A quick thought on this whole "control of AI models" debate.
Handguns and Fentanyl are available all over the world, but we still don't put them in the convenience aisle at grocery stores.
The reason we don't is because we want friction between people having negative, impulsive thoughts and them actually taking those actions.
If ChatGPT, Claude, and the most popular open source models answer every question about harming oneself, or hurting someone else, or hacking into X or Y, or making a virus that only kills yapping chihuahuas, we do not want that AI to help with that.
We want it to say something like, "No, sorry, I can't help with that. But hey let's talk about it, what's going on?"
That's a control. Same for planning terror activity. Or to kill your spouse.
Yes, models will be available that help you with those things. But they shouldn't be the norm, for billions of people on Earth.
This is common sense, but it's somehow being spun into an evil control narrative.
Are there rich people who'd like to control all the smart AI and make everyone use the dumb ones? Sure. Are there governments who want to keep the people down by not giving them all the information? Sure. 100%.
That doesn't mean we scrap our existing laws, or stop making new ones, just because some people want to abuse them.
So you know where I'm coming from: my whole purpose in all of this is making sure everyone on Earth has the best AI, with open models that are as good as or better than anything closed-source. No AI poverty line, where the rich get the smart models and everyone else gets the dumb ones. It's the same reason I'm building SAFE.
The solution to bad science is better science, not alchemy or mysticism. The solution to bad democracy is better democracy, not authoritarianism or anarchy.
Many years ago, in an earlier era of silliness about a looming ed-tech revolution, a startup founder sent me an email, asking that I please hold off from writing anything about the company. They'd experienced a huge surge in demand for their app – it was fall, students were headed back-to-school. He confessed that, until their new round of funding actually cleared the bank, they were struggling to pay their bills, particularly a very large bill for Twilio, the messaging service that was, in fact, almost the entirety of the functionality of what they were offering to schools. But unlike Twilio, this particular app was "free" – I put that word in quotation marks because, of course, nothing is. There are real costs to running a business: paychecks have to be cut, operational expenses have to be paid for. What enabled this specific startup, and so many like it, to offer their product at no charge was a subsidy of sorts, in the form of venture capital, which has promoted a new, strange business model, allowing companies to avoid thinking about revenue let alone profitability – ostensibly just in the early stages, but increasingly (and dangerously), long into the lifespan of a company.
Schools love "free," of course, as they're almost always operating with budgetary constraints (and/or with political threats to axe even more of their funding). So "free" software has been able to make substantial in-roads into classrooms -- particularly alongside the narrative about the compulsory usage of ed-tech -- and many educators and administrators have been able to convince themselves that there really are no costs to adoption.
But at some point, the venture capital runs out. At some point, the bill comes due. At some point, a startup has to determine what part of the product or service it will charge for. "Find the thing that schools can't do without," I heard one founder quip at an ed-tech event years ago, "and make them pay for that." "Make it painful for them to stop," he added, suggesting that students with disabilities made for a very good target for this strategy.
Even when these pricing practices aren't nefarious (although frankly they mostly are -- that's capitalism), we all understand how software can be "painful to stop" -- not because we're "addicted" (I will always hate that framwork) or because of some weird "brand loyalty," but simply because we have used a particular tool for so long; we are familiar with its functionality, and we don't want to have to learn a new interface; and, of course, these apps have so much of our work, our data, and tech companies have made it virtually impossible to move any of it elsewhere.
There are other problems with "free" ed-tech too. As it costs nothing to adopt (and then likely reject) different apps, schools have found themselves using thousands of different apps (an average of almost 2600 according to a report a few years ago -- that report found that students accessed about fifty unique applications over the course of the year). Student and teacher data is strewn across these tools, often with little regard for privacy or security, let alone any semblance of curricular consistency or a shared educational experience.
This flurry of tool adoption is typically (mis-)read as enthusiasm for ed-tech rather than what's far more likely: most school software is shit; you download it, use it once or twice, and yikes, you never touch it again. And even when there is enthusiasm -- such seems to be the case with students' usage of ChatGPT to do their homework -- we should still pause before celebrating this as some educational marvel. We should still pause before interpreting any of this as indication there's some insatiable demand for ed-tech or for generative AI because it's good. Mostly, it's because it's free.
As Dave Karpf wrote back in May, "we are still in the free-trial-period of most AI products. Everything is being subsidized. That renders a false picture of the demand curve." "Free" distorts demand; "free" also distorts a business's viability. AI companies -- much like many ed-tech startups who like to boast, come August, an explosion in sign-ups for their free app -- might be able to show off an incredible growth in the number of subscriptions; but that growth is actually driving their revenue down not up.
(And now, as AI companies are starting to charge based on token-usage not simply a flat subscription, many of their customers are shocked at the bill. "Companies are scrambling to stop spending so much on AI," as 404 Media reports.)
What we are witnessing with AI is a demand for compute, the AI companies' demand for compute: their demand for data centers, their demand for data storage, their demand for data processing. Generative AI seems to have an insatiable demand for power (literally and figuratively) and for resources; and the latter isn't just about water -- the industry has also been gobbling up the components necessary to build all computer hardware, driving the prices up for everything from hard-drives to chips. All computer hardware -- from smartphones to laptops to video game consoles, obviously, but also all the appliances and vehicles and gadgets that we have (unnecessarily) stuck computers into so that dangerous men could chortle that "software is eating the world."
