For 28 years: a journalist @ CBC, POLITICO, CP. Next: getting a master’s in Artificial Intelligence management at Georgetown.

Joined June 2009
4,367 Photos and videos
A counterpoint to the sovereign-AI reaction on Trump v. Anthropic
Replying to @Afinetheorem
The obvious way to do this is exactly what we currently do for all other dual use technology: treaties plus smaller countries contributing essential components to ensure they aren't held up. Plus global trusted safety institutions. Not impossible! 3/3
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We have a new Exhibit A for those AI sovereignty advocates arguing that other countries need to scale up alternatives to the U.S. models. At the very least as a backup plan
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
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/ What the shutdown looked like when I woke up overseas this morning to an unfinished programming job
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/ Updates and links in my daily digest to this milestone development - the US government turning off the taps for foreigners. The Fable 5 / Mythos shutdown in my daily digest.
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Alexander Panetta retweeted
And Dean is completely correct. It’s obviously insane to sell AI chips to China, but then export control the models that those same chips produce and run.
If this is true, it is just baffling. An administration whose posture is that we *should* export advanced AI chips to China, which also wants to ban… Britain (and every other non-American on Earth)… from using our best models? I have no words.
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This hands a huge advantage to China or... to OpenAI
For anyone wondering what this means: - Anthropic (and potentially future OpenAI, Google, xAI) models that cost billions to develop will make 0 revenue outside the US - a big double digit percentage of Anthropic (and potentially OpenAI, Google, xAI) workforce can no longer work there, because they are foreigners and are not allowed to use those models So Trump just made frontier model development effectively unprofitable and tremendously slowed down Anthropic (and potentially others in the future) He's handing China the win on a gold platter. *potentially: if the same restrictions are imposed on other frontier labs and models
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Life sometimes throws you a curveball -- like watching Canada playing in the ⚽️ World Cup, in Toronto, from your new home in Ankara, Turkey. Full of surprises! 🇨🇦
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/ I grew up cheering for Italy in these things, and this is the point at which we'd start using extremely naughty turns of phrase with references to the Bible
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Switching owner of this site from block to mute now that he has enough money to buy every industry and subnational region where people he dislikes could ever work or live 
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Synthetic personas for research. Cool. Just studied this at school. It can work. However... if you build your persona off bad, statistically biased, or incomplete data, you'll be basing your market research on a foundation of steaming statistical garbage! Handle with care!
A toothpaste company has quietly killed the entire market research industry and nobody is talking about it. Colgate published a paper showing you can predict real purchase intent at 90% accuracy by simply asking LLMs to roleplay customers. And this is beyond insane. If you ask an AI, "Rate this product from 1 to 5," it gives safe, middle-of-the-road garbage. So researchers invented a method called Semantic Similarity Rating (SSR). Instead of asking the AI for a number, they asked it to roleplay. They gave the LLM a demographic profile. They showed it a product concept. And they asked it to write down its raw, unfiltered thoughts. Then, they used a semantic model to translate those written thoughts into a numerical score. The results are staggering. Tested against 57 real corporate surveys and 9,300 actual human responses, the synthetic AI consumers matched real human buying behavior with 90% reliability. They perfectly mirrored how different age brackets and income levels react to price changes. And they provided detailed, qualitative feedback that was deeper and more critical than what actual humans wrote. This destroys the economics of traditional market research. You don't need to wait a month to see if a product will sell. You can simulate 1,000 hyper-targeted customer interviews overnight. You can A/B test pricing across every demographic instantly.
Community note
The 90% figure refers to the AI method achieving 90% of human test-retest reliability for purchase intent surveys, not 90% accuracy in predicting real purchases. It was tested on personal care products in categories LLMs know well. arxiv.org/abs/2510.08338
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I'm proud of this one. Just a few years ago, I couldn't use Excel. My wife taught me after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when she saw me tallying results by hand. Today, Apple approved my iPhone app. If you're traveling and want a break from over-touristed sites, this finds beautiful places nearby, off the beaten path. It works without internet. I'd be delighted if you downloaded it and left a review. Here: apps.apple.com/us/app/wander…
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Today's AI digest: Anthropic Backtracks On Silent Sabotage Strategy --> New Data Backs Up Youth Jobs Fear --> OpenAI's IPO Plan --> The Value Of Chatbots That Challenge
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/ Here's a link to the study on youth jobs: Stanford finds a 3.8% drop in employment for youth in AI-connected fields, while non-AI fields are seeing (much smaller) growth digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/…

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Alexander Panetta retweeted
NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner. Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order safety alignment is risky. When closed (and open) models ship with aggressive refusals, they will be sprinkled with second-order blindspots that attackers will discover...and exploit. We are only in the earliest days of attackers leveraging these features, and it wouldn't surprise me if users systems that need to handle complex cybersecurity issues demand that models be less safety-blunted. In the weeds: @SocketSecurity's post also shows why intention matters in how you design a malware analysis pipeline to avoid prompt manipulation. H/T to colleagues that shared this with me socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-hu…
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Anthropic's powerful new Mythos-level model stopped while rendering my Daily AI briefing note. Its security flag went up.... simply because I mentioned its own system card!
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/... in any case here's my daily note: The good, the bad, and the ugly of Claude's Fable 5. A highly capable model that raises new and unsettling questions, about inequality, power, and speech. Also today: Canada gets new legislation and a new open-source model.
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I've been moderately impressed by the new Claude Fable -- did some stuff incrementally better on things I threw at it. Then you see stuff like this...
Mythos / Fable is unbelievable. Was on a customer call today and had Claude transcribing in the background. As they were telling me about the features they wish their current software had, Claude was building the features in real time. By the end of the call I was able to show a fully working product, with the exact workflow they mentioned 15 minutes earlier. Autonomous looped building triggered from a customer call. 🤯
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Alexander Panetta retweeted
Claude Fable 5 is available today on paid plans. Claude Mythos 5 is available to Glasswing partners, with a broader trusted access program to follow. Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-fa…
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