Sunday, August 2, 2026 · about a 2 minute read
Today the news keeps circling the same quiet question: what happens when AI starts doing the work we thought only experts could do, and who actually controls it?
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OpenAI published ten mathematical results that AI systems helped produce, following Anthropic doing something similar with cryptography last week. If your work involves any kind of complex analysis or formal reasoning, the window for 'AI can't do that' is getting smaller and worth tracking.
Greg Brockman noted that even OpenAI employees, who hook ChatGPT into Slack, get annoyed when a colleague's AI contacts them directly asking for help. The lesson is simple: people are fine with automation until it shows up in their inbox pretending to be a person.
GPT-5.6 got a price cut, a new small model called Inkling-Small arrived, and Google showed off Gemini Robotics 2. Cheaper models mean more of this technology quietly showing up inside the apps and services you already use, whether or not you notice.
Simon Willison rounded up the recent wave of open letters about AI development, which have been piling up from researchers, companies, and advocates. When this many people feel the need to write formal letters, it usually means the informal conversations are not going well.
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This essay looks at the Ars Notoria, a medieval manuscript that promised students instant knowledge through prayers and magic diagrams before exams. The dream of downloading expertise straight into your brain is genuinely ancient. What is new is that the current version of that dream, a language model that can pass a bar exam, actually works, sort of, and understanding what 'sort of' means is the whole game.
Simon Willison joined a podcast to talk about AI models, meaning models whose underlying numbers are public and can be run by anyone. If the last few years of AI felt like something happening to you, open-weight models are where the conversation shifts to something you could actually participate in.
That's today. See you tomorrow.
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The book behind this newsletter
How ChatGPT, Claude, and Modern AI Actually Work
The trick is small. The world it built is not.