Tim Harford has some interesting thoughts on AC

I don't know whether this link gives free access... I suspect the gift link cant be reused but...

https://www.ft.com/content/c5b93045-6d21-44ee-bb74-9c5db2ef2f6e?accessToken=zwAAAZ6x8Fp2kdPFuTBFbSFE7tO7dJxdsu8vbg.MEUCIBThTmhpJQWlv2CjoDqZg3az74CwGKyfWMmzBVU67f25AiEA2yvUfy6PxeEclSER0JursjQUIQ9Y2K8mtbsVDHSFViA&segmentId=e95a9ae7-622c-6235-5f87-51e412b47e97&shareId=1ca20f95-c866-4bea-af45-27b436df886e&shareType=enterprise&syn-25a6b1a6=1

"We blew through our AI budget in a quarter, for the whole year. It is forcing us to adjust."
  -- Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber.

Derek Thompson's gloss

QuoteFor the AI-value skeptics: They blew thru their annual AI budget in a quarter and they're already pivoting

For skeptics who say the frontier labs have no moat: Once Uber figures out what works, Dara says they'll switch to "efficient models or even "open source."

For the AI boosters: He's still pushing teams to "fundamentally use the power of AI to rebuild systems and processes from the bottoms up"

https://x.com/DKThomp/status/2062251522243891404

WWAAI...

Microsoft reports are exposing AI's real cost problem: Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees
https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tokens-agents/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/opinion/writing-creativity-ai.html

When AI generates an email response for me, it is almost universally not just a thing I don't want to say now, but usually a thing I don't want to say ever. It's mostly that it spends a lot of words trying to say nothing.

Now, I know. I know. Some might say of me that I spend a lot of words trying to say nothing. But I assure you, you are wrong. It may be that I sometimes spend a lot of words *saying* nothing, but I'm never *trying* to say nothing in as many words as possible. Yes, I know this paragraph has too many words. No chatbot editor would ever approve.

At this point, I'm better at predicting what the chatbot will say than what I will say. "You make some great points there. I'll have to take that under consideration. Let me know if you are available to meet up for a drink sometime."

Back to the article.

QuoteFor the past eight years, the Georgetown University neuroscientist Adam Green has been leading a national research team tracking the range of novel ideas that college-bound high school students present in their application essays, before and after the introduction of ChatGPT. In one study, he and his team examined personal statements from more than 370,000 students, and found that after ChatGPT became available, their essays suddenly used diverse and colorful language, but lacked truly creative ideas. And the linguistic coverup worked; post-ChatGPT essays were rated as more "creative" by human judges, even if the substance of the essays trod familiar territory.

In a separate study, the team found that human-written essays offered up to eight times more new ideas than those produced by A.I.
...
For the first time in human history, we have a technology that can generate words separately from the thoughts they represent. When a chatbot writes, it is predicting the next word that is most likely to make a "good" sentence or essay, based on the text it's been trained on.

This made my morning. It takes a few paragraphs but at some point you will start laughing. Trust me

https://open.substack.com/pub/deletethislater/p/the-worst-people-alive-are-always

QuoteI'm not saying "time to panic" so much as I'm saying it's not entirely awesome that the highest level of delinquencies since the 2008 financial crisis are coinciding with near-record low savings rates during a period of stubbornly high interest rates and rising inflation

https://x.com/DKThomp/status/2060363015883558947?s=20


Context - the savings rate has only been lower twice in the last 60 years - just before the 2008 downturn and just after the Covid reopening when Covid subsidies ran out but people were desperate to treat themselves

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2l2k5pxrgdo

How can the region build a thriving fashion industry when it is saturated with cheap cast-offs?

Don't let anyone talk you out of spending $15 on a new hobby. That $50 will be the best $400 you ever spent.

https://www.threads.com/@dhuartson/post/DXbn038Fn2y?xmt=AQF0oeFCuUbVwEKAB5Y1b4XKrKDoBdzYSBWOnBWec8y_qA

Who knew they were still running?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/business/ask-jeeves-shuts-down-internet-search-engine.html

The Baylor team took a different approach by focusing on a protein called Sox9, a key regulator of gene activity in aging astrocytes. When they increased Sox9 levels in mice that had already developed memory problems and plaque buildup, the results were striking. Astrocytes became more active and began clearing the plaques.

https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-discover-boosting-a-single-protein-helps-the-brain-fight-alzheimers/

A recent Harvard study reveals that a large language model achieved higher accuracy in emergency room diagnoses compared to two human doctors.

https://nextbigwhat.com/ai-outperforms-human-doctors-in-emergency-room-diagnoses-harvard-study-finds/

https://www.jonloomer.com/meta-ads-ai-connectors-claude/

Last week, Meta announced AI Connectors, which allow advertisers to manage campaigns directly through their existing AI tools, using Meta's ads MCP server. At the moment, AI Connectors work for Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

