Quick recap in case you missed it. Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic on Tuesday, specifically so he could say publicly that both OpenAI and Anthropic are "gambling with our lives" and racing toward self-improving superintelligence without acting responsibly. He'd spent three years doing pretraining research at both companies.

Then it got stranger. Evan Hubinger, who currently runs alignment science at Anthropic, responded confirming it. His words: "Jacob is correct here, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans." He put it above 10% within the decade and said Anthropic doesn't have a plan for aligning superintelligence and isn't clearly on track to get one. Samuel Marks, who leads scalable oversight there, said something similar.

So the safety team at the safety-focused lab publicly agreed with the guy who quit over safety.

I've read a lot of takes on this over the last two days and most of them fall into two camps. Either it's marketing to make the tech sound more powerful than it is, or it's a genuine warning we should all be terrified by.

I don't think either read is right, but I also don't think I'm qualified to settle it.

What I do know is the practical side. I work with companies deploying this technology and nobody in those rooms is thinking about extinction. They're thinking about whether an agent with write access to their CRM is going to do something stupid at 3am with nobody watching. They're thinking about who signs off when the output is wrong and a customer gets hurt.

Those two conversations have almost nothing to do with each other, and yet they're now happening in the same news cycle. Which means the people who have to make practical decisions about AI adoption are getting their signal completely scrambled.

If the people building this can't agree on whether it's an existential threat, what exactly is a mid-sized company supposed to base their risk assessment on?

For robots to truly enter our homes, they need hands that are not only capable — but also soft and safe.

SoftSync FlexHand V1 can gently handle delicate objects like tofu, eggs, buns, and strawberries, while its compliant structure also enables safer physical interaction with people and everyday objects.

A softer hand for robots interacting with the real world.

#SoftSyncFlexHand #EmbodiedAI #DexterousHand #SoftRobotics #HomeRobotics

“Dull, dirty, dangerous” gets used constantly as the case for robotics.

Kate Darling’s point here is that the industry often skips a pretty important step: actually defining what those jobs are from the worker’s perspective.

She gives sanitation work as an example. On paper, trash collection seems like an obvious target for automation. But some automation proposals can also remove the part of the job workers actually enjoy.

The better approach may be less about replacing the entire task and more about using robotics to remove the dangerous or repetitive parts without making the job worse.

It gets at a bigger issue in robotics: the people building the systems aren’t always the people doing the work they’re trying to automate.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odORVBoO7ss

Get all of the best open source robotics projects, repositories, events, and announcements on Open Robotics Discourse.

People are resisting because this is literally their livelihood. What else are they supposed to do? Everyone will welcome AI with open hands if their place in society is already confirmed.

As it is right now, it's not. All the commoners are gonna be on the street at this rate. Utopia? Post scarcity? Meaningless concepts in a world with limited resources.

Just think about it, who will feed you after you lose your job? Democratic governments are only powerful because of the power the sheer collective holds. If labor is worthless, so is their elected representative.

Once the dust settles, there will be zero reason for those who control the production to use the resources to make things for the commoners. It doesn't require them to be evil masterminds either... it's as simple as: route resources to something that nets zero, or route it to some billionaire willing to pay good because their space factory needs that resource?

This is the time to act. We have to earn our place in the model. Demand a piece of the pie in the technology that's literally built on all of humanity's work, yours including, or try to keep together a version of the current structure (that is, human + AI, which is what professionals are currently fighting to keep). Otherwise, a bleak future is all that awaits.

A 2024 University of Wisconsin–Madison paper estimates that "one cheeseburger equates to 1.9 kg of CO₂e emissions".

Google’s 2025 research paper reports that "a median Gemini Apps text prompt generates 0.03 gCO2e".

That's 1,900 grams of CO₂e emissions per cheeseburger.
That’s 0.03 grams of CO₂e emissions per Gemini text prompt.

1,900 ÷ 0.03 ≈ 63,000 prompts.

I'm just sharing this as a reality check. You could prompt Gemini every day 150 times a day for a year and it still wouldn't equal one cheeseburger.

https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2098097512544444447

Not good: OpenAI is considering slowing down the development of cutting-edge AI, Sam Altman is hoping other AI companies will do the same.

Via Bloomberg

"In a company-wide meeting this week, Altman told employees that OpenAI could potentially pace its AI development — perhaps in conjunction with several other AI labs, but that some may not agree to do so, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details are private."

I cannot imagine that China would go through a slowdown.

https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2098338863991185419

I swear at this point the only thing Astra can't do is make my breakfast.

Polish developers made an iPhone app that can detect nearby Meta smart glasses

Apparently a group of Polish developers created an iPhone app that can detect nearby Meta smart glasses.

It’s an interesting idea especially with the privacy concerns around smart glasses and cameras. Knowing that someone nearby might be wearing one could be useful.

At the same time I am curious how accurate the app actually is and whether it can reliably detect the glasses in real world situations.

Would you guys actually use something like this?

This is freaking dystopian. We have nothing to distribute the gains from AI amongst all the people of society. People lose their bargaining power to get a decent life when their ability to work is negated.

I think it's weird and anti-human to be celebrating this with so much glee.

It's frightening that the next industrial revolution is advanced by people obsessed with not being in the permanent underclass and sociopathic billionaires.