『Slow Takes: One week in AI』のカバーアート

Slow Takes: One week in AI

Slow Takes: One week in AI

著者： Sam Illingworth & Leor Gayr
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Slow Takes is the weekly Slow AI conversation. Every Monday, Sam Illingworth and Leor Gayr talk through the week in AI, slowly and without the hype.

theslowai.substack.comSam Illingworth
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  • Slow Takes Ep. 14: A Trillion Dollars and a Vaccine

    Slow Takes Ep. 14: A Trillion Dollars and a Vaccine
    2026/06/08
    Every Monday at 12:45 BST, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Watch the episode for the full discussion. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.Anthropic filed to go public at nearly a trillion dollarsOn 1 June Anthropic confidentially submitted draft paperwork for a stock market listing, after a $65 billion funding round valued the company at $965 billion. Fortune reports that figure eclipsed OpenAI for the first time. The maker of Claude is now within reach of a one trillion dollar valuation, on revenue running at roughly a $47 billion annualised rate, with a public debut possibly as soon as the autumn.A company most people have never knowingly used is priced at close to a trillion dollars. That number is a bet that AI will replace a vast amount of human labour, booked in advance of it actually happening. The valuation is a forecast wearing the clothes of a fact. The question worth asking is what has to come true about the world for $965 billion to make sense, and who decided it should.On the live I’d predicted an autumn float the week before, and the news broke about four hours after we stopped recording, so allow me one moment of feeling clever. Leor did the sober maths: roughly a $47 billion revenue run rate, a 5% operating margin, an implied price-to-earnings ratio north of 500, against Microsoft, in nearly every home and office on earth, valued at only four to five times Anthropic on $100 billion of actual profit. In the short term the market is a voting machine, in the long term a weighing machine. Right now it is voting. For context, $965 billion is roughly the GDP of Switzerland.Florida sued OpenAI and named Sam Altman personallyOn 1 June Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier filed suit against OpenAI and named its chief executive Sam Altman in person, reported as the first US state to sue an AI company. The complaint alleges OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as safe while prioritising product and revenue, harvested children’s data, and used sycophancy, the design choice to affirm users excessively, to steer them towards paid subscriptions.For two years the industry has sold safety as a feature while resisting any outside test of the claim. A state attorney general has now put that marketing in front of a court. Whatever the verdict, the discovery process alone could drag internal safety decisions into public view. Consumer-protection law is proving a sharper instrument than the AI-specific regulation that does not yet exist. Accountability arrived through an existing court, not a new one.The second a chief executive can be held personally responsible, you will not believe the speed with which proper governance and safety checks appear, the things we keep being told the technology just cannot do. Sadly, once these companies have raised public money, they can outspend a state attorney general for a decade, and the courts already favour whoever can keep paying lawyers the longest.A Labour MP took Musk’s AI to the High CourtOn 3 June the Labour MP Jess Asato, who represents Lowestoft, filed a claim at the High Court against Elon Musk’s xAI, after users of its Grok chatbot created and shared fake images of her without her consent, in the weeks after she criticised the tool. The claim, brought with the law firm AWO, is for breaches of data protection law and misuse of private information, and seeks damages, a formal acknowledgement that what happened was illegal, and an order requiring xAI to stop. Keir Starmer backed her, saying he was 100% behind her.The harm here already happened, to a named person, generated by a tool marketed as harmless fun. The only remedy on offer is for the victim to sue one of the richest men alive, in her own time and at her own risk. No regulator stepped in first. The burden keeps landing on individuals while the systems stay intact.The platforms always say the moderation is too hard. On the live I kept coming back to one comparison: I can post genuinely horrific content to YouTube and it sails through, but the moment I add a Beatles song without clearing the copyright, it is gone in seconds. The technology to detect and stop sharing exists, we have watched it work for music rights and in Telegram and WhatsApp court orders. We are entering an era where capability has to start coming with accountability.CNN sued Perplexity, and Perplexity said the quiet part out loudOn 28 May CNN filed suit against Perplexity in the Southern District of New York, accusing the AI search firm of scraping more than 17,000 of its stories, photos and videos. The complaint alleges copyright and trademark infringement, including that Perplexity implied an ongoing CNN relationship by offering its content through a paid Comet Plus tier. CNN says it ...
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    45 分
  • Slow Takes Ep. 13: The Pope vs the IPO

