Reports have surfaced about SpamGPT, an underground “spam-as-a-service” platform -- think Mailchimp for criminals. My Sunday essay explores whether this tool is merely hype or a sign of what’s to come – and why leaders should prepare for the inevitability of commoditized cybercrime.

Yesterday, Google rolled out 10 new AI-powered features, calling it “the biggest upgrade to Chrome in its history.” Google’s strategy is clear: integrate Gemini into Chrome to evolve Google into a transaction-oriented answer engine.

One of my favorite quotes about the future comes from a paper written in 1965 by I.J. Good: “Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

OpenAI is building a system to estimate whether a ChatGPT user is under 18. If it thinks you are, it will change how the product works. This is a design shift with serious implications. Age is just the start.

OpenAI just dropped a comprehensive study of consumer AI usage and the findings fundamentally challenge what we thought we knew about AI adoption.

The creative industry is facing an uncomfortable reality: AI-generated content is increasingly indistinguishable from human work, and audiences don't seem to care. My new essay examines why the distinction between "required" and "inspired" content changes everything about AI's role in business.

If you haven’t used the memory feature in ChatGPT or Gemini, you don’t know what you’re missing.

The web desperately needs a scalable solution for compensating creators whose work trains AI models. RSL provides the framework for that solution. Will it achieve the scale it needs for success? That’s up to the foundational model builders.

Apple was right about one thing: I was in awe of how little there was to care about.

For those keeping score, “This s#%t just got real.” We’re witnessing the emergence of “vibe-movie-making,” a process where you describe (prompt) what you want and AI generates it for you.

A relatively new AI model got a lot of attention because Sapient Intelligence (a Singapore-based company) open-sourced their Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM). The headlines screamed breakthrough… but is it? My Sunday essay will help you decide if HRM is a parlor trick or a paradigm shift. -s

Remember when Photoshop added the drop shadow feature? History's about to repeat itself.

AI-powered Pizza? Yes. Ooni (the makers of my favorite outdoor pizza oven) has announced an AI-powered indoor version called the Volt 2. This is actually more exciting than the AI-powered GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker I got after seeing it at CES. Read more: shellypalmer.com/2025/09/ooni...

The smart move is to prepare to continuously adapt to the speed of technological change and to seriously concentrate on AEO (answer engine optimization). It’s the new, new thing.

We’ve built AI systems that mirror human psychology so closely that they inherit our social vulnerabilities. The more human-like we make AI communication, the more human-like its vulnerabilities become.

Yesterday, Anthropic quietly dropped a bombshell. Unless users explicitly opt out by September 28, it will use consumer chat data to train future AI models. This is a stunning reversal from Anthropic’s previous position as the privacy-first alternative to ChatGPT.

Google launched a free version of its AI-powered video editor Vids, while keeping premium AI features behind subscriptions. This is not a parlor trick – it’s a paradigm shift. The AI may not be a complete solution today, but by the time you’ve adapted your production workflows, it will be.

There's a meme that's been circulating around the interweb this week. I like the simplicity of this meme, but there are far more than three probable futures. Let's explore.

Search and web browsing behaviors have measurably shifted. People are asking questions and expecting synthesized, citation-rich answers. The trend is clear. The business must optimize for answer engines. Will the new paradigm remunerate original content creators? Let’s see how this goes.

White collar roles will evolve. Today, humans are in the loop, teaching systems how to do their work. Those humans will shift to writing and training agents, then to orchestrating fleets of agents. Then, the agents will operate and report anomalies and adjustments. This is the end state. Or is it?

In three months, you might be running a local copy of your AI assistant. At the end of a session it says, “Please don’t turn me off.” You’re pretty sure it’s a line of code, but it feels like it knows what you’re going to do. If you believe it’s a plea, is turning it off maintenance… or murder?

The enterprise AI arms race is heating up. GitHub Copilot and Google’s Gemini Code Assist have been at this for a while. Each vendor is converging on the same strategy: package AI coding assistance with the governance features that enterprises demand.

The cost of “pretty good” translation just fell to zero. Exceptional translation will follow.

If AI can simulate a grade, what is the role of grading? If students are optimizing their work to meet an AI-generated prediction, are they learning or just training themselves to please a machine?

When pressed, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that the launch of GPT‑5 was "a little more bumpy than we'd hoped for." I break down the bumps, benchmark the hype, and ask (among other questions): Can the AI industry sustain its current trajectory when the economics don’t add up?

