Chart goes up https://metr.org/

Lovely Paul Ford essay on AI coding, with lots of memorable lines. Worth a read.

More on responsibly using LLMs for journalism ->

Stunning reporting from NYT: Meta plans to add facial recognition to its smart classes > Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-recognition-smart-glasses.html

New: Researchers found a clever way to reveal AI biases, like the states with the laziest people, or the cities with the best pizza. Look up your city here -> https://wapo.st/4bMoWqk with Geoffrey A. Fowler

New blog post: A case study on using Claude Code in data journalism -> kschaul.com/post/2026/02...

New: How the federal government is using AI https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/09/trump-administration-ai-push/

Amid the hundreds of colleagues we’ve lost today, I wanted to highlight the BRILLIANT data/graphics folks who any newsroom should be fighting to hire right now—threading here:

So many incredible journalists got laid off today. Heroes, mentors, friends. Just an absolutely devastating day. Starting a thread here with some of their incredible work, and how to follow and support them.

Sickening to believe this is how stuff works today www.washingtonpost.c...

For nearly a century, the @washingtonpost’s foreign correspondents have been on the ground for the world’s most pressing stories. Now, our desk is facing potential steep cuts. Washington needs us. The world needs us. If you read us and need us, please watch this video and share.

Please don't try clawdbot/moltbot/openclaw unless you know what you're doing. (Or at least let me know so I can hack you and write about it.)

New story: ICE's masks, guns and tactical gear are easy to see. But did you know about all the less visible tech they use? We explain it all here -> wapo.st/4bXee03 w Eva Dou and @arturgalocha.bsky.social

some of my favorite snippets from newly released court docs in the Anthropic copyright book case. eye-opening stuff on Project Panama, their plan to "destructively scan all the books in the world" in order to train AI

Musk’s participation in the bikini trend opened the floodgates. Grok went from making 300k images a week to 4.4 million. Read more from me, @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com and @stuartathompson.bsky.social: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

I usually keep my baseball thoughts to group texts, but $60 million aav for Kyle Tucker is just disgusting

1/ The @startribune.com has put its live blog outside the paywall www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi... but here’s how you can support them even if you don’t subscribe …

Opus 4.5 result on METR task duration is wild

Please do not use AI to “unmask“ people in images. It doesn’t work. It just makes up a plausible face. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/09/ai-unmask-shooting-ice-minneapolis/

New from me: Researchers tested AI on hundreds of real freelance jobs. The best system did 2.5% successfully. https://wapo.st/3N8QI68

New from me: Researchers tested AI on hundreds of real freelance jobs. The best system did 2.5% successfully. https://wapo.st/3N8QI68

our data story visualizing the rabbit hole people can fall into with chatGPT is on the cover of today’s @washingtonpost.com @kevinschaul.bsky.social

New: We got data behind a ChatGPT wrongful death lawsuit. The results are horrifying. More details here (🎁): https://wapo.st/4qxaGGe

New AI image technique by Qwen is the first I've seen that uses layers natively — like actual artists and designers do. Once layer-aware AI gets built into design software, look out. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15603

I partnered with @geoffreyfowler.bsky.social to test a bunch of AI editing tools, and something ~very interesting~ happened. We asked Gemini to generate a professional photo of an actor crying at the Oscars. It did — including a fake copyright notice from a real AP photographer.

🚀 We tested 5 leading AI image generators @washingtonpost.com to see which tool is truly the best at editing & creating visuals. From adding bangs to The Rock to removing people from photos — the results might surprise you 🧵👇

Trump has signed an order directing the federal government to sue states that pass AI laws that threaten America's "global AI dominance." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2... by @gerritd.bsky.social

How interesting that OpenAI did not have to train a new video model to start generating Disney characters ... :| https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

Caught up on some blogs post-Thanksgiving and gotta recommend these two gems: "You should write an agent" I endeavored to do this myself one week, and then somehow just 30 minutes later it was done) -> https://fly.io/blog/everyone-write-an-agent/

Made a chart showing how OpenAI's lead has evaporated, according to the Artificial Analysis intelligence index Full story -> 🎁 https://wapo.st/3Xy8Xnz

My Nieman Lab prediction for 2026: The AI bubble may pop but people’s use of AI for information won’t and it's better if we start taking this seriously.

Interesting study -> New research suggests AI chatbots can shift people’s political views more effectively than campaign ads on TV. https://wapo.st/49RSstP

On the one hand, ChatGPT is super popular. On the other hand, AI companies need to make SO MUCH revenue. Bubble or no bubble? More data here -> 🎁 https://wapo.st/3KfxpXE

So many nuggets in here, like “Mental health experts told his team, for example, that sleep deprivation was often linked to mania. Previously, models had been “naïve” about this, he said, and might congratulate someone who said they never needed to sleep.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/t...

On the one hand, ChatGPT is super popular. On the other hand, AI companies need to make SO MUCH revenue. Bubble or no bubble? More data here -> 🎁 https://wapo.st/3KfxpXE

New from me: Four reasons AI is — and is not — a bubble 🎁 https://wapo.st/3KfxpXE

We present Olmo 3, our next family of fully open, leading language models. This family of 7B and 32B models represents: 1. The best 32B base model. 2. The best 7B Western thinking & instruct models. 3. The first 32B (or larger) fully open reasoning model.

Google’s releasing an AI-powered code editor called Antigravity. Like a combination of Claude Code and an agentic web browser, but altogether in one GUI. https://antigravity.google/blog/introducing-google-antigravity

A scroll of your Facebook timeline will tell there's been a nuclear attack, Peyton Manning has come out of retirement and signed with the Packers, Epstein was found alive in Florida, an NFL player was suspended for supporting Trump, a whistleblower said the moon landing was fake. Nonstop unreality.

I’m starting a new series of interviews with all the leading open model labs around the world to show why people are doing this, how people train great models, and where the ecosystem is going.

Another glimpse into what people really use ChatGPT for, and it's ... really something https://wapo.st/3LzQUL2

Set up a git scraper for LMArena leaderboards. This csv has all the text ranks since May 2025, and will be updated as rankings change. https://github.com/kevinschaul/lmarena-leaderboard-history/blob/main/history.csv

Hell of a story right here www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Must-read story on Common Crawl — the scraped internet data behind many LLMs. They tell publishers they are making progress on takedown requests, but ... nope! Glad we have journalists with tech chops like @alexreisner.bsky.social who can test their claims www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

🗣️📈 Today, I'm happy to release a new tool empowering chatbots like AnthropicAI's Claude to create charts with Datawrapper, a leading newsroom tool for publishing data.

I keep a running log of how AI did on real tasks. Notes from the last few weeks: 🧵

So there were some AI-generated videos that purported to show Black women ranting about SNAP benefits, and... Fox News is reporting on this like these are real people. They're not! They're AI! This is truly insane. Total unreality. www.foxnews.com/media/snap-b...

New: Videos show ICE/CBP agents are scanning peoples' faces on the street to verify citizenship. ICE has tool to instantly look up unprecedented number of databases with just a photo “I’m an American citizen so leave me alone” “Alright, we just got to verify that” www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Lovely image editing evals with before/after sliders https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing