October 5, 2026

People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough?

Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that’s designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do. At the start of the call, he said something that’s been stuck in my head since: “We often say that we’re a self-loathing AI…

A new contest pits competitors against each other in a race to biological youth

October 2, 2026
This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. One that rewards competitors for getting younger. I recently turned 40, and I don’t need reminding that both time and my chronological age only tick forward. But this game is focused on competitors’ biological ages—figures that are meant to provide a better way to measure…

Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason

October 2, 2026
On an afternoon in Seoul in March 2016, I watched a program I helped build put a stone on the fifth line of a Go board in what looked like a gift to its human opponent. Move 37 in game two of the five-game match looked so absurd that some commentators thought it was a…

ChatGPT can now virtually try on clothes for you

October 1, 2026
OpenAI is rolling out new shopping features for ChatGPT that let users virtually try on clothing and accessories using their own photos and save products they like to a Favorites library.