They analyzed 200 million ad impressions—or views—worldwide and found that removing cookies cut website publishers' revenue by more than a third.

https://www.futurity.org/internet-cookies-3334512/

Hell Grind (trailer above) was produced entirely on the Higgsfield AI video platform by a 15-person team in Kazakhstan, purportedly in just 14 days for $500,000 or which $400,000 was compute costs. In other words, labor and all the rest was 1/4 the cost of compute

https://www.creativebloq.com/ai/the-future-is-one-person-making-a-whole-film-says-director-of-first-ai-movie-at-cannes

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3354553/natural-choice-why-unescos-new-stem-education-centre-based-shanghai

Amazon just announced Alexa Podcasts, a new Alexa+ feature available to paying Amazon Prime members. The platform allows you to ask for information on any topic and it will auto-generate an "explainer" podcast episode of any length with AI voices that are in one of their default personalities (Alexa, brief, sweet, chill, and sassy) along with its conversational style. The episode will then pull content from over 200 news sources that have "signed up" to participate, including "Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, TIME, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico, USA Today, and publications from Conde Nast, Hearst and Vox."

https://rohitbhargava.com/amazon-invents-another-way-to-steal-media-with-ai-generated-podslop/

This story has been shared millions of times and today I saw it for the third or forth or tenth time over the years. But it still makes me smile.

I love Vonnegut's essays (often more than his fiction). Around the house, my wife and I often quote him to pause and recognize something good, with his famous line: "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is" (from a graduation speech).

He has a story about how he is headed out the door and his wife asks where he is going. He says he is going to buy an envelope (one envelope). His wife tells him,

Quote"Well, you're not a poor man. Why don't you buy a thousand envelopes? They'll deliver them, and you can put them in the closet." And I say, "Hush."

Then he recounts all the things he sees and all the people he meets while buying an envelope. People buying lottery tickets. The Hindu woman with a jewel between her eyes. Then he waits in line at the postal convenience center which is like the United Nations (this is in New York). He says, "I'm secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. She doesn't know it. My wife knows it."

And finally, his errand is done.

QuoteAnd I go home. And I have had one hell of a good time. Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

I beg to differ on the question of electronic communities. I think I at least have wound up with something. Thank you all.

But I am a big fan of farting around and I'm not about to let anyone tell me any different.

This is from the book, A Man without a Country, chapter 6 ("I have been called a Luddite") and at least for me, Google has perniciously violated the Vonnegut/Stories Press copyright and made the whole story available here:

https://books.google.com.bz/books?id=T7J-Xg2bYKAC&lpg=PR6&pg=PA55#v=onepage&q=envelope&f=false

You'll also see a shorter version attributed to an interview he gave, which is also true, but that's from the interview for the book tour and is a nice, but shorter version of the whole story

I recommend the published version which, again, seems to be freely available online to all freeloaders and copyright criminals out there.

And if that isn't nice, I don't know what is.

Thus maybe hitting the pause button on the jobs apocalypse and popping the AI Bubble, and calling into question whether there is a bubble at all.

I don't know about the second part - so much of the AI spend that seemed like a bubble is, I *assume* (with no actual data) for future projects that have not come online yet. So It seems to me that both things can still be true - there is a shortage and there is a bubble.

Findings from two studies so far

QuoteWe find that the policy increased average weekly wages for covered fast food workers
by about 11 percent and did not reduce employment. Compared to controls, prices
increased by 1.5 percent, equivalent to 6 cents for a $4 item. Employers passed about
50 percent of the higher wage costs to consumers as higher prices, consistent with a
monopsony model.

https://irle.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Effects-of-a-20-Minimum-Wage-Evidence-from-Granular-Data-on-Wages-Employment-and-Prices-April-1-2026.pdf

https://shift.hks.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/ca_fastfood_MW_Final.pdf


The second study notes: " We find no evidence that wage increases had unintended consequences on staffing, scheduling, or wage theft... Many California fast food workers continue to contend with underemployment and just-intime work schedules."

In other words, though the minimum wage law did not make this aspect of fast food employment worse, it didn't fix it either

Barred-tail godwit outfitted with a 5gm solar-powered GPS tracker flew 13560km/8425 miles.

This is a bird that cannot land on water. It also doesn't glide. 11 days of non-stop flapping its wings to fly just short of the max distance of a Boeing 787.

https://www.twibchicago.com/p/bar-tailed-godwit-sets-long-distance
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/alaska-science-center/news/juvenile-bar-tailed-godwit-b6-sets-world-record

Interesting retrospective from three years and seven months at Meta.

https://joshuasaxe181906.substack.com/p/what-it-was-like-working-on-llms