia history? Some contenders: * Michael Jack Schmidt * Wilt at his apex * Doc * Reggie * Chuck * Bubba Chuck (aka AI) * Big Dick Nick * Rocky (fictional) * Joe Frazier (real) * St Saquon * Eric Lindros
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