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May 20

Talk with AI

Virtual · 101

May 21

Build with AI

Virtual · 201

June 3

Talk with AI

In-Person · 101

El Segundo, CA

Know Your Freaking Audience, For Crying Out Loud

A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida stood in front of thousands of graduating communication and media students last week, called AI "the next Industrial Revolution," and seemed genuinely baffled when the room erupted in boos. These are students entering one of the toughest job markets in years, in the exact fields being disrupted by the technology she was celebrating. The clip went viral within hours. The moment the crowd cheered was when she accidentally said "only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives." She thought that was the controversial line. It was the only thing the room agreed with.

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In Retrospect, Lying to the Court About Using AI Was Probably Not the Move

A Nebraska attorney submitted a legal brief with 57 of 63 citations flagged as defective. Twenty were outright hallucinations. Three were cases that do not exist in any jurisdiction. When the state Supreme Court asked directly whether he had used AI, he said no. He had. He became the first attorney in U.S. history to receive an indefinite license suspension tied to AI hallucinations. His client, fighting for custody of his daughter, is now on the hook for $52,000 in opposing counsel fees. The AI did not fail him. He failed to check the AI's work and then failed to be honest about it. Both things carry consequences.

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The AI Infrastructure Race Just Went Offshore. Literally.

An Oregon startup called Panthalassa raised $140 million to build autonomous floating data center nodes that sit in the open ocean, convert wave energy into electricity, run AI chips onboard, and beam results back via Starlink satellite. No power grid. No zoning board. No angry neighbors. Peter Thiel led the round, valuing the company at nearly $1 billion. As the great data centers of the AI era move out to sea, the environmental accountability questions do not get simpler. They get murkier. International waters, by design, answer to a much shorter list of people. That part of the conversation has not started yet.

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The Competitors Funding Each Other and Calling It a Strategy

Google and Amazon are both building AI products to compete with Anthropic. They are also Anthropic's biggest investors. Last quarter, nearly half of Google's record profits and more than half of Amazon's net income came not from their own businesses, but from marking up the value of their Anthropic stakes on paper. The more they invest in Anthropic, the higher the valuation goes, and the more profit they get to report. Pouring money into the company you are trying to beat in an AI arms race is a strange way to go about it. But in this particular race, the whole pond is rising, and apparently everybody's boat rises with it.

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Telling AI It's an Expert Doesn't Actually Make It One

A new study tested one of the most common prompting techniques: assigning the AI a professional persona before asking questions. Telling the model it is a great physicist did not make it significantly more accurate at physics. Telling it to act as a lawyer did not make its legal answers worse. The AI does not actually become the role. What persona prompting does is shape how the response is framed and worded, which can still be useful. But that is a very different value proposition than most people think they are getting. The real implication: if the AI does not become more capable through role play, then the judgment about whether the output is actually good has to live entirely with the person using it. That was always true. This study just makes it harder to pretend otherwise.

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