Lionel Nation

19 SEP 2026.

The travails of META GLASSES. Just the beginning.

People who use Meta’s smart glasses or were recorded with the gadget are worried about how the social media giant is using their photos and videos.

======================

Danny Thompson, John Martyn and Kathy Mattea turn “May You Never” into a warm, intimate conversation between musicians. Martyn’s weathered voice carries the song’s tenderness, Mattea adds a graceful country warmth and Thompson’s bass gives the performance its deep, unhurried pulse. The Transatlantic Sessions setting makes everything feel effortless and timeless, blending British folk, American roots and jazz-inflected musicianship into a beautifully restrained performance about loyalty, friendship and enduring affection.

Danny Thompson, @johnmartynmusic and @kathymattea perform the classic John Martyn song ‘May You Never’ at ‘Transatlantic Sessions’ Remember to subscribe to stay up to date with all new releases: http://bit.ly/3VcrHWc #DannyThompson #Bass

The post How Does It Feel to See Everything Implode? appeared first on Lionel Nation.

17 SEP 2026.

If it’s false, act accordingly.

President Donald Trump directly ordered the cover-up of the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files, ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed in a stunning interview.

===================

The Loyales give “Don’t Get Me Wrong” a warm, affectionate treatment that respects the Pretenders original without merely copying it. The performance keeps the song’s irresistible melodic bounce while adding a looser, more intimate live-band character. Chrissie Hynde’s original vocal attitude is impossible to duplicate, so wisely they do not try. Instead, the arrangement leans into the tune itself: bright guitar, steady rhythm and that instantly recognizable chorus. A terrific reminder of just how beautifully constructed this song always was.

https://TheLoyales.com :: Follow for tour dates https://bnds.us/8bdgkk :: Instagram https://instagram.com/the.loyales The Loyales band is “like a living, breathing jukebox, full of expertly curated 45’s.” [New York Magazine] We gathered over the winter at a fabulous studio in Brooklyn, NY (https://atomicsoundnyc.com/) and recorded ourselves playing live. The setlist was comprised of our favorite classics.

The post Insanity Only Exists If It Is Recognized As Such appeared first on Lionel Nation.

16 SEP 2026.

There is growing concern that the artificial intelligence boom may be entering dangerous territory. Economists at Capital Economics are warning that many of the classic signs of a late-stage financial bubble are now flashing at once. Stock market valuations are increasingly concentrated in a relatively small group of enormous technology companies. Corporations are borrowing and issuing equity aggressively to finance massive AI infrastructure projects. Expectations for future earnings are extraordinarily high. The uncomfortable comparison is the dot-com boom, when investors correctly recognized that the internet would transform the world but still managed to wildly overpay for the companies promising to deliver that transformation.

That distinction matters. Artificial intelligence can be revolutionary and still produce a spectacular investment bubble. Railroads changed America. The internet changed civilization. Neither technological revolution prevented investors from losing fortunes when enthusiasm outran economic reality.

The enormous sums being poured into data centers, chips, power generation and AI development now require enormous future profits to justify today’s valuations. If those profits arrive more slowly than expected, or if companies discover that AI services cannot produce enough revenue to cover their extraordinary infrastructure costs, markets could suddenly begin questioning assumptions that currently appear almost unquestionable.

The Federal Reserve adds another complication. Higher interest rates make borrowing more expensive and traditionally cool speculative investment. Yet AI spending has become so strategically important that technology companies may continue spending regardless, potentially creating an unusual situation where monetary tightening slows the ordinary economy while the AI arms race continues almost untouched.

The real warning is not that artificial intelligence is fake. Quite the opposite. The technology may be enormously important. The warning is that investors sometimes confuse an important technology with an unlimited investment opportunity. History repeatedly demonstrates that revolutionary technology, extravagant expectations and cheap capital can produce extraordinary booms. It also demonstrates what happens when reality finally sends the bill.

The warning lights on the economic dashboard are screaming as the Federal Reserve weighs whether or not to hit the emergency brake.

=======================

Toy Factory Project turns the Marshall Tucker Band classic “Can’t You See” into a roaring celebration at the 2025 Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Led by original MTB drummer Paul T. Riddle, the all-star lineup includes Marcus King, Oteil Burbridge, Charlie Starr, Josh Shilling and Billy Contreras. King’s gritty, soulful vocal gives the song enormous weight while the guitars, fiddle and Hammond organ stretch its Southern rock roots beautifully. Best of all, the young crowd knows every word. Timeless music, gloriously alive.

A timeless Southern rock anthem meets a new generation as Toy Factory Project delivers a live performance of “Can’t You See” at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. When the chorus hits, a crowd of younger fans sings every word at the top of their lungs-proof that great songs don’t belong to one era, they belong to everyone.

