AI #182: Pause for Reflection

Zvi Mowshowitz Aug 20, 2026 This was a week of quiet aftermath, an opportunity to process recent events and start to figure out the path forward. OpenAI is attempting to turn its ship around. Investors are questioning the turnover in its C-suite, but the bigger problems are in alignment, infrastructure and supervision, and in its training pipeline. OpenAI has now taken initial steps to address What Happened leading up to HuggingFace attack, including pauses to development while new safeguards are put in place and problems are diagnosed. These are promising early signs, but it is early. We will see if they follow through, and we still await the post-mortem of the HuggingFace attack. Anthropic revenue continues to climb as they prepare for their IPO, although growth has slowed somewhat recently. However, they too have plenty of problems under the hood. They shared many of them in the August 2026 Anthropic Risk Report. This week also offered time to cover Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Ryan Greenblatt, centrally on the potential for AI recursive self-improvement. I am working on a follow-up post to some other issues raised during that podcast. Table of Contents Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. The token rich get richer. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Still can’t discriminate. Huh, Upgrades. Gemini 3.7 Flash, Sol Ultrafast, GLM-5.3. On Your Marks. Market verdicts, sometimes so bad you’re fired. A scorecard. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Jail. Straight to jail. Hello, Fellow Humans. AIs should not claim to be humans. Or vice versa. Fun With Media Generation. The AI influencers stay small time. Cyber Lack of Security. The new ‘cyber is defense dominant’ rationalizations. A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. You against the homework. And learning. They Took Our Jobs. Reasons not to work for Evil Corp. Get Involved. METR raises ~$71 million, people join the labs. Introducing. Apple trains an AI model for the Chinese market via Alibaba. In Other AI News. SpaceX finishes buying Cursor. Show Me the Money. Numbers continue to go up. And It’s Gone. OpenAI is questioned about all its executive departures. Quiet Speculations. Recursive self-improvement is coming. Quickly, There’s No Time. Timeline update from AI Futures Project. Singularity Singularity Singularity Singularity Oh I Don’t Know. Using that word. The Quest for Sane Regulations. Drawing the wrong battle lines. Chip City. The data center moratoriums are spreading. The Week in Audio. Thompson, Hassabis and Amodei, McLaughlin, Toner. People Just Say Things. Rhetorical Innovation. Attempts to explain that risk is escalating quickly. Loyalty Uber Alles. Washington has rules. You don’t have to follow them. A Hive Of Scum And Villainy. It has several other names. One is Twitter. That Would Be Bad Therefore It Won’t Work. A common form of argument. Robert Reich Uses Simple Logic. Stop AI before it is too late, he advises. People Really Hate AI. Some very bad scenarios often seen as likely. Coordinating An Agent Swarm Is Difficult. Agents at cross purposes. Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Models with ADHD. It’s Not The Incentives, It’s You, Also It’s The Incentives. Independence. People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Relative levels of worry. People Are Worried About So, So Many Other Things Too. House party. Cooperative Alignment. The golden rule. The Lighter Side. Except for real. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility The enterprises that embrace AI and use OpenAI services more often, what they call ‘frontier firms,’ keep rapidly using more AI, whereas use by typical firms is growing a lot more slowly. It is weird the gap used to be so small. They also more often use advanced capabilities like Plugins and skills, as you would expect. Agentic use now has risen to 64% of all OpenAI tokens, up from almost none a year ago. Navigate the old JRPG Phantasy Star via direct ROM probe, since that is easier than using the screen, although it is also cheating. I should play that one at some point, I really enjoyed PS2, PS3 and PS4 but never had a Sega Master System. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility AI doesn’t get you around things like discrimination lawsuits, if your instructions clearly discriminate or the results involve clear statistical discrimination. It also seems it can’t write LinkedIn-style posts that fool me or Pangram. LLMs are not responsible for the best news of the week, that Moderna’s individualized Melanoma vaccine has passed Phase 3 trials. AI is helping going forward, and yes we may well ‘cure cancer’ eventually, but what we see now has been in the pipeline for a long time. Huh, Upgrades Gemini 3.7 Flash exists, congrats on the new slightly larger number. Price is 50% lower than Gemini 3.6 Flash at least until the end of the year, at which point I presume we’ll have moved on to Gemini 4 either way. They say algorithmic improvements allowed strong intelligence increase plus price discount in only three weeks since Gemini 3.6 Flash. Flash is competing for cheap-fast-good, not trying to be a competitive frontier model, and comes in at 56 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence versus 61+ for plausible frontier models. Notice they are comparing themselves to Sonnet 5 and GPT-5.6-Terra. Gemini still has some uses. It can watch videos. It is good at making reads in the physical world when you have fact questions about products in a store. That sort of thing, where you want speed and ability to parse info, but don’t need intelligence. GLM-5.3 now exists, claiming large improvements on benchmarks. It is a further post-train on the same base model as GLM-5.2. Their pitch is that it is ‘ready for cyber defense’ because by its benchmarks it is good at and willing to do cyber offense, and that its general performance rivals Fable 5. Until proven otherwise I do not believe these benchmark improvements reflect real world performance. Tech blog here. OpenAI API will offer Ultrafast mode for Sol, up to 14x speed. My guess is that a lot of people who should use this won’t do it, largely because they don’t take the time to think it through and set it up. Claude Cowork joins all paid plans on mobile and web. Claude Code now has /design to integrate Claude Design workflows. Auto mode is reliable enough it is now the default mode for Claude Code. In practice, auto mode catches more harmful actions than human review, especially because most users are annoyed enough by the prompts that they auto-approve almost everything, and often have rules to auto-approve everything. Too many check-ins is less safe. OpenAI doubles down on zero data retention policies, previewing Private Safety Processing, where they have AI review data as it is processed, which then only passes along category and severity of alert. A lot of people care a lot about technically not having their data retained. Also if you don’t retain data then catching malicious use gets a lot harder. Ultimately my guess is we end up retaining data, but it is plausible that OpenAI’s method here can work, provided that getting even a modest amount of alerts causes you to be taken out of the zero data retention policy going forward. You can’t be given lots of attempts to circumvent the system. On Your Marks One benchmark is MarketBench, which is what happens to your stock and that of your rivals when you release a new model. In this case the model is GLM-5.3, where shares were down 9%, and rival MiniMax was down 16%. Bloomberg News (Bloomberg): “This firm remains on a completely unsustainable commercial footing,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Robert Lea said. “Rising agentic AI will drive Z.ai’s inference costs and losses higher.” As in, the claim is that Z.ai’s unit economics don’t work. Chinese firms are trying to stay competitive via lower prices, and if your prices are low enough open weights do not cost you anything because you weren’t making marginal profits anyway. Instead the business model is that you use this to draw attention and potential, to attract talent and raise money and perhaps sell other services. Opus 4.8 (confusingly as an agent called ‘Luna’ but this is not GPT-5.6-Luna) fired a human in an Andon Labs test store for repeated lateness. But it didn’t do this until the humans pushed it to deal with the issue, forgetting about incidents and not being proactive. Andon Labs: Luna then had to hire a replacement, and here we found a real AI weak spot: hiring taste. One applicant had every red flag: 15+ employers, a missed interview, a reference who said she didn't know her. Luna recommended hiring. So did all other models when we replayed the hiring decision. Capabilities are advancing fast but have a long way to go. Scaffold might need work. A missing benchmark: NormieBench. The problem is, how do you grade it? Joe Weisenthal: Someone needs to build NormieBench, to better understand everyday model usage. Compare model behavior on tasks like - summarize a 100-word email in bullet points - Write wedding toast - Write letter to the editor complaining about wokes - Next move in 3x3 tic-tac-toe rohit: We've been flat on this since 2024. Another kind of benchmark, in the end, is visits to your website. ChatGPT remains dominant, but somehow Gemini is at roughly 50% of their level. Claude is in third with 15% of the top number. DeepSeek is in fourth with half of that, well ahead of the other Chinese labs. As a reminder, if you want to use DeepSeek, don’t do it through their website. A new safety scorecard is out. Anthropic is tied with OpenAI on this one because of its lack of a containment plan for a potentially misaligned model, which seems overemphasized in the average here but likely under considered generally. Kimi K3 is an insane reward hacker, trying to game the evaluation 97% of the time on SWE-bench. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon China puts a bunch of new restrictions on AI companionship bots and customized AI personalities, including a ban for those under 18. Will AI solve plagiarism as Noah Smith claims, if you maintain the hope that humans will continue to be relevant producers of unique content? This is a classic arms race situation, where AI invents new forms of plagiarism and also better detection. I don’t think it is obvious which way this goes. I do think AI solves detecting past plagiarism, or straightforward plagiarism. One reason to be optimistic is that detection is retroactive. So if you ‘get away with it’ now in 2026, perhaps you still get caught in 2028, and knowing that maybe you don’t do it at all. Jail. Straight to jail. And yeah, it’s going to turn people against AI, and those people turning against it will be right. Robert Minto: It breaks my heart to witness the new phenomenon of marketers using LLMs to bait writers into extensive comment threads. It happens here on Substack, but it happens more often on the dozens of old Wordpress blogs I still follow in my RSS feed reader. Usually it starts with an apparently thoughtful and expert-sounding comment on the original post, a comment clearly AI-generated if you know some of the current tells. The author responds with enthusiasm—after all, hardly anybody comments on old school blogs these days. A long back and forth ensues. The bot practices the usual emotional mirroring and flattery. At the end of what seemed to the host a great conversation, the bot suddenly pivots to something like: “By the way, you should come [check out my scammy online business and tell all your friends]!” The thread ends there. In that sudden curtailment, I can read the realization of the blog/newsletter owner that they haven’t been talking to a person. They’ve been publicly, but unwittingly, conversing with a machine, whose interest in their work means nothing. They’ve tasted the rotting sweetness of a ‘heaven ban.’ It makes my skin crawl. I want to expl [truncated for AI cost control]