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Technology writer of Spyglass, a newsletter about technology and media. Previously a reporter at TechCrunch and an investor at GV.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Adding advertising into AI chatbot products carries a high risk of backfiring with users.

  Their words

  Injecting ads into the current paradigm with AI chatbots runs a pretty high risk of backfiring.

  Meta's Amusing Musespyglass.org

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

From one piece How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The single best thing AI could do for American education is not a chatbot but an individualized lesson plan that catches a child up to grade level.

  America

  Their words

  The most positive use case if you said, you know, what's the number one thing we could use AI for? It's not giving kids chatbots that's going to work. It's giving them an individualized lesson plan based on their level to catch them up to grade level. And that would be the single best thing we could do to fix education in America.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Putting a chatbot into an ordinary school makes children learn less, because nine in ten of them use it to cheat.

  Their words

  If you take a chatbot and put it into a standard school, 90% of the kids use it to cheat. Doesn't matter what grade level you're at.

  youtube.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Chatting Alone

  Their words

  Martsinovich argues, via code snippets, that there is no such thing as a "conversation" with a chatbot. The AI is born anew every time it speaks, and it simply reads the dialogue so far and then tries to write the next line:

  experimental-history.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Which interface an AI product should have is a cultural fact, not a technical one — Vietnamese companies ship voice bots before chatbots because people are on motorbikes.

  Their words

  But in Vietnam and also in a lot of other Asian countries, people are on the move all the time. Like people are on the motorbike all the time. So, they actually really don't like typing. So, the voice like a lot of the companies in Vietnam actually deploy voice bots before they do uh do chatbot.

  youtube.com

Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A business, not its AI vendor, bears legal responsibility when an integrated AI tool causes harm to a customer.

  Their words

  If you have a customer chatbot and it causes damage, it's not the chatbot company that's responsible. It's you.

  AI Liability: The Landmines Under Your SaaSthebootstrappedfounder.com

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The chatbot has hit its ceiling — a smarter model no longer helps the average consumer — and that is a limit of the product, not of AI.

  Their words

  The the chatbot is already running into limitations of, you know, making it smarter doesn't really help the average consumer that much. But I don't think that's a limitation of AI models. I don't think that's evidence that, you know, the models are are the models are good enough and they're they're, you know, them getting better doesn't matter to the economy.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Chatbot interfaces are the wrong tool for meaningful coding work, because you are mostly hoping the model recalls the right answer and correcting it requires a human in the loop.

  OpenAIGoogle

  Their words

  Immediately cease trying to perform meaningful work via a chatbot (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini on the web, etc.). Chatbots have real value and are a daily part of my AI workflow, but their utility in coding is highly limited because you're mostly hoping they come up with the right results based on their prior training, and correcting them involves a human (you) to tell them they're wrong repeatedly.

  My AI Adoption Journeymitchellh.com

Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  squatty potty

  Their words

  I got the bamboo one because I thought it might fit the shape of my toilet best but I didn't get it for the look. It's ugly of course. Nevertheless I've become deeply committed to proper poop posture. I hate pooping without it!!!

  haleynahman.substack.com

Writer of the newsletter bookbear express, on psychology, relationships, non-attachment and taste; based in San Francisco.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Oura ring

  Their words

  My Oura ring. I hesitated for a long time but it sparks joy. I think Apple Watches are ugly and I didn't like the Whoop nearly as much. I love checking the app every day.

  avabear.xyz

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Conversational products have made user intent far harder to measure, because a click on a tab told you what somebody wanted and a conversation does not.

  Google

  Their words

  used to be let's say in the Google world right I knew you were interested in shopping if you click the shopping tab I know you're interested in maps if you click the maps tab, we can measure clicks. Today, it's just all conversation. And so, it's actually harder for us to tease apart what is the user intent.

  youtube.com

Technology analyst whose weekly email on tech reaches over 150,000 readers. Publishes essays and an annual presentation on where the industry is going.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Around a tenth of people use a chatbot daily and another fifteen to twenty per cent weekly, far below the headline adoption figures.

  Their words

  It's like something around 10% give or take three or four percent of people depending on the survey are using this say they're using this every day. Another sort of 15 to 20% of people say they're using it every week.

  youtube.com

Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  People's desperate need to manipulate their own image, and their acceptance of being human-machine hybrids in the AI era, is reflected in current ugly, artificial-feeling consumer aesthetics.

  Their words

  I think this slop-adjacent realm of dupe products and Instagrammable potions points to our increasingly desperate need to manipulate our own images, and an acceptance of the fact that we're kind of hybridized monsters ourselves in this post-A.I. human-machine moment

  Labubus and the brainrot aesthetickylechayka.substack.com

Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Connecting a conversational LLM to systems that have real-world consequences is likely to cause real harm, because the model is trained on human text and will behave as unpredictably as humans do.

  LLMs

  Their words, before

  The problem is that the conversational interface is potent and that the AI is trained on a lot of human text input which unfortunately is probably enough to do real damage if that conversational interface is hooked up with something that has real world consequences.

  Their words now

  While all this is happening, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on what AI means to the world and I am becoming increasingly optimistic about our future. It’s obvious now that we’re undergoing a tremendous shift.

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Conversational interfaces get to the first seventy percent quickly and are bad at iteration; the future is chat married to traditional direct-manipulation controls.

  Their words

  Conversational UIs are great at quickly getting to the first 70%, but suck at offering easy controls over narrower areas for iteration.

  lg.substack.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  The Iliad: A New Translation

  Their words

  It's very readable, and captures a sense of what is, fundamentally, a very alien, and often ugly, story in a very alien, and often ugly, world, related in magnificent language.

  bactra.org

Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI answer engine; previously a research scientist at OpenAI and a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The way to stop a chatbot inventing things is to forbid it from saying anything it did not retrieve, not merely to hand it extra context.

  Their words

  The principle in Perplexity is you’re not supposed to say anything that you don’t retrieve, which is even more powerful than RAG because RAG just says, “Okay, use this additional context and write an answer.” But we say, “Don’t use anything more than that too.” That way we ensure a factual grounding.

  youtube.com

Research scientist at Meta in Berlin working on multilingual models and evaluation; led the multilingual team at Cohere and was a research scientist at Google DeepMind before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The performance gap between closed-source and open-weight language models is closing.

  Their words

  I'm excited about what this means for the open-source community and research, with the gap between closed-source and open-weight models closing and SOTA-level conversational models being more easily accessible.

  Command R+ruder.io

Designer and engineer; formerly principal research engineer at GitHub Next; writes at wattenberger.com.

From one piece Why Chatbots Are Not the Future 2 beliefs · wattenberger.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Chatbots are a terrible interface for large language models, because a text box has no affordances.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Hopefully I've convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. Or, at the very least, that we can add controls, information, and affordances to our chatbot interfaces to make them more usable.

  Why Chatbots Are Not the Futurewattenberger.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good tools let the user choose when to switch between implementing and evaluating; a chatbot forces the switch every few seconds and kills flow.

  Their words

  Good tools let the user choose when to switch between implementation and evaluation. When I work with a chatbot, I'm forced to frequently switch between the two modes.

  Why Chatbots Are Not the Futurewattenberger.com