The post The Fraud of Promise: The Collapse of AI, Victim of Hype and Overexetension appeared first on Lionel Nation.

15 SEP 2026.

Sound familiar?

A Russian disinformation operation has turned its attention to the US midterm elections, unleashing a series of deepfake videos that depict celebrities attacking Democrats, researchers said, with more…

====================

Molly Tuttle and Lindsay Lou bring gorgeous warmth and precision to Joni Mitchell’s “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio.” Their voices blend effortlessly, balancing sweetness with just enough grit, while the acoustic arrangement preserves Mitchell’s playful, conversational spirit. Tuttle’s musicianship is characteristically impeccable, but the real pleasure is the chemistry between them. It feels spontaneous, intimate and unforced, like two exceptional musicians simply enjoying a great song together.

You Turn Me On (I’m A Radio) by Joni Mitchell Performed by Molly Tuttle & Lindsay Lou East Nashville – July 2016

The post The Coronation of Empress appeared first on Lionel Nation.

13 SEP 2026.

Yet the public refuses to notice.

The head of the artificial intelligence company calls the exponential rate of AI developments a “warning sign,” with risks for humanity, and says, “We need to slow down.” He talks with “Sunday Morning” about possible steps forward.

=====================

Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” in the Bing Lounge setting is a terrific reminder that beneath the quirky synth-pop reputation was a genuinely sophisticated musician and arranger. Stripped of the giant 1980s production, the song reveals its clever rhythmic structure, melodic hooks and sly humor. Dolby performs it with relaxed confidence, clearly enjoying the absurdity that made the original unforgettable. The arrangement feels warmer and more organic while preserving the song’s eccentric personality. It is nostalgia without becoming a museum piece, playful, intelligent and still remarkably fresh decades later.

October 12, 2011 – Thomas Dolby with “Blinded Me With Science” in the Bing Lounge, presented by Dick Hannah Dealerships. 101.9 KINK.FM. Portland, OR FB: http://www.facebook.com/binglounge Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thebinglounge Tumblr: http://binglounge.tumblr.com

The post There’s Nothing More Insidious Than the Reinvention of History appeared first on Lionel Nation.

11 SEP 2026.

The world has changed. Finally. Did you see this?

“NAZA,” the new documentary from “No Other Land” directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, received an ovation at its Venice premiere on Thursday.

==========================

Gin Blossoms brought a welcome blast of ’90s alternative rock to Good Morning America with “Follow You Down,” the enduring hit from their platinum-selling album Congratulations I’m Sorry. Three decades later, the song still carries the band’s unmistakable mix of jangling guitars, melodic hooks and bittersweet nostalgia. The performance was a reminder that some songs never leave the cultural bloodstream. Familiar, effortless and wonderfully unchanged, this one still sounds terrific.

The Grammy-nominated alternative rock band performs its hit song from the platinum-selling album “Congratulations I’m Sorry.”

The post The Lone Gunman Shite Is Upon Us Again and the Actions and Reactions Are Usual appeared first on Lionel Nation.

10 SEP 2026.

In mid-2023, within the “RLSlow” research project, we saw the first results that gave us confidence that we will be able to scale the training of reasoning models, unlocking the capability of pretrained models to form their own chains of thought. Szymon and I spent that night at the office, thinking not about the incredible benchmark numbers, products, or scientific results that this technology will deliver – but rather, trying to process the sobering fact we will actually see machines meaningfully smarter than ourselves in our lifetime, and we already see the shape of these systems; wondering how to alert people to the significance of this.

Three years later, reasoning language models are a rapidly growing part of the economy and starting to push the boundaries of science. They are able to operate computers and graphical interfaces, collaborate with people and each other, and carry out research projects. They are also transforming the landscape of computer security, and in that present clear new dangers.

A lot of new research happened in this period, and our understanding of these systems is again a little different than it was in 2023. Based on internal results, I have a strong expectation that this speed of progress could be sustained into recursive self-improvement. If AI development continues along its current path, the systems we’ll see in the next few years are likely to represent further capability jumps of equal or larger magnitude, and to increasingly drive their own development.

This is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence. OpenAI will continue to seek technical solutions to alignment and monitoring, to build defensive systems and unilaterally withhold further scaling as needed; however, I believe broader interventions are required.

At a high level, progress in machine intelligence is driven by increasing computational power. We at OpenAI deeply internalized this around 2017, after seeing consistent returns to scaling across multiple research projects1. As a result, we sought out access to much more compute than we had originally planned, and increasingly oriented our research around a small number of very scalable directions. We believed that was the only way for us to be at the frontier of AI research, and influence the impacts of AGI.