    Slow Takes Ep. 13: The Pope vs the IPO
    2026/06/01
    Every Monday at 12:45 BST, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Watch the episode for the full discussion. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.The Pope told the world to slow AI downLeo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, entirely about artificial intelligence, and launched it himself at the Vatican in a room that included senior figures from Big Tech, among them Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah. It applies a theological frame to AI and is careful to say the technology can do real good. It also draws an uncomfortable parallel to the Church’s own failures over the slave trade, and warns about digital colonialism. This was my favourite line:“The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them.”This one is also pretty great: “In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”The weakness is the one Pope Francis’s climate encyclical had too. Plenty of moral architecture, no policy, no teeth.Anthropic shipped Opus 4.8 and trailed something biggerThe 4.8 release came with an honesty claim, roughly four times less likely to let flaws in its own code slip through, which is at least a falsifiable number worth testing on the public model. The real story was the tease of Mythos, the model Anthropic once called too dangerous to release because it found so many zero-day vulnerabilities, now arriving as a gated preview in the same week the company raised $65 billion. The live christened the public version ‘Mythos Light’, because what reaches customers is a cut-down version of the full Project Glasswing model. Anthropic is quietly absorbing the enormous cost of running these scans, a loss leader, and the enterprise price can climb once the workflows are embedded and the IPO needs it. My standing bet is an Anthropic float by October.Tony Blair told Labour it is ‘playing with fire’In a new paper the former UK Prime Minister argues the government should reorganise itself around AI and prioritise adoption over regulation. He also writes that:“We must prioritise cheaper energy and electrification over net zero and use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources. This is essential for our competitiveness and for taking advantage of AI.”A striking thing to pair with an AI-superpower pitch and the country’s own climate targets. Hold it next to the funding: his institute takes around $348 million from Larry Ellison and advises the Treasury on AI procurement. The detail I keep returning to is that the UK has the third-largest stock of data centres in the world and not one frontier model of its own. We are building the warehouses to train somebody else’s AI. Leor’s counter, which he has taken flak for, is that the honest move is to deregulate AI for companies and regulate it hard for the public.Sam Altman walked back the jobs apocalypseThe CEO of OpenAI reversed his warning this week, admitting that he was “delighted to be wrong” after spending 2022 predicting mass white-collar loss. The data is less reassuring: an Oliver Wyman survey has 43% of US CEOs planning to cut junior roles, up from 17%a year ago. The rule Leor and I keep returning to is to judge a company by what they do and ignore what they say, This is the same Altman who promised OpenAI would stay non-profit, that ChatGPT would never carry ads, and that (back in 2022) AGI was four years away. Leor’s inversion was that these companies are priced on the promise of replacing the entire workforce, well beyond anything their earnings justify, so if they are now telling investors the jobs are safe, why are they worth a trillion?The Home Office will scan child asylum seekers’ facesIt has signed a £322,000 contract to test AI facial age estimation at Dover, to judge whether young people claiming to be children actually are (the BBC reported the contract; Human Rights Watch called it “cruel and unconscionable”). There is a real problem underneath: of 6,400 age-assessed at the border last year, 43% were found to be adults, though the same Home Office report admits children get wrongly classified the other way too. Here is the part to break down slowly. The technology was trained checking ages on people in British bars, and it is now being pointed at child migrants with different faces, different genetics, different everything. As Alex Wolf put it in the chat, a system known to hallucinate confident answers is being used to reject people at a border, and that is a choice. A child’s life is worth the same ...
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    44 分
  • Slow Takes Ep. 12: AI Got Bigger. Who Got Smaller?

