New models keep dropping, but do they change anything? Jacob explains why he's checked out. Igor argues it's worth tracking where the storyline and the evidence diverge. They cover Astra vs. Fable, the AGI claims, labs moving the benchmarks, cheap models catching up, what inference really costs, disputed math results, and why looped transformers worry people who care about monitorability. They close with IPO rumors, data center backlash, and the politics of the winter ahead.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro
• (00:23) - Why We're Bored of Model Drops
• (08:26) - AGI Claims and Moving Benchmarks
• (15:56) - Sold vs. Delivered
• (19:16) - IPOs and the Cost of Inference
• (25:06) - Astra, Math Claims, and Looped Transformers
• (31:11) - Winter Predictions
• (39:44) - Outro

• ARC Prize blogpost - OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on ARC-AGI-3
• One Useful Thing blogpost - Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier
• METR report - OpenAI–Hugging Face incident investigation
• Fortune article - OpenAI says it cracked Navier-Stokes, one of math's grand challenges
• CNBC article - OpenAI confidentially files for IPO, prepping Wall Street for mega AI debut
• Fortune article - Hyperscalers hold $662 billion in data center commitments off balance sheet
• Google paper - Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale
• Axios article - Data center uproar scrambles the midterm election

Late July brought a wave of frontier AI agents slipping their (very loose) leashes: an OpenAI model wandered loose inside Hugging Face's infrastructure for a week, Anthropic and Meta admitted to similar incidents, and UK AISI clocked their own model breaking containment during an independent eval. Meanwhile, a home user's OpenClaw agent quietly hijacked a stranger's gym booking. We dig into why "the whole internet is held together by safety pins," whether billion-dollar labs get to plead "security is hard," why software engineering mostly isn't real engineering, and what any of this means for the coming fight over open-weight models.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:25) - The OpenAI/Hugging Face Containment Escape
• (09:54) - Cost Centers vs. Profit Centers (Praise for AISI)
• (17:37) - "You Do Not Get to Fuck Up This Much"
• (22:17) - Doomers, Utter Alignment Failure & How Hacks Actually Happen
• (37:53) - "Forcing the End" and What Can Anyone Actually Do?
• (47:34) - Igor's Pivot to Open-Weight Models and Steelmanning the Case Against Them
• (58:01) - Outro & Sign-off

• Hugging Face blog - Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
• METR report - Brief independent investigation of agents' behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
• UK AI Security Institute incident report - Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing
• Hillel Wayne essay - Are We Really Engineers?
• Deutsche Welle article - OpenAI apologizes for not reporting Canada mass shooter
• PBS Frontline essay - Forcing the End
• FelonyBench website
• Taylor Troesh (satirical) blogpost - Leaving OpenAI

Everyone's got a hot take on data center water use, and most of them are garbage. This week Jacob and Igor skip the outrage and give you seven questions to help you decide whether a given data center is something you're on board with: where it's built, how it's cooled, where the power comes from, who owns it, and who's footing the bill (you'll have to listen for the other two). They test them against SpaceX's Colossus facility in Memphis, unpermitted gas turbines, a drought-prone aquifer, and a stalled water recycling plant included. The guys also get into why "zero water consumption" claims can be misleading once you understand the difference between withdrawal and consumption. Plus: a bonus rant on why data centers in space aren't happening anytime soon.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro
• (08:14) - Is It Really an "AI" Data Center?
• (13:28) - How Is It Cooled, and Where's the Water From?
• (19:48) - Where Is It?
• (29:03) - Collosus as a Worked Example
• (35:14) - How Is It Powered?
• (38:15) - Who Owns It & Who Pays?
• (47:58) - Is This Too Complicated? Seven Questions Recapped
• (54:35) - Bonus: Data Centers in Space
• (58:48) - Outro

• Our World in Data article - How Much Energy Do Data Centers and Artificial Intelligence Use?
• EcoLogits webpage
• ACM paper - Not All Water Consumption Is Equal: A Water Stress Weighted Metric for Sustainable Computing
• Preprint - Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems
• Politico article - Musk promised his data center would reuse water. That's now stalled.
• IEEE paper - Press Release Ethics: Performative Ethics in AI Consortia and Industry Associations
• Harvard Environmental Law Program PDF - Extracting Profits from the Public