There are new algorithms that have been developed along the way, new feats of ingenuity from teams and individual researchers. I see them largely as discoveries along the path of scaling; the science of deep learning is still nascent, and meaningful algorithmic progress tends to correlate with access to compute. If you zoom out to a multiple-year horizon, AI is continuing to become more intelligent as it is scaled to larger computers.

And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century⁠(opens in a new window), we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.

AI is grown more than designed – it is, to first degree, the product of repeating a straightforward optimization step many times on a hard-to-imagine amount of compute. This results in an incredibly complex system that works through abstract concepts and can simulate facets of human behavior. We can discover various insights about little mechanisms that emerge within this system, in a process similar to neuroscience – and, similarly to neuroscience, its overall action evades a description we can fully understand.

The study of deep learning-based AI is largely an experimental science. We put a lot of effort⁠ into building principled algorithms and making testable predictions, but fundamentally, our large-scale training runs are experiments, and we are sometimes surprised by their results. Moreover, as the systems become more capable, the results become harder to interpret.

This is made more complicated by the current algorithms generally improving easy-to-measure capabilities faster than those hard to objectively quantify. We spend a lot of time trying to understand how capabilities generalize, and what to prioritize to advance the skills that are going to be most relevant in the next few years. For instance, we believe we could make the models better at specifically mathematics research with additional focus, but we do not prioritize this direction because of the urgency we feel about RSI and automated alignment research, as I will discuss later.

The intelligence produced by scaling deep learning is not directly comparable to human intelligence. To become very relevant in the real world – very useful or very dangerous – the AI does not need to match or exceed all human capabilities; it just needs to surpass enough of them. And as it continues to surpass humans on more and more axes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand exactly how capable it is.

Because machine intelligence comes from a fundamentally different process than human intelligence, we cannot assume it adheres to human principles by default, or generalizes from them in a human-like manner. The core problem in AI research is that of alignment – getting the AI to “try to do the right thing” by human standards.

For the purpose of organizing practical research directions, I find it useful to distinguish goal alignment and value alignment.

Goal alignment is broadly: “does the AI try to accomplish the goal set before it?”. This can include things like adherence to an instruction hierarchy⁠, or the ability to communicate and collaborate with people, to attempt to understand their objectives. This set of directions has been extremely practically relevant.

Value alignment is a more intrinsic property of the model. It is the ability to hold and generalize from a high-level set of principles; to act “reasonably” even when given unclear or conflicting objectives, or placed in unfamiliar or adversarial situations. An aligned AI should act with honesty and integrity, and love for humanity.

Of course, the boundary between value and goal alignment can be blurry, and truly caring about goals requires attempting to infer the intent⁠(opens in a new window) and values underlying them. However, generally when I talk about the long-term importance of alignment research, I am referring to value alignment.

The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization. As machines become smarter, they find themselves working on higher-level concepts, and placed in environments increasingly different from those they encountered in training. They can fail at generalizing from the values taught and reinforced in their training process to those new situations; and it can be hard for us to be sure how they will act. This is made even more difficult by the fact the overall ecosystem the AIs are used in is changing very quickly; for example, AIs trained today need to be robust to interacting with a variety of other AIs. Crucially, we need future AIs to continue to hold human values regardless of whether they believe they’re under human supervision.

There are two major classes of currently practically employed methods for alignment training.

Jakub Pachocki reflects on increasingly capable AI and the challenge of keeping it aligned. He calls for stronger safeguards and international coordination.

The Doobie Brothers turn “Listen to the Music” into a joyous finale at New York’s Beacon Theatre, revisiting the song as a full-band reprise rather than simple nostalgia. The harmonies remain effortless, the guitars warm and precise, and the rhythm section gives the performance real lift. What stands out is the sense of celebration: veteran musicians completely comfortable in their legacy, still sounding alive, communal and unmistakably themselves decades later.

Official live video of The Doobie Brothers performing “Listen To The Music (Reprise),” from their LIVE FROM THE BEACON THEATER show in November 2018. For the first time ever, we’re releasing “Live From The Beacon Theatre” digitally, featuring performances of both “Toulouse Street” and “The Captain and Me” in their entirety.

The post This Is the End. AGI Is Here. With NO ALIGNMENT. appeared first on Lionel Nation.

09 SEP 2026.

A completely fake Eminem song generated with artificial intelligence is going viral on YouTube, and thousands of listeners apparently believe it is genuine. The nearly 12-minute track, titled “I’m Back,” has accumulated more than 100,000 views and has appeared prominently in YouTube searches for Eminem, at times outranking legitimate songs by the rapper.

