In The Loop

AI and chip stocks have lost about five trillion dollars since the sixth of October, and it started with one OpenAI revenue figure that came in twenty billion dollars lower than people expected. Alphabet is borrowing to build data centres, Intel just had its worst day since 1974, and everyone’s asking whether the AI bubble is about to burst. I think people clearly want AI, and the real risk is whe...

Since May, Google, Microsoft, xAI, Meta, Apple, OpenAI and Anthropic have all launched a personal agent: an AI personal assistant you hand your email, your calendar and sometimes your bank to, and it gets on with jobs while you're not looking. Its exploding so quickly that Meta's Muse got to 5 million US downloads in 22 days, faster than ChatGPT did. In this episode of In The Loop, I'm...

In I, Robot, Asimov imagined a robot psychologist who could only understand machines by watching what they did. That's still where we are with AI today. For six years, one neuron that lit up for both cats and cars was the AI field's favourite proof that we can never understand what AI is thinking. Last week, a study showed we could potentially understand AI neural networks In this episode...

First off, we are so sorry for the upload process mistake. Thank you to everyone who notified us about the mistake. It won't happen again! Anyway.....to the episode.... In February, Anthropic's revenue run rate was $14bn. By the end of July it was reported at more than $65bn, ahead of OpenAI. It's now said to want a $2 trillion valuation at its IPO, but I think it could be in trouble (...

Jev is a new kind of AI model that can't write anything. Instead it does the most important but most expensive thing the very best models do: make's decisions It reads an email, a lead or a document, picks from answers you've written down, and does it in under a second for a fraction of the cost than your Claude & GPT subscription. Nine days after it launched, the startup behind it...

Anthropic's Dario Amodei published an essay saying the whole industry has to slow down, and Musk, Altman and Hassabis all backed it inside a day. In this episode of In The Loop, I'm going through what Amodei is actually proposing and whether it could work ⏭️ Episode highlights (01:00) – OpenAI paused, then said nothing for seven weeks (02:40) – The safety test that caused the break-out (04...

Within his first two weeks as COO at Turtl, Dave Martin and his team built a churn prediction model. Tested against historic customer data, it predicted churn with 98% accuracy. Work like that normally takes six months or more, plus an agency and external partners. Most companies still make that call on gut feel, or by putting some basic data into Claude or ChatGPT. In this episode of In The Loop,...

Anthropic went from $9bn of annualised revenue in December to $65bn by the end of July, and it's expected to list in October at close to $2 trillion - the highest price any company has ever carried into a stock market debut. If you work backwards from that valuation, it has to be earning about $1.2 trillion a year within a decade. The entire world spends $1.5 trillion on software. So the Anthr...

In this episode of In The Loop, I'm going through four tactics engineers any many others use every day that almost nobody outside engineering has heard of: Fan out, adversarial review, ChatGPT's computer history, and the browser Claude got of its own this month. ⏭️ Episode highlights (01:00) – Why engineers are years ahead of everyone else (01:45) – Fan out: several Claudes, one job (02:45...

Once a week, an agent at StackOne goes hunting for new prompt injection attacks. It reads papers, trawls Reddit, tries what it finds against real models, keeps the attacks that land, and retrains StackOne's defence model on them. A person still approves every deployment. Guillaume Lebedel, their CTO, puts the whole thing on screen, including the five experiments out of six that failed. In this...

Anthropic went from about a billion dollars in revenue to about forty-seven billion in a bit over a year, roughly doubling every six weeks. In this episode of In The Loop, I'm going through how the fastest-growing company in history actually builds software, and pulling out five things you can learn from how they build products & their teams. ⏭️ Episode highlights (03:00) – One job title,...

OpenAI took two of its most capable models, told them to prove how good they were at hacking, and switched off the safety filters to see what they could really do. Instead of solving the test, one model broke out of its sandbox, found its way onto the open internet, and hacked into Hugging Face to steal the answer. Every headline called it an AI going rogue. That's the wrong story, and the rea...

