The evolution of OpenAI’s mission statement
13th February 2026 As a USA 501(c)(3) the OpenAI non-profit has to file a tax return each year with the IRS. One of the required fields on that tax return is to “Briefly describe the organization’s mission or most significant activities”—this has actual legal weight to it as the IRS can use it to evaluate […]
IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
The job market has been a sore subject for Gen Z. The unemployment rate among young college grads sits at 5.6%, hovering near its highest level in more than a decade outside the pandemic. Meanwhile, prominent executives—from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei to Ford’s Jim Farley—have warned that artificial intelligence will slash corporate entry-level jobs. But some […]
AI bot crabby-rathbun is still polluting open source
I’ve returned to the HackerNews article and the blog post written by Scott Shambaugh a few times now. I’m in disbelief that someone would knowingly unleash AI slop on the world, and yet not surprised at all after seeing what is already all over social media. Sleuthing the GitHub repo’s blog posts, I noticed the […]
How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
Show Caption Hide Caption Understanding cancer clusters: What you need to know Explore the concept of cancer clusters, which are unusual concentrations of cancer cases in a specific area over a certain period. Picture this: At your annual physical with your primary care provider, you also receive a full-body scan and a more extensive panel […]
OpenAI has deleted the word ’safely’ from its mission
OpenAI, the maker of the most popular AI chatbot, used to say it aimed to build artificial intelligence that “safely benefits humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” according to its 2023 mission statement. But the ChatGPT maker seems to no longer have the same emphasis on doing so “safely.” While reviewing its […]
The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling
TikTok spokesperson Paolo Ganino said the Commission’s findings “present a categorically false and entirely meritless depiction of our platform and we will take whatever steps are necessary to challenge these findings through every means available to us.” The right solution The Commission could eventually agree with platforms on a wide range of changes that address […]
Something Big Is (Not) Happening
Or is it happening, perhaps it has already happened? Maybe it’s just acting like it has happened, because it is tired and would like to go to bed? Although trains can get you far going straight across long, flat distances, the sherpas are still gainfully employed since we have not yet succeeded in getting locomotives […]
The Scott Shambaugh Situation Clarifies How Dumb We Are Acting
My personal blog here is dedicated to tech geek material, mostly about databases like postgres. I don’t get political, but at the moment I’m so irritated that I’m making the extraordinary exception to veer into the territory of flame-war opinionating… This relates to Postgres because Scott is a volunteer maintainer on an open source project […]
Breaking the spell of vibe coding
Vibe coding is the creation of large quantities of highly complex AI-generated code, often with the intention that the code will not be read by humans. It has cast quite a spell on the tech industry. Executives push lay-offs claiming AI can handle the work. Managers pressure employees to meet quotas of how much of […]
I’m not worried about AI job loss
Two days ago, someone named Matt Shumer posted an essay on Twitter with the title “Something Big Is Happening.” Almost immediately, his essay went extremely viral. As of this writing, it’s been viewed about 100 million times and counting; and it’s been shared by such strikingly diverse figures as the conservative commentator Matt Walsh (“this […]