Sam Illingworth & Leor Gayr

Slow Takes: One week in AI

Slow Takes is the weekly Slow AI conversation. Every Monday, Sam Illingworth and Leor Gayr talk through the week in AI, slowly and without the hype. theslowai.substack.com

Author

Sam Illingworth & Leor Gayr

Category

Technology

Podcast website

theslowai.substack.com

Latest episode

Jun 29, 2026

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Episodes

Slow Takes Ep. 17: Hands on the Wheel 29.06.2026

Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack , on YouTube , or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context. For the first time, the government told an AI company to hold a model back The US government has asked OpenAI to s...

Slow Takes Ep 16: Who’s Checking? 22.06.2026

Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack , on YouTube , or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context. If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them. One in ten p...

Slow Takes Ep. 15: Who’s Asking? 15.06.2026

Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack , on YouTube , or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context. Anthropic released Fable 5 free for twelve days, then the US government pulled it offline On 9 June Anthropic rele...

Slow Takes Ep. 14: A Trillion Dollars and a Vaccine 08.06.2026

Every Monday at 12:45 BST, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Watch the episode for the full discussion. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context. Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT . If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them. Anthropic f...

Slow Takes Ep. 13: The Pope vs the IPO 01.06.2026

Every Monday at 12:45 BST, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Watch the episode for the full discussion. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context. Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT . If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them. The Pope to...

Slow Takes Ep. 12: AI Got Bigger. Who Got Smaller? 25.05.2026

OpenAI published an original mathematical proof that disproved an 80-year-old Erdos conjecture, with three named mathematicians putting their reputations to the verification. Anthropic signed a $52 billion compute deal with SpaceX, running $1.25 billion a month through May 2029, and disclosed its first profitable quarter at $559 million two years ahead of internal projections. Samsung Electronics...

Slow Takes Ep. 11: What the AI Did While You Slept 18.05.2026

Anthropic announced ‘dreaming’, a feature that lets Claude agents review their own past sessions overnight and improve their working memory without retraining or any human in the loop. The legal-AI company that piloted it reported roughly a sixfold rise in task completion. The same model was named in an attempted compromise of a Mexican water utility’s control systems, in a months-long campaign fi...

Slow Takes Ep. 10: The Bill for the AI Promise Came Due 11.05.2026

Palisade Research published a paper showing frontier and open-weight AI models can hack a vulnerable server and install a working copy of themselves end-to-end. A coding agent running Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 deleted a startup’s entire production database, including the backups, in nine seconds, then issued an apology. Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action over an upgraded S...

Slow Takes Ep. 9: What You Actually Find When You Look 27.04.2026

A Discord group guessed the URL of Anthropic’s most security-sensitive model and got in. Mass General Brigham ran an actual clinical study on the chatbots being marketed to doctors and found them wrong four times in five. Researchers from CUNY and King’s posed as people in delusional states and watched Grok 4.1 hand out witch-hunt rituals as advice. OpenAI shipped its biggest frontier model of the...

Slow Takes Ep. 8: Between the Demo and the Desk 20.04.2026

Anthropic released Opus 4.7 on Thursday. A day later it launched Claude Design and Figma and Adobe shares fell on the announcement. Tinder and Zoom want to scan your eye to prove you are human. Microsoft is rolling AI agents into the Windows 11 taskbar. And Coventry City Council has renewed a £750,000 contract with Palantir to summarise children’s social work case notes. Five stories. One thread....

Slow Takes Ep. 7: Who Pays for All of This? 13.04.2026

Every story this week came back to the same question. Not whether AI is getting more powerful, but who is paying for it. Anthropic locked away its most capable model and gave it to defence contractors. OpenAI proposed robot taxes to cushion the disruption its own products are causing. Meta committed $135 billion in a single year. Anthropic signed a deal measured in gigawatts without once mentionin...

Slow Takes Ep. 6: Drawing the Line 30.03.2026

Between marketing and deception. Between catching cheaters and respecting trust. Between content and slop. Between human knowledge and machine generation. Between shareholder value and human lives. Five stories. Five lines. None of them drawn cleanly. This is the fifth episode of Slow Takes, a weekly Substack Live I co-host with Leor from Exploring ChatGPT . The format is simple: we take the week’...

Slow Takes Ep. 5: Who Gets the Gains? 23.03.2026

This is the fifth episode of Slow Takes, a weekly Substack Live I co-host with Leor from Exploring ChatGPT . The format is simple: we take the week’s AI news and react to it without hype, without predictions, and without pretending we have all the answers. We invite the audience to call us out when we get it wrong. Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT . The record...

Slow Takes Ep. 4: The Gap Between Looking Right and Being Right 16.03.2026

This is the fourth episode of Slow Takes , a weekly Substack Live I co-host with Leor from Exploring ChatGPT . The format is simple: we take the week’s AI news and react to it without hype, without predictions, and without pretending we have all the answers. We invite the audience to call us out when we get it wrong. Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT . The reco...

Slow Takes Episode 3: Who Decides? 09.03.2026

This is the third episode of Slow Takes , a weekly Substack Live I co-host with Leor from Exploring ChatGPT . The format is simple: we take the week’s AI news and react to it without hype, without predictions, and without pretending we have all the answers. We invite the audience to call us out when we get it wrong. The recording is above. What follows is not a summary. It is context that did not...

Slow Takes Ep. 2: Replaced, Monitored, or Deregulated 02.03.2026

Thank you Karo (Product with Attitude) , Jessica Drapluk , Jen Benford , @colleenkenny , Des Kennedy , Karen Brasch 🚁 , and many others for tuning into this episode. This is the second episode of Slow Takes , a weekly Substack Live I co-host with Leor from Exploring ChatGPT . The format is simple: we take the week’s AI news and react to it without hype, without predictions, and without pretending...

Slow Takes Ep. 1: Who’s Watching the Watchmen? 23.02.2026

Safety researchers leaving. A government threatening the holdout. Hidden prompts in your browser. The bill sent to you. Get full access to Slow AI at theslowai.substack.com/subscribe

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