As this is the first post there's a few more things, but generally I'll be aiming for 2-3 things to read or listen to per week.
Rick Rubin interviews Jack Clark of Anthropic (an episode of the Tetragrammaton podcast)
Really long (2 hours!), discursive, fascinating, lots of detail about how Anthropic came to be and visions for the future, as well as Jack's own background. Recommended as a good insight into how the founders of Anthropic are seeing the world develop.
Black Mirror-esque piece from Ars Technica - can you stop people making an AI avatar of you after you're dead, using your voice, appearance, written content and so on? An introduction to the world of grief tech and grief bots.
Simon Willison has been patiently explaining the new kinds of security risks possible with LLMs (and coined the phrase "prompt injection" back in 2022). This is his most clear explanation yet of the three features that, if they are all present, open opportunities for attackers to steal data. A recent example was EchoLeak that showed how data could be exfiltrated via Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Why human–AI relationships need socioaffective alignment
Really loved this paper. Builds on work from the early days of the Web by the great Cliff Nass and others on how people relate socially to computers in surprising ways. Then shows how much of the current thinking on AI alignment doesn't really take into account what will happen as longer running relationships between people and AI models become more common. Many things that seem obvious in retrospect; that's always a good sign.
AI Isn’t Only a Tool—It’s a Whole New Storytelling Medium
Eliot Peper is a science fiction author who writes here about using AI as part of developing the setting and characters for the Tolans game / "AI friend". I loved these insights into the creative process using new tools in a creative way.
Black Forest Labs FLUX.1 Kontext
One of the interesting product launches, also featured at RAAIS. A much better image editor, maintaining the context from one image to the next (try this in ChatGPT and you'll see it re-creates much of a photo and loses the consistency). It turns out Black Forest Labs really are in the Black Forest - who says you have to be in the Bay Area?
Coding agents have crossed a chasm
A great personal perspective from David Singleton (ex engineering leader from Google and Stripe) on present day collaborative coding with AI tools. A realisation part way through this particular example was asking the model to generate a sequence diagram:
Instead of diving straight into more code analysis, I tried a different approach. I asked Claude to read through our OAuth implementation and create an ASCII sequence diagram of the entire flow.
This turned out to be the key insight. The diagram mapped out every interaction. Having a visual representation immediately revealed the complex timing dependencies that weren’t obvious from reading the code linearly. More importantly, it gave Claude the context it needed to reason about the problem systematically instead of just throwing generic debugging suggestions at me.
With the sequence diagram as context, Claude spotted the issue: a state dependency race condition. The fix was simple once “we” found it: removing the problematic dependency that was causing the re-execution.