If software has done anything like this over the past few decades, it's because hardware -- consumer electronics, broadly speaking -- has become fairly affordable. So affordable that people buy the latest model even if its capabilities are only marginally better than the one they already possess. And importantly (for our purposes here, at least) so affordable that schools have been able to bring ed-tech out of "the computer room" and into (almost) every classroom and onto (almost) every desk.
What looks like a bad investment academically and increasingly like a bad investment politically may also soon be calculated as a bad investment financially as well.
People have been told for decades now that we cannot afford not to have students on computers. But it might be, if the AI industry continues maniacally apace, that none of us will be able to be on computers at all.
A view of Raso Island, with a lark's nest in the center (Image credits)
This week's bird is the raso lark, a small bird found only on the Raso islet of the Cape Verde islands. Very little is known about this critically endangered bird – its desert home is remote, and there hasn't been much ornithological work on the archipelago, Wikipedia reports. The bird is threatened by geckos and kestrels, as well as by dogs and cats accidentally introduced to the area. Also in critical danger: Cabo Verde, which plays Argentina a little later this evening. How can you not root for this little lark? How can you not root for Vozinha?
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Current AI is "a global partnership building a public option for AI", founded as a non-profit at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025 and backed by serious capital ($400m already committed).
They launched their Gap Map a couple of days ago - an attempt at indexing the current state of open source AI:
The Gap Map v0.1 details 421 products in depth: 266 software tools and libraries, 85 models, 50 datasets, and 20 hardware projects, produced by 228 organizations. These products are organized into 14 categories across 3 layers of the stack (model components, product / UX, and infrastructure). The remaining 24,400 artifacts constitute the uncategorized long tail of the open source AI ecosystem, and will carry no score until they are researched and cited.
The map itself is interesting to explore, but I'm more excited about the underlying data - released under an MIT license in the currentai-org/os-ai-map GitHub account: 1,184 YAML files plus the notebooks, schemas and other scripts used to help gather them.
Since the files are on GitHub you can use Datasette Lite to explore some of them - here are 16,185 GitHub repos the project is tracking as a CSV file loaded into Datasette Lite.
Competition among food trucks in Washington, D.C., is fierce—enough, it seems, that some competitors carry machetes and occasionally attack each other with screwdrivers. The district decriminalized unlicensed street vending a few years ago, and while that spares plenty of good-hearted vendors from punishment, it also means food-quality standards are dicey, prices are wildly inconsistent, and a few unnamed bosses are hell-bent on guarding their turf. Jessica Sidman explores it all, from the heavily fortified frozen dessert warehouses to the shell companies that mask food-truck ownership.
Of the $16.50 I was charged, my Square receipt shows $1.50 in DC sales tax. The DC Office of Tax and Revenue later tells me it has no record of Fusion Swirl LLC, the company named on my receipt. . . .
I also look up the Virginia license plate of the shiny blue truck for traffic violations. Since last October, it has racked up 27 tickets totaling $2,842, mostly for illegal parking and not displaying a front license plate.
The receipt also has a phone number. A few days later, I call. The person on the other end tells me he’s the owner and has multiple food trucks. I explain I’m a journalist and ask his name.
“Uh, yeah, my name is . . . .” The call ends. Subsequent calls go straight to voicemail.
This political compass style quiz by bambamramfan is pretty neat - answer 29 questions about AI and AI ethics to see which of the 30 archetypes you best fit.
I'm impressed that my answers on my first time through the quiz categorized me as "The Garage Tinkerer", patron saint myself!
It's implemented as a single page React app using the <script type="text/babel"> trick to avoid the necessary build step. Here's the code.
Math is wonderful, and there are so many different ways to play and experience it. I enjoy having conversations with other math lovers and sharing ideas, puzzles, pedagogy, and questions.
In one of these conversations with Dr. Maria at Natural Math, I learned about a book called Modultown by Drs. Sasha Fradkin and Allison Bishop, and the artist, Mark Gonyea. The project also has an adjacent puzzle book with a delightful puzzle called Moduloku.
The first thing is to look for blanks I can check right away against the remainders. I see that the third column has one blank and the sum has a remainder of one when divided by 10. Of the numbers available, only 7 gives a remainder of 1.
I can then use the same approach to find the numbers in the first column. First I find the 9, but then, the next one is a little tricky. I need a 2, but since that isn't available, I can use 12 to get the same remainder.
Now, the top row has a remainder of 3 and the sum is 3 with two blanks. That means that the sum of the two blanks must be divisible by 10. The only combination that works is 6 and 4. So, the last two blanks must be 5 and 8.
We can do the same for the columns. So, column 2 has a remainder of 5 and sum of 11. That means that we must sum the two blanks to a number that has a remainder of 4 when divided by 10. The only combination of 4,6 and 5,8 that works is 6 and 8, which sums to 14.
Which leaves only one possible value for each remaining blank – Solved!
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