Foundation model transparency index

AI shoot-out (LLM Council)

12th grade girls less interested in marriage than boys

Where has all the weirdness gone? Interesting take on how much our world has moved to sameness and monoculture - while we can and should celebrate longer lives and less cults we probably need to ask ourselves what we lose (yes, we are all individuals)

High agency (h/t Usman) - example: you can just do things…

Power outage halts Waymo service - without streetlights the cars get confused.

S. Korea steps up and creates AI policy

Expectations and gender double binds - Perimenopause edition

Instagram evolution - Super interesting take on the future of authenticity and the power of creatives in the AI slop era. I notice that I’ve moved away from AI copy editing my work letting the typos and awkward sentence structure remain in my published work.  This might be me being lazy, but I think it’s something else.

2025 AI reality check - a great summary of AI flops and re-directs in 2025 with analysis on what/why sort of a “best of” of the AI failures we’ve seen so far.

Climate change - report on the cost to adapt to the +2c climate of 2050 (Heat is the biggest followed by drought, flooding and then fire). I especially liked the library of adaptation measures.  There are some cool insights in here even for such a stressful topic. Report here

Social expectations and gender norms - housekeeping edition. Instagram summary, study - Meg POV: This is another example of a blindspot. It’s easy to be convicted about a point of view and to even be right but it requires additional intellectual honesty to recognize that what is true for you is possibly not true for someone else.  Ask yourself what you are certain about and what advice you give others that might not be true for them.  When you make it a practice to search out examples where this happens you begin to recognize systems problems everywhere.

China adding chatbot accountability - Putting guardrails on risks for children and emotional harm. Another example of China stepping into a leadership position in innovation and technology.

Death Tech - a blindspot market for me but one that makes so much sense AND is not only demographically important but ultimately an extension of the topic of care work and thus often culturally gendered.

BYD overtakes Tesla in EV sales

Subsea desalination - cool to see innovation in the area of drinking water - this is an important topic.

More Amazon layoffs (or I guess this is really just the start of another layoff season)

AI agent oversight is a job - this job is growing and very important.

AI layoffs are really just run of the mill corporate layoff spin

Influencer accents - I didn’t know this was a thing but after it was explained I couldn’t stop hearing it (you have been warned). Meg POV: We are all part of a massive social experiment and like most social experiments we are proving that humans are quite easily manipulated and wildly conforming.  As we train AI to get better at this, we need to know we are part of the problem and we are doing this willingly.

7 deadly sins all available by subscription -There are a few framing perspectives I’ve really enjoyed. The first is Kara Swisher’s comment about Silicon Valley tech scene as “assisted living for millennials” the second was the 2010s focus on “building technology to automate your mother” and now we have reached peak enshittification and full WAll.E living taking all our vices and serving them up on demand.  The understanding that humans create the conditions of our own destruction is not new but the ability to do this so effectively seems to be worth taking note.