Braid

Two bets on AGI, an 80-year-old problem, and Anthropic in the black


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Google's I/O keynote is a day behind us, and the week it kicked off turned into a referendum on two very different bets on artificial general intelligence — plus a pile of counter-programming from everyone else. Today: OpenAI cracking an 80-year-old math problem with a general-purpose model, Anthropic's first profitable quarter and what Karpathy was actually hired to do, a 70-page paper on why frontier models still can't tell a fact from a labeled lie, Midjourney's hardware regret, ads arriving inside Google's AI answers, Meta's layoffs, Cohere's open-weights comeback, and a field guide to skilling up coding agents.

  • Two bets on the same finish line — Google's world-model road vs OpenAI's text-reasoning road, in the labs' own words.
  • OpenAI cracks an 80-year-old problem — the planar unit distance result from a general-purpose reasoning model.
  • Anthropic in the black, and Karpathy's bet — ~$559M operating profit and a hire aimed at recursive self-improvement.
  • Jagged intelligence, and the false story — the paper where models believe a story they were told a thousand times was fake.
  • Midjourney's hardware regret — the tooling tax of betting on the less-supported accelerator.
  • Ads come to AI Mode — the business model under the consumer bet.
  • Meta's eight thousand — the cost side, on the same clock as the wins.
  • Cohere comes back, Apache-licensed — Command A+, a mixture-of-experts model that fits on one or two GPUs.
  • Skilling up the agent — Marc Klingen's concrete lessons on teaching a coding agent to wire up your tool.
  • Who's training whom — the anxiety running underneath the week.
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BraidBy Lenar Kess · Damra Vol