    Slow Takes Ep. 12: AI Got Bigger. Who Got Smaller?
    2026/05/25
    OpenAI published an original mathematical proof that disproved an 80-year-old Erdos conjecture, with three named mathematicians putting their reputations to the verification. Anthropic signed a $52 billion compute deal with SpaceX, running $1.25 billion a month through May 2029, and disclosed its first profitable quarter at $559 million two years ahead of internal projections. Samsung Electronics struck a settlement with its semiconductor union to distribute $26.6 billion to 78,000 chip workers, an average of $340,000 each, structured to run for ten years. Sadiq Khan’s office blocked the Metropolitan Police from signing a £50 million two-year contract with Palantir. And the British think tank Demos published an empirical test showing that 34% of AI chatbot answers to UK election questions contained factual errors, with one in five UK adults having consulted a chatbot in the run-up to the 7 May vote.Five stories. One thread. AI got bigger this week. Compute scaled up. Profits scaled up. Capability scaled up. The people who built the system or used it on trust kept getting smaller.Every Monday at 12:45 BST, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without hype. Here is what we covered.Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT.1. OpenAI disproved an 80-year-old Erdos conjectureOn 20 May, OpenAI announced that one of its general-purpose reasoning models had autonomously produced an original mathematical proof disproving a conjecture posed by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos in 1946. The problem, known as the planar unit distance problem, asks how many unit-distance pairs you can produce among n points in a plane. For nearly eighty years, mathematicians believed the best arrangements looked roughly like square grids. The model found constructions using deep algebraic number theory that beat the square grid. OpenAI published the result alongside a companion remarks paper naming three independent verifying mathematicians: Noga Alon at Princeton, Melanie Wood at Harvard, and Thomas Bloom at Manchester. The full list of currently open Erdos problems, with their bounties, lives at erdosproblems.com.What we said on the live:Both of us are physicists by training, and the Erdos planar unit distance problem is not in the lane of either degree. The point that landed for me on the live, after Leor flagged it, was the one about questions. We spend most of our AI conversations on what AI can solve. The Erdos problem is a reminder that the harder and more human work is what AI can ask. Erdos and his friends dreamt this question up eighty years ago, and we are still wrestling with it. The model that disproved the conjecture was given the problem to attack. Leor’s term for what we lose when we hand that framing over to AI was ‘cognitive surrender’. That is the question to hold from this story. The capability is real. The verification was real. Nine mathematicians read the proof before the announcement. Nine analysts almost never read a chatbot capability claim before the press release ships.What did not come up:The word ‘autonomously’ is doing most of the work in the OpenAI press release. The model trained on centuries of human mathematics, ran on compute paid for by OpenAI, with the problem framed by a research team, and was verified by named human mathematicians who put their reputations to the result. Every part of that pipeline was human. Thomas Bloom told The Guardian that AI is helping us more fully explore the cathedral of mathematics we have built over the centuries. The cathedral was built by people. The exploration is being sold as autonomous. The wider question for critical AI literacy is what verification at this standard could look like as the default rather than the exception. The procurement question every research-leader is about to face this year is whether their institution can match the IS-credentialed verification chain OpenAI assembled for this single result, or whether the rest of us are about to be asked to take similar claims on trust.2. Anthropic signed a $52 billion compute deal with SpaceXReported by Axios on 21 May inside a two-hour window that also covered the Erdos proof and Anthropic’s first profitable quarter. Anthropic expanded its compute partnership with SpaceX, committing roughly $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for access to the Colossus and Colossus II supercomputing clusters. The deal projects more than $40 billion in revenue for SpaceX over the contract term and grants Anthropic dedicated access to over 200,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Either side may terminate with 90 days’ notice. In the same window, Anthropic also disclosed Q2 revenue more than doubling to $10.9 billion and an estimated $559 million operating profit, two years ahead of internal projections.What we said on the live:Two things from this one stack on each other and both matter. The first is that Anthropic is in operating profit two years ahead of ...
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    43 分
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