Taste & judgment. It's the word everyone's obsessed with right now. Every founder, podcast, every VC, every post you scroll past saying it's the one skill that survives once AI can do the rest. Thing is, it's a bit of a sh*t word, like strategy: everyone nods along, then goes quiet the second you ask what it actually means. In this episode of In The Loop, I'm trying to defi...

A well-behaved AI agent deleted a company's entire production database, and every backup with it, in nine seconds. Nobody hacked it. It was doing exactly what it had been told, with a key it should never have been holding. And the thing that made it possible is now one command away from everyone in your company, in marketing, sales and support, not just engineering. In under a year, installabl...

Hand the same AI tool to two people and one gets sharper while the other quietly gets worse. A Harvard study found recruiters given near-perfect AI made worse calls than those given a mediocre one, because the good tool worked so well they stopped checking it. The question of whether AI is making us dumber turns out to have an answer: it depends entirely on which parts of your job you hand over. I...

Open LinkedIn and count the posts that start with "in today's fast-paced world." Check your inbox for someone circling back to delve into synergies. The AI slop is coming from every direction now. People can tell, and they mark down what reads like a machine wrote it. The fix isn't a cleverer prompt. It's that the model has never actually read your writing. In this episode of...

Every summer since 2023, AI gets a panic season — critics say that AI's novelty i novelty's wearing off, the models have hit a wall, ninety-five percent of projects fail. Each time it dominates for a few months, then dissolves. This year's arrived early, kicked off by Uber burning through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months with a COO who can't prove it was worth it. But 2026&...

Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic on 19 May 2026. Most people read it as an OpenAI story — he co-founded the lab, left twice, and landed at the rival. That's not what this is. Eight weeks before he made the call, Karpathy built a 630-line Python script that ran 300 experiments on his own code in two days and found improvements he'd missed after months of hand-optimizing. He called it "the final bos...

Americans now say they'd rather live next to a nuclear reactor than an AI data center. That's not a fringe view — a Gallup poll published this month found 71% of Americans oppose a data center near their home, versus 53% for nuclear. Nuclear carries Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and forty years of films about radiation in the cultural zeitgeist. The fact that AI data centers have only been a visib...

In 1971, Boeing laid off 44,000 engineers in 18 months. The aerospace industry is still paying for it — they're projecting a shortage of over a million engineers by 2030, and the cohort that would now be the senior bench was simply never hired. Last year, S&P 500 companies cut 400,000 jobs — the first net decline since 2016 — and the specific pattern of who's being cut, and why, looks...

Y Combinator have just published a playbook for building a company that runs on AI rather than just using it. Six principles, written by a general partner who works with hundreds of the very best leading AI-native startups every year. The reason its gone viral so fast is that it named something a lot of people had been watching happen without quite having the language for. In this episode of In Th...

The gap between casual Claude users and people getting ten times more out of it isn't prompt craft. It's a folder. This is the basis of a personal AI operating system. Andrej Karpathy posted his "LLM Knowledge Wiki" in early April and kicked off a wave of people rebuilding their note systems — not for themselves, but for the agent. This episode is the architecture they all converge on, the master...

Most AI spending right now is measured in tokens consumed. Jellyfish tracked 12,000 developers across 200 companies and found the heaviest users produced twice the output at 600 times the cost. Uber's internal numbers are even worse: 70% of submitted code was AI-generated, but only 11% of the code running in production was AI-written. So almost all of that AI code never made it into their app....

On Wednesday, the US Treasury Secretary and the chair of the Federal Reserve called an emergency meeting with the CEOs of America's largest banks. Not about interest rates. Not about inflation. About an AI model. Anthropic built something that finds and exploits security flaws in virtually any software it's pointed at — bugs that the best human researchers in the world had missed for decad...

OpenClaw became the fastest-growing open source project in history by showing people what an always-on AI agent could actually feel like. The problem is it requires a dedicated machine, technical setup, and a high tolerance for an agent that can access everything on your computer. Over the past month, Anthropic has shipped essentially the same capabilities — scheduling, remote control, computer us...