Everyone's talking about AI but most of it is hype, jargon, or someone trying to sell you something. Pierce Freeman and Richard Diehl Martinez are two Stanford friends who actually work in this space with nothing to sell you but good vibes. We'll make you smarter - and you might actually enjoy it.
AI’s Trust Gap: Disputed OpenAI Firings, a Shaky Math Proof and Hidden Model Costs
Pierce and Rich run through the week in AI, seven minutes per topic. Gemini Argon is cheap at $2 / $10 per million tokens until the price doubles after November 30. But on Artificial Analysis it costs $1.99 per task against 72 cents for GPT 6.1 Solmax at about the same score, which is why per-token pricing is starting to mean less than cost per task.
Liquid AI’s biggest LFM2.5 model is 24B total with 2B active, combining mixture of experts, short convolutions and grouped query attention to hit 184 tokens per second on an M5 Max.
Fish Audio’s Drama 3 takes bracketed stage directions like [exhale] and [emphasis], and gets there with plain GRPO and a pile of human preference data.
They also recap the rest of the week: the OpenAI spy caught on camera retrieving his bug, why everyone is copying Tinker’s pay-per-token training API, and OpenAI firing three safety researchers, one of whom was METR’s point of contact. Plus: is the industry getting sloppy as it speeds up?
Our first weekly roundup. We set a timer and mostly stuck to it.
8 Oct 2026
The Agent Wars: Dots vs Muse vs Grok Bot
In the last two months, xAI's Grok Bot, Meta Muse, and OpenAI Dots all launched with nearly the same pitch: a persistent personal agent with its own cloud computer, memory, and scheduled tasks. Pierce (fresh back from Italy with Parmesan) and Richard compare the three, from Grok Bot's bot "teams" to Dots' always-on assistant to Muse negotiating Facebook Marketplace sales for you, sometimes badly.
We get into the security side: how Meta's "sentinel" keeps your credentials out of the agent's reach, where that approach can fail, and why handing agents Bash and letting them talk to each other opens new attack paths. We also look at why Muse hit 5M downloads in about three weeks, how much of that came from Meta's own ad spend, and why its retention numbers may say less than they seem to.
1 Oct 2026
Trump Says AI's Only Guardrail Is a "High IQ President"
On September 14, Trump called AI safety a hoax and said the only guardrail AI needs is a "high IQ president." Vance said it felt weird that frontier labs keep begging the government to regulate them. Days later, Jensen Huang put Trump on speakerphone on stage at the All-In summit, where Trump called the AI fears a hoax again. Jensen's own position is that pausing and pacing are things the labs can do voluntarily. With Trump and Xi both in New York for the UN this week, the White House and the labs asking to slow down have rarely been further apart.
Pierce and Rich trace how we got here, from the original pause letter to the Pacing the Frontier campaign. Signing is gated to frontier-lab email addresses, and only one of their friends did. They also get into what the labs should actually slow down: RL environments and new architectures, not chips. Also: whether a lab-wide slowdown amounts to an illegal AI OPEC, and Bernie Sanders' ASI bill, which carries 20 years in prison and a "corporate death penalty" (nobody has seen the full text). Plus the awkward fact that most US startups run on Qwen, Kimi and GLM, and what a Trump-Xi deal on AI could realistically include.
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