Expert attention map

The Who's Who of AI

What credible people across AI noticed, why it matters, and where the field is converging or disagreeing.

2,365 searchable experts 2,967 tracked across all sources
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Most important

The developments commanding sustained expert attention

One card per development. Sources are clustered; expert reactions remain attributable.

Developing AI field signal Development 1d ago
⚡ 6 h early
AI companies buy old books

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

11 experts across 3 network communities independently surfaced this.

11 experts 3 communities 1 sources clustered
Meredith Broussard 404 Media Joseph Cox Jason Koebler Shannon Mattern Eileen Clancy 🧿 Kate Knibbs Emanuel Maiberg +3

“ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.””

“New from 404 Media: a company is selling tons of old books specifically to AI companies and says they have a strong NDA to never reveal which AI company bought all of the books. They don't want headlines of 'we scanned and destroyed millions of books for AI…”

2 experts discussed this · 2 posts
Emanuel Maiberg: companies are sourcing millions of printed books for AI labs that scan them for training data, then destroy them. printed books are more valuable because they're free of AI slop, and AI labs know d…
Meredith Broussard: companies are sourcing millions of printed books for AI labs that scan them for training data, then destroy them. printed books are more valuable because they're free of AI slop, and AI labs know d…
Neil Turkewitz: How do you spell TRAGEDY?
Open the full discussion →
Primary source 404media.co ↗
Established AI field signal Development 7d ago
⚡ 2 h early
Suno AI music scraping revealed hack

Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius

9 experts across 4 network communities independently surfaced this.

9 experts 4 communities 1 sources clustered
Mark Riedl 404 Media Eryk Salvaggio Joseph Cox Jason Koebler dell cameron Marielza Neil Turkewitz +1

“Hack reveals that Suno (AI music generator) was trained on copyrighted music www.404media.co/hack-reveals...”

“The lawsuits have made clear that Suno did train on huge amounts of copyrighted works, but the hacked data shared with 404 Media sheds more light on how Suno scraped songs from the internet and where it took them from. @jasonkoebler.bsky.social reports. Rea…”

2 experts discussed this · 25 posts
Jason Koebler: Scoop: The AI music generator Suno was hacked. Hacker shared source code that shows how the tool was made and part of the music and podcasts that were scraped to create it. Decades worth of music, …
Jason Koebler: Suno also scraped episodes from roughly 420,000 different podcasts, which was at least ~1 million hours of audio. They had code that specifically sought acapella versions of songs on YouTube for vo…
Jason Koebler: Customer emails/phone numbers & Stripe payment details were also hacked; no one was ever notified because the company deemed it wasn't important to
Open the full discussion →
Primary source 404media.co ↗
Developing AI field signal Development 1d ago
⚡ 7 h early
Flock camera town bag dispute

Flock ‘Objects to Our Removing Their Equipment’: Emails Reveal Why a Town Put Bags Over Its Flock Cameras

6 experts across 3 network communities independently surfaced this.

6 experts 3 communities 1 sources clustered
404 Media Hypervisible Joseph Cox Jason Koebler Ben Winters Jake Laperruque

“The emails give insight into the process cities face while deFlocking themselves after voting not to renew a contract with the AI surveillance company. @evystadium.bsky.social has more. Read the full story by @jasonkoebler.bsky.social here: www.404media.co/…”

“"For the time being, if you or someone on your crew has availability to secure black plastic bags (or something else) over the cameras, that would be great." www.404media.co/flock-object...”

2 experts discussed this · 2 posts
Jason Koebler: New: Public records show how a city that ended its Flock contract spent months trying to get the company to remove the cameras or turn off the cameras. They were told Flock "objects" to the city re…
David Marx: set a hard deadline and then fine them daily for each day and camera afterwards.
404 Media: New: Public records show how a city that ended its Flock contract spent months trying to get the company to remove the cameras or turn off the cameras. They were told Flock "objects" to the city re…
Open the full discussion →
Primary source 404media.co ↗
Established AI field signal Development 11d ago
⚡ 4 h early
Companies throttle employee AI spending

Companies Are Throttling Employees’ AI Use Because It’s Too Expensive

7 experts across 4 network communities independently surfaced this.

7 experts 4 communities 1 sources clustered
404 Media Hypervisible Joseph Cox Emanuel Maiberg Social Media Lab Joshua Grochow Veni Kunche

““Crazy, we go from no more [AI] leaderboard to actual usage limits in two weeks,” one Amazon employee said in a reply on Slack. www.404media.co/companies-ar...”

““Companies across tech, entertainment, banking, and many other industries are throttling their employees’ use of AI and pleading with workers to use less powerful models to stop AI costs from spiraling out of control…””

Primary source 404media.co ↗
Established AI field signal Analysis 9d ago
⚡ 2 h early
AI makes game cloning easier

AI Made Cloning Games Easier Than Ever

6 experts across 2 network communities independently surfaced this.

6 experts 2 communities 1 sources clustered
404 Media Joseph Cox Jason Koebler James Grimmelmann Woodrow Hartzog Damon Beres

“Vibecoding has made it possible to create a cheap rip off of a video game in just a few hours.”

“Someone had a cool idea for a game (Tetris but the whole board rotates) and posted a proof of concept to social media. Immediately someone ripped it off and vibe coded it www.404media.co/ai-made-clon...”

Primary source 404media.co ↗
Established AI field signal Development 20d ago
⚡ 2 h early
companies simplify AI prompts to cut costs

Companies Are Making Claude and Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop AI’s Soaring Costs

5 experts across 2 network communities independently surfaced this.

5 experts 2 communities 1 sources clustered
404 Media Joseph Cox Robin Hanson Joshua Grochow René Walter

““It makes the model speak less like a polite chatbot and more like a terse tool." Companies are deliberately making their AI tools speak like cavemen in an attempt to stop burning through AI tokens, @evystadium.bsky.social has more. @josephcox.bsky.social s…”

“I tried out the tool that makes Claude, Codex, Gemini etc talk like caveman to lower token spend. It seems to work; I got much more to the point responses; caveman provides stats on how many tokens you've apparently saved www.404media.co/companies-ar...”

Primary source 404media.co ↗
Established AI field signal Resource 8d ago
⚡ 6 h early
unidentified YouTube video A

- YouTube

2 directory members surfaced this signal.

2 experts 1 community 1 sources clustered
Joseph Cox Jason Koebler

“your AI-generated flyer for your business is trash and no one likes it and it makes people not want to come to your restaurant watch more, subscribe here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc_u...”

“an important podcast episode we did because i was brave and wore my tanktop hoodie to make a fashion statement www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc_u...”

Primary source youtube.com ↗