AI Reading for Monday August 25

The AI revolution will cut nearly $1 trillion a year out of S&P 500 budgets, Morgan Stanley says—largely from agents and robots replacing humans - Fortune

Former OpenAI researcher says a $10,000 monthly UBI will be 'feasible' with AI-enabled growth - Business Insider

Insist on AI that complements professionals—"doctors... teachers, lawyers, building contractors"—rather than aiming to automate them out of jobs, noting AI "probably won’t be [fully ready] in a meaningful sense for most of the next decade." (tell it to bean-counters, insurance companies and CEOs) - The Atlantic

Will historians really be replaced by AI? - The Washington Post

Publishers race to counter ‘Google Zero’ threat as AI changes search engines - Financial Times

We Put a Coding Agent in a While Loop and It Shipped 6 Repos Overnight: Developers at a YC hackathon looped Claude Code to auto-port repositories, generating roughly 1,100 commits and highlighting emergent behaviors and the power of simpler prompts. - GitHub

Geoffrey Huntley (formerly tech lead for developer productivity at Canva) teaches building a coding agent "With LLM tokens, that's all it is. 300 lines of code running in a loop with LLM tokens." — and walked through five core primitives (read_file, list_files, bash, edit, code_search) - Geoffrey Huntley

Claude Code: one main control loop with at most one branch; heavy use of a small, cheap model (over 50% of calls use claude-3-5-haiku) for reads/summaries; a persistent context file with each request; extensive, example-rich system prompts and an agent-managed todo list to prevent context rot. - minusx.ai

Beyond one-shot-and-fix: the author switched to asking Claude Code to write a plan document that becomes the single source of truth (e.g., @plans/query-builder.md), clearing the chat and restarting with just that plan to avoid context-loss and overwritten instructions - Between the Prompts

Deepwiki - now integrated in WindSurf after Devin merger, you can roll over a variable or function and get a deep explanation of what it does, its lifecycle. - AI Tidbits

China is quietly upstaging America with its open models - The Economist

Do AI Companies Actually Care About America? - The Atlantic

Palantir's weaponized AI surveillance platforms threaten human rights around the world. - the Guardian

Silicon Valley Launches $100m Pro-AI PACs to Defend Industry in Midterm Elections - The Wall Street Journal

OpenAI warned against “unauthorized opportunities to gain exposure to OpenAI through a variety of means,” like special purpose vehicles (SPVs), and said attempts to “circumvent our transfer restrictions” “will not be recognized and carry no economic value to you.” - OpenAI

AI Is Replacing Online Content Moderators, But It's Bad at the Job - Bloomberg

AI Is Booming. So Are Household Electricity Bills. - Bloomberg

The A.I.-Profits Drought and the Lessons of History: Like the steam engine, electricity, and computers, generative artificial intelligence could take longer than expected to transform the economy. - The New Yorker

More colleges are turning to AI to cut down on operating costs - BostonGlobe.com

Alex Green, a Harvard professor, said he's concerned that AI use in education damages students' communication, research, and reasoning skills. - Business Insider

Experts warn AI-enabled toys and companions could harm children's social development and blur reality without adequate safeguards. - Futurism

Another AI tool won’t solve your problems. But AI training might - Fast Company

Elon Musk announced that xAI has open sourced Grok 2.5, that Grok 2's model weights are now available on Hugging Face, and that they plan to "do the same for Grok 3 in about six months." - X (formerly Twitter)

Google is rumoured to have completed development of its first AI-enabled glasses and plans to have them made in Taiwan but has not yet chosen a contract manufacturer; Quanta handled prototype design and is a strong contender while market reports suggest HTC may produce the devices. - South China Morning Post

Use caution with browser extensions that watch everything you do and use AI to train models, to profile you, and sell your info to data brokers. - EL PAÍS English

We're all lab rats in a massive uncontrolled experiment - EL PAÍS English

Smarter AI is supercharging battery innovation - Fast CompanyWaymo to test robotaxis in NYC. We will see how they deal with aggressive driving and vandalism. - Fast Company

Future of AI in NYC is probably smart transportation increasing density, not so much replacing the drivers but the whole car.

The internet is now crawling with AI slop political cartoons that mimic the work of original artists - San Francisco Chronicle

Smart robots roam Asian multi-tier egg cage systems to detect sick and dead birds and continuously monitor house conditions (temperature, humidity, ammonia, wind); covers a barn in about eight minutes identifying cages via QR codes. - WATT AgNet

Hong Kong deploys AI rat catchers and infrared trackers. - South China Morning Post

YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without telling users or asking permission. As AI mediates our world, what happens to our shared connection with reality? - BBC

Creators including Rick Beato and Rhett Shull reported odd artifacts—over‑sharpened skin, distorted ears—and said the results "look AI-generated" and "could potentially erode the trust I have with my audience," noting the edits were made without their consent.

Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study suggests that it’s an inevitable by-product of their architecture. Necessity is the mother of invention? - WIRED

3 free Veo 3 generations for everyone this weekend - X (formerly Twitter)

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