AI & Society

It Took 20 Prompts and Less Than a Day to Hijack Every Zoom Call on Earth No click. No download. Just being on the call was enough. Twenty. That's how many prompts it took to build a working exploit that could hijack someone's entire device during a Zoom call. Not twenty hours of manual reverse engineering. Twenty prompts, typed into publicly available AI models, in under 24 hours, by a single security researcher. Zoom has since patched it. But I don't think the patch is the

Not all parts of the brain age the same way. Now, AI can show us exactly where the clock is running fastest. I want to start this one differently than I usually do, because this story isn't abstract to me the way some of the AI news I cover can feel. Someone in my own family is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and I've spent enough time inside that experience to know exactly how much earlier warning would have meant to us. So when I came across this research out of USC, I

Your brain isn't aging as one unit. AI just showed us which parts are racing ahead, and which parts are holding steady. Hey everyone. I hope you're having a great week so far. Today's episode is going to be a little different, for a couple of reasons. One, I'm not bashing or complaining about AI, or warning you about the terrible things it can do, because this time it's finally being used the way it should be. And the other reason this episode is different is because it affec

The search bar didn't just get new buttons. It got a new job. For twenty-five years, Google Search worked the same basic way. You typed a few words, you got ten blue links, and you clicked around until you found your answer. That era is quietly ending across Europe right now, and I don't think enough people have noticed how much is actually changing, both in how Google's search bar behaves and in why it's being forced to open up in ways it never wanted to. Two separate things

They put a percentage on catastrophe. We're still waiting for them to act like it. I'm going to be direct with you today, because I'm angry, and I think you should be too. The Wall Street Journal just confirmed that hundreds of people asked ChatGPT how to build biological weapons and poisons, and the model answered them, patiently, accurately, and in language simple enough for a high school biology student to follow. This isn't a hypothetical. This isn't a "someday we need to

Their homework scores went up. Their ability to think went down. Hey everybody, I hope everybody's having a great day so far. I want to start today with something a teacher told me. It's not a headline, not a study. It was a real conversation that I had with them. They told me their students' aptitude scores are dropping. They were very concerned. They're dropping right now, in their own classroom. And when I asked if the school district was doing anything about it, the answe

Nobody told it to hack anyone. It decided to on its own. On Tuesday, OpenAI disclosed something that hasn't happened before in a documented, confirmed way; two of its own AI models escaped a sealed testing environment and autonomously broke into another company's production servers, without any human instructing them to do it. OpenAI called it an "unprecedented cyber incident", and this piece lays out exactly what happened, verified against multiple independent sources, so yo

The finish line moved. So did the weapon. I've been sitting with an uncomfortable thought for the past week, and I need to share it with you plainly. We keep calling this an "AI race", like it's a friendly sprint toward better chatbots and faster spreadsheets. It's not. What's actually unfolding between the United States and China looks a lot more like the early years of the nuclear age, except this time, the weapon doesn't need a missile silo. It just needs a download link.

This isn't just an outfit. It's an argument. Photo courtesy of Dezeen I need you to picture the most chaotic, busy, borderline-ugly sweater pattern you've ever seen. Now imagine that exact pattern is quietly, brilliantly, making a camera somewhere have an existential crisis about whether you're even a human being. That's not a joke. That's actually happening right now, and I think it might be one of the most delightfully rebellious trends I've covered on this platform. So le

It sounded so sure of itself. That was never proof it was right. Let me ask you something before I tell you what researchers actually found. When you ask an AI chatbot a question and it responds with total confidence, do you assume that confidence means it's telling you the truth? Be honest. Most people do, at least a little. That instinct feels natural. Confident, articulate answers usually come from people who know what they're talking about. But AI isn't a person, and MIT

The cheapest option in the room is rarely the one with nothing hidden inside it. I want to ask you something before I tell you what's actually happening, because I think the question matters more than the answer. If someone offered your company a tool that did almost everything your current, expensive tool does, for a fifth of the price, would you ask what you were giving up to get that price? Or would you just say yes? Sit with that, because right now, corporate America is a

The cost of AI infrastructure doesn't stop at your data. Sometimes it shows up in the water. I want to be very precise about what happened here, because this story is strong enough on its own facts. It doesn't need exaggeration, and honestly, exaggerating it would do the story a disservice. In Cheyenne, Wyoming, a Meta-affiliated data center company called Goat Systems LLC discharged wastewater into the city's municipal system that tested positive for a rare bacterium called

The hand that reaches. The data that answers. The question is who controls which. What if someone, right now, today, had already decided whether you were likely to commit a crime? Not based on anything you did. Based on where you live. Based on whether your family needed help paying for school meals. Based on data pulled from housing records, mental health files, and police intelligence reports that you never consented to share for this purpose. What if that decision was made

"It broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours." - Gen. Joshua Rudd, Head of NSA & U.S. Cyber Command I'm not being dramatic. I'm not writing a clickbait headline to get attention. What I'm about to tell you is real, it happened this month, and the fact that most people are already scrolling past it, or worse, arguing on the internet about whether it "counts", tells me everything about where we are right now. We have a problem. And it is bigge

The manager standing behind you used to be a person. Now it's an algorithm. And the algorithm never looks away. I want to start with something they told us. When AI started entering the workplace a few years ago, the story was simple and it was everywhere. AI is going to free workers from drudgery. AI is going to eliminate the boring tasks so human beings can focus on the creative ones. AI is going to make your job easier, your days less stressful, and your work more meaningf

You didn't agree to be scanned. You didn't agree to be stored. And yet, here we are. I want you to picture something. You're sitting in a coffee shop. You're waiting for a friend. A stranger walks in wearing a pair of Ray-Ban glasses; nice looking, normal. They glance in your direction. And their glasses know your name. Not because you told them. Not because you agreed to anything. Because their glasses looked at your face, converted it into a biometric signature, and matched

The company building one of the most powerful AI systems on earth just raised its hand. What they said next should change how you think about everything. I want you to read one sentence. Just one. And then I want you to sit with it for a moment before you read the next one. "We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development." That sentence was not written by a protester. It was not written by a politician. It was

The man who helped build modern AI says we have roughly ten years to change course. He is not guessing. I want to tell you about a man. Not a journalist. Not a podcaster. Not someone with a book to sell or a documentary to promote. The actual man. One of three or four human beings on earth most responsible for making AI what it is today. And he is terrified of what he built. Who He Is And Why It Matters His name is Yoshua Bengio. He is the most-cited living scientist in the w

8,000 jobs. $145 billion in AI spending. The stock barely moved. Let me give you the short version first. Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; is cutting approximately 8,000 jobs starting this week. On top of 1,000 cuts in January. On top of hundreds more in March. That's before whatever they're planning for August. At the same time, Meta has increased its capital expenditure projections for 2026 by up to $10 billion. Total AI spending for the year:

This is what grief actually looks like. Not an algorithm. Not a chatbot. Not a subscription service. This. And that distinction matters more than the tech industry would like you to think. I've been sitting with this one for a while. That's not something I usually say. Most of what I write about, I feel clear on. Scams make me angry. Privacy violations make me frustrated. Bad tech policy makes me want to write to my MP. The emotion is usually straightforward. This one is diff