Dónal and Ciarán return with more "Bubble Watch", reporting on the latest expansion in valuations, hype, and attempts to find new ways to commercialise AI. Among those potential avenues to income, they discuss emerging AI robots, OpenAI's decision to allow AI erotica for adults, and the push to get AI into education - as well as the associated concerns. This last quarterly update for 2025 draws together some themes that you've identified in your submitted comments and questions and tries to end on a little hope amid a lot of anxiety!

Topics in the episode

• The AI Bubble gets bubblier - OpenAI's quarterly loss reports, Sam Altman's angry interviews, and the beginnings of a withdrawal of money from key parts of the AI economy.
• AI hardware in the form of robots like the recent XPENG demo and renewed concerns about labour replacement and military applications.
• OpenAI's hope of monetising via erotica.
• AI disinformation in the Irish Presidential election, as well as related stories in the Netherlands and elsewhere
• The unsuitability of mainstream GenAI tools to educational contexts and recent research on their associated Cognitive Deficit in learning contexts
• Top-down vs Bottom-up reactions and responses to AI in our lives and work

Resources & Links

• The widely circulated images describing the circular investment within AI include this famous example from Bloomberg Reporting
• Recent reporting on the topic is widespread but includes these examples from WSJ, NYT, Ars Technica, Business Insider, etc., etc. 
• MIT NANDA report on 95% of AI integration showing no return on investment
• MIT Media Lab's research on Cognitive Deficit and AI
• Reporting on the XPENG humanoid robot (Euronews)
• Reporting from Ciarán's colleagues at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in a Digital Dispatch on Russian state content surfacing in Chatbot outputs
• More discussion of "LLM Grooming & Data Voids" in this Harvard Kennedy School paper.
• Fact Check reporting from TheJournal on AI videos in the Irish Presidential Election, including the infamous Catherine Connolly withdrawal fake video
• Reporting from Politico on AI Deepfakes in European Elections

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán explore the increasingly looming questions about the overinflation of the major AI companies' valuations and the anxiety about whether we are in a bubble - and what might happen if it pops. Relevant to their discussion of the need for AI models to keep the hype levels high, they discuss the muted reception to the release of ChatGPT-5 and some of the emerging strategies to make AI chatbots more palatable to certain audiences who are worried about "woke".

Topics in this episode

• Are we in an AI bubble? Spoiler alert: Yes - based on any normal metric of what an investment bubble is - but why is the promise of an almost-there superintelligence keeping things from popping?
• Despite being in a bubble, the lasting impacts of where AI already is on jobs and society is discussed
• The recent release of ChatGPT-5 has led to negative feedback from the tech press and vocal users - this is contrasted with other recent version releases.
• Examining how AI companies are trying to find new ways to add value, leading to a discussion of "Third Devices" and AI hardware
• The limitations and diminishing returns of training on synthetic data - and the apparent slowing down in model progress
• AI & Ideology - what does it mean to have a non-woke AI?

Resources & Links

• The Economist story mentioned by Dónal: "AI valuations are verging on the unhinged - Unless superintelligence is just around the corner" (25 June 2025)
• Article in TheJournal.ie on "Brendan", the AI Dublin Tour Guide
• ChatGPT's dodgy graph is linked and discussed here: "OpenAI gets caught vibe graphing" (The Verge, 07 August)
• Sam Altman (OpenAI) tells venture capitalists that he will take billions of their money and build AGI - and then ask it how to make a return on the investment  (Twitter Video, Warren Terra)
• Some good discussion on the struggles of agentive AI ("AI Agents have, so far, mostly been a dud", Gary Marcus, Substack)
• Apple's important recent paper on the limitations of "reasoning" within tested reasoning models is available as a PDF here
• Coverage of Truth Social's deal with Perplexity - to make a non-woke chatbot for the platform

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán continue the 2025 season with a second quarterly update that looks at some recent themes in AI development. They're pondering doom again, as we increasingly grapple with the evidence that AI systems are powerfully persuasive and full of flattery at the same time as our ability to meaningfully supervise them seems to be diminishing.

Topics in this episode

• Can we see how reasoning models reason? If AI is thinking, or sharing information and it's not in human language, how can we check that it's aligned with our values. 
• This interpretability issue is tied to the concept of neuralese - inscrutable machine thoughts!
• We discuss the predictions and prophetic doom visions of the AI-2027 document
• Increasing ubiquity and sometimes invisibility of AI, as it's inserted into other products. Is this more enshittification? 
• AI is becoming a persuasion machine - we look at the recent issues on Reddit's r/ChangeMyView, where researchers skipped good ethics practice but ended up with worrying results
• We talk about flattery, manipulation, and Eli Yudkowsky's AI-Box thought experiment

Resources & Links

• The AI-2027 piece, from Daniel Kokotajlo et al. is a must-read!
• Dario Amodei's latest essay, The Urgency of Interpretability
• T.O.P.I.C. - A detailed referencing model for indicating the use of GenAI Tools in academic assignments. 
• Yudkowsky's AI-box Experiment, described on his site.
• "The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen" - coverage of the University of Zurich / Reddit study, by Tom Barlett for The Atlantic
• ChatGPT wants us to buy things via our AI conversations (reported by Reece Rogers, for Wired)

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán start a new season for 2025, with a slight change in format to bring you roughly quarterly updates on the themes and topics required to help you know enough about AI. This first episode of 2025, recorded in mid February, gives a summary of what's happened since last November and answers some of your submitted questions. (Thanks for those!)