The imitation uses AI to reproduce Eminem’s voice, cadence and delivery. While the vocals contain noticeable artificial qualities, many commenters nevertheless praised the track as though Eminem himself recorded it. The video title does not clearly identify the song as AI-generated, and it reportedly lacks YouTube’s official AI disclosure label. A disclaimer buried in the description merely calls it a fan-made project.

The creator, Milana Salaeva, said there was no intention to deceive and described AI as simply one tool used alongside conventional music production. The same contact information reportedly appears on other accounts producing material resembling artists such as Meek Mill and 21 Savage.

The episode points to a much larger problem. AI-generated music is becoming increasingly convincing, increasingly abundant and increasingly capable of competing with real artists for attention, search placement, streams and potentially revenue. The line between imitation and authenticity is getting dangerously thin.

A track titled “I’m Back” by rapper Marshall “Eminem” Mathers offers YouTube users almost 12 minutes of painful AI mimicry.

=====================

Playing for Change turns “When the Levee Breaks” into a thunderous global collaboration, anchored by Led Zeppelin legend John Paul Jones. Musicians from around the world trade vocals, guitars, percussion and atmosphere while preserving the song’s swampy menace and enormous rhythmic weight. What makes it work is restraint: nobody tries to outshine the original. Instead, the arrangement expands it, giving the blues classic a communal, almost ceremonial power. It is both tribute and reinvention, performed with extraordinary musicianship and soul.

Watch our New Song Around The World “Acontecer”: https://youtu.be/fRY0Rojs5Nw Order our latest album Songs For Humanity now! https://shop.playingforchange.com/collections/songs-for-humanity “When The Levee Breaks” is a powerful, thought-provoking and emotionally-charged classic by Led Zeppelin, from their Led Zeppelin IV album.

The post If AI/AGI Is Permitted to Exist Unfettered What Will Be the Limitations Against Abuse? appeared first on Lionel Nation.

08 SEP 2026.

Australia is preparing legislation that could give users the right to turn off social-media algorithms that determine what appears in their feeds. The proposed “digital duty of care” law would require companies such as Meta to offer Australians a non-personalized alternative rather than automatically steering users toward content based on their behavior and interests. Communications Minister Anika Wells says many people may still prefer algorithmic recommendations, but the crucial point is that users should have the choice. (Currently) The proposal reflects growing concern that social-media algorithms can be addictive and may promote sensational, extreme or emotionally provocative material simply because it keeps users scrolling longer. Australia has already taken an unusually aggressive regulatory approach by banning social-media accounts for children under 16, although early data suggests many teenagers continue using the platforms despite that restriction. (Yahoo News New Zealand) The new measure would extend the argument beyond children: users should control their feeds rather than allowing Big Tech’s engagement machinery to control them.

===================

Larkin Poe gives Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” a gritty, blues-soaked makeover, replacing the original’s laid-back swagger with sharper guitars, richer harmonies and unmistakable Southern-rock muscle. Rebecca Lovell’s vocal carries confidence and grit while Megan Lovell’s slide guitar supplies the fire. They respect the song’s familiar groove without simply copying it, transforming a classic-rock staple into something tougher, earthier and distinctly their own.

As artists, we aspire to keep learning the songs that move and inspire us. We want you to share in the experience – this is one of the songs that has shaped us. Larkin Poe’s album of stripped-down cover songs, “Kindred Spirits” is out now!

The post Are You Ever of the Opinion That No One’s Actually in Charge of Anything? appeared first on Lionel Nation.

07 SEP 2026.

But you knew this. I hope.

As we learn to think more and more highly of the bots, we will learn to think less and less highly of our fellow humans.

===============

John Prine’s 2018 NPR Tiny Desk Concert captures everything that made him irreplaceable: wit, melancholy, understatement and astonishing songwriting. Backed by Jason Wilber, David Jacques and Kenneth Blevins, Prine performs “Caravan of Fools,” “Summer’s End,” “All the Best” and “Souvenirs.” His weathered voice gives the older material even greater emotional weight, while the newer songs prove his writing remained razor sharp. It is intimate, funny, sad and deeply human, with Prine effortlessly commanding the tiny room through storytelling alone.

March 12, 2018 | Bob Boilen — An American treasure came to the Tiny Desk and even premiered a new song. John Prine is a truly legendary songwriter. For more than 45 years the 71-year-old artist has written some of the most powerful lyrics in the American music canon, including “Sam Stone,” “Angel From Montgomery,” “Hello In There” and countless others.

The post How Are Conscientious Americans Supposed to Actually Know What’s Happening? appeared first on Lionel Nation.