The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources: UBS requires AI skills when hiring junior investment bankers, making it one of the first major financial institutions to explicitly require AI literacy (Simon Foy/Financial Times) [4d]
OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki says no lab has solved alignment enough to keep scaling at maximum speed, and hopes voluntary slowdowns become commonplace (OpenAI) [4d]
Analysis: since October, Anthropic has entered into agreements for at least 14.8 GW of compute capacity and may spend as much as $517B over the next decade (Valida Pau/The Information) [4d]
OpenAI says it hit its "automated research intern" goal, its researchers now use 3.1 agent-workdays per human workday, and top users spend $7,000+/day on tokens (OpenAI) [4d]
Tim Cook's pay package indicates he will remain very active at Apple; sources: Apple's plans to squeeze more App Store profits prompted Phil Schiller to leave (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [4d]
How AI gutted Kenya's essay-writing industry, which at its peak paid 40,000+ people in Nairobi to do overseas students' homework, leaving few paths back to work (New York Times) [4d]
Trump officials say Judeo-Christian principles inform AI policy, with some optimistic about AI and others seeing parallels to biblical end-times prophecies (Philip Wegmann/Wall Street Journal) [5d]
Sources: Travis Kalanick's Atoms is developing robotaxi tech and hired Anthony Levandowski after acquiring his company Pronto; Uber has invested $100M in Atoms (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times) [5d]
OpenAI quietly updates its evaluation metrics for GPT-6 Astra, making changes that appear to favor Astra and continuing to revise other metrics after launch (Emily Forlini/Fortune) [5d]
The data center backlash is challenging Texas' pro-business approach; Wood Mackenzie: Texas has more data center capacity under construction than any US state (Stephanie Findlay/Financial Times) [5d]
As researchers begin applying AI to understand animal communication, bioethicists warn it could give humans new ways to manipulate, exploit, and harm animals (Morgan Meaker/Bloomberg) [5d]