Topics in this episode

• We can't avoid talking about them: Musk & Trump and some of the effects they've both had on the AI space in the last three months
• Regulatory Developments, and the EU's AI Act starting to come into force
• US - EU relations, and the continued innovation vs regulation chatter
• DeepSeek and China's bold entry into the contemporary AI model space
• What are Reasoning Models and how do they work?
• Some history and concepts related to machine logic
• AI Benchmarks - a quick primer as we move closer to "Humanity's Last Exam"

Resources & Links

• JD Vance's Speech from the Paris AI Conference is here (The American Presidency Project)
• Details on HLE (Humanity's Last Exam) here, including some sample questions. Let us know how you did!
• Details on the ARC-AGI here.
• A graph of OpenAI model performance (and discussion) is here (80,000 hours)

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán discuss the ways - both real and imagined in fiction - that AI could bring about civilization-ending doom for us all. What can we learn from how sci-fi has treated this topic? What are the distant and nearer potential dooms, and what can we do now, apart from saying thanks to ChatGPT? Oh, and note that listening to this episode may drastically affect your life and cause a future powerful AI to punish you in a psychic prison!

Topics in this episode

• What is p(Doom) and why are we hearing about it from AI researchers and investors?
• How has AI doom been dealt with in Sci-fi and can this teach us anything useful?
• What is Dead Internet Theory and why might AI contribute to the Enshitification of the internet?
• Why has the religious concept of Paschal's Wager found a new form in AI discussions that started on internet forums?

Resources & Links

• More on the history of p(Doom) on wikipedia here.
• An interesting article on Dead Internet Theory & AI Walter, Y. Artificial influencers and the dead internet theory. AI & Society (2024).
• Read about Roko's Basilisk (if you dare)
• More on Roko's Basilisk on the LessWrong forum where the though experiment emerged in 2009

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán discuss some of the concerns about misinformation and disinformation that have emerged with the rise of impressively capable GenAI models, and provide some detail on what their effects might be. They discuss the calls for regulation and how this has begun to take shape in the EU, Ireland,  and elsewhere.

Topics in this episode

• What are the implications for misinformation inherent in the current and emerging GenAI models?
• Why have there been calls to pause development, and why did this not lead anywhere?
• How have the various language, image, audio, and video models already been used for problematic content?
• Is social media ready for the onslaught to come?
• Can we regulate AI to combat this and how is that beginning?
• Why should we be critical of offers to self-regulate from the tech companies?
• What's the EU AI Act? 
• And why is Ireland using the word "doomsayers" in policy documents about AI?

Resources & Links

• The EU's AI Act: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/
• Some of ISD's work on AI & Misinformation: https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/disconnected-from-reality-american-voters-grapple-with-ai-and-flawed-osint-strategies/
• More on the Slovak Deepfake case discussed by Ciarán: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/beyond-the-deepfake-hype-ai-democracy-and-the-slovak-case/
• GenAI & ISIS: https://gnet-research.org/2024/02/05/ai-caliphate-pro-islamic-state-propaganda-and-generative-ai/?
• The Irish Government's "Friend or Foe" Report: https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/6538e-artificial-intelligence-friend-or-foe/

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán discuss the vast ocean of data that Large Language Models (LLMs) depend on for their training, covering some of the issues of access to that data and the biases reflected within it. This episode should help you better understand some aspects of the AI training process.

Topics in this episode

• What data is being used to train models like ChatGPT?
• What are "supervised" or "unsupervised" machine learning methods?
• How have the owners of copyright data, like news organisations, reacted to the use of their text?
• What issues of bias arise in training models based on existing text?
• What happens when AI models train on AI output?
• How do we morally and ethically align the actions of AI models, as part of their training?

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán talk you through everything that's emerged since capable Large Language Models entered the chat a few years ago - up to late 2024, at least! This episode covers the companies, models, and tools that have become central to contemporary GenAI, and will broaden your understanding of where things are beyond ChatGPT.

Topics in this episode

• What are Transformer models and why are these significant?
• How did OpenAI come to dominate this space?
• Who are the other organisations to know and what other GenAI models should you be aware of?

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán go back, back, back to see how the long history of computing machines connects to the AI revolution we're in now.

Topics in this episode

• How far back does the history of humans building machines to aid our thinking go?
• Why are  French weaving machines and alcoholic poet's daughters involved?
• How does the history of computing go through County Cork in the 1800s?
• Who are Turning and Shannon, and why do workplace disagreements leading to new companies fracturing off seem to be a repeating theme?
• What are the key developments in the evolution of computing that allow us to build AI systems now?

Links & Resources

• The Antikythera Mechanism (Wikipedia)
• Information about George Boole's time in Cork (UCC Website)
• Crash Course video on Boolean Logic (YouTube)
• An image of "The Mechanical Turk" (WikiMedia Commons)
• Tom Standage's (2002) The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine 
• Information about and images of the Jacquard Loom (Science & Industry Museum)
• The portrait of J.M. Jacquard, woven in silk by his loom, which took 24,000 punch cards to program (WikiMedia Commons)
• Photograph of a young Claude Shannon, juggling on a unicycle (Ray Soni, Photo courtesy of the Shannon family)
• Ray Cavanaugh's (2016) article Claude Shannon: The Juggling Unicyclist Who Pedaled Us Into the Digital Age (Time Magazine)

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán start the series with some explainers that should help you sound much more knowledgeable discussing the state of contemporary AI at your next dinner party.

Topics in this episode

• What is AI? Why has it seemed to appear so recently and become so important?
• What's the difference between AI and GenAI?
• What is ChatGPT and how do models like it work?
• What are the other important AI tools to be aware of?
• What does this technology hold for the future of science and society?
• Are we all doomed?

Links & Resources

• Dario Amodei's Essay, Machines of Loving Grace 

You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!