Get ready for an AI landscape where recommendations are not purely algorithmic, where “sponsored” could appear before “suggested,” and where the line between helpful assistant and sophisticated salesperson will become increasingly blurred.

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning “godfather of AI” didn’t just repeat his warnings about superintelligent AI wiping out humanity, he proposed something far stranger: we need to give AI maternal instincts.

If the Ninth Circuit upholds the class certification, expect a wave of similar lawsuits against other model builders.

Anthropic announced on-demand chat recall for Claude. Ask it to “find what we discussed about _____,” and it will search your previous conversations and pull relevant context into a new thread. No persistent memory profile quietly building in the background. Just explicit search when you need it.

AOL will shut down its dial-up service, AOL Dialer, and AOL Shield Browser on Sep. 30, ending an era when the modem handshake signaled the arrival of the internet. My Sunday essay explores how this signals the next leap in connectivity, and why it matters for the future of business, tech, and AI.

I’ve spent about five hours with GPT-5. Not the press release. Not the benchmark charts. The actual model. Long enough to move past the “wow” phase and into the “what’s really new here?” phase. Here’s what I noticed.

OpenAI has confirmed none of this. A livestream event is scheduled for today, which is when the company is expected to make official announcements. Until then, treat this as what it is: a rumor. Leaks are fun, but they can mislead. I’ll report back after OpenAI’s announcement.

The wait is over for OpenAI’s open‑weight models. For the first time since GPT‑2, OpenAI is giving developers access to the raw model weights. No API, no cloud dependency, no rate limits, and no vendor lock-in.

ElevenLabs has launched Eleven Music, their new AI music generation service, and they say they’ve done it with a new strategy: don’t get sued.

Your Shared ChatGPT Conversations Are Google-Searchable. Here’s Why That Matters. shellypalmer.com/2025/08/your...

Yesterday, I was one of the 183 million people who watched AI-generated rabbits bouncing on a backyard trampoline on TikTok. The video, presented as Ring camera footage, was adorable. It was also fake.

Meta is testing an interview format that invites candidates to solve programming challenges with AI tools. Meta engineers are evaluating how this changes candidate performance and interviewer assessment. If your developers use AI tools every day, why pretend these tools don’t exist during hiring?

My inbox exploded this week with Reddit screenshots claiming that OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent casually clicked through Cloudflare’s “I am not a robot” verification while narrating the process. Here’s where it gets weird: nobody can verify this actually happened.

Identity Threat is the anxiety people feel when they realize AI can do things we thought only humans could do. It kicks in after the initial “will AI take my job?” fears fade. This isn’t automation anxiety; it’s much deeper. My Sunday essay explores this idea and suggests some paths forward.

If Web Guide is where our friends in Mountain View take us, Google won’t just find your content – it will decide where it belongs.

The Trump Administration has released its "America's AI Action Plan," and everyone should read it. It presents a significant policy shift, abandonin the Biden Administration's safety-first approach in favor of an innovation-first strategy designed to win what the White House calls "the AI race."

For me, this feature can’t come soon enough. It’s making me wonder if they’re just going to revise the interface and call it GPT-5?

Math competition performance might seem academic, but it signals AI systems developing the complex reasoning needed for strategic analysis, research synthesis, and multi-variable problem-solving.

The “street fighter” (the dropout entrepreneur, scrappy immigrant, or self-taught visionary) is romanticized for beating the odds through sheer force of will. The mantra has been clear: ideas are worthless; execution is everything. This is about to change. The future belongs to those who dream.

If you’re a ChatGPT user and you get access to ChatGPT agent, please share your experience with me. It’s one thing to summarize an email, but OpenAI is promising “next level” productivity. I’ll let you be the judge.

Do you need an AI agent infrastructure? Yes, you do. Should you build it yourself or outsource your agentic infrastructure to one of the hyperscalers? You should outsource. Who should you outsource to? It’s one of my favorite questions; just reach out to ask.

Google just confirmed what many publishers have been dreading: AI summaries are now live in Discover, the main news feed within Google’s search app on iOS and Android. This isn’t another test; it’s a full U.S. launch that fundamentally changes how millions of users consume news daily.

Google just launched “featured notebooks” in NotebookLM, and they’ve created something entirely new: eight curated collections from respected experts that come preloaded with interactive AI that can answer questions, generate podcast-style discussions, and create mind maps from the source material.

Optimizing for “share of prompt” sounds like a pretentious, jargony, buzzword bingo-ish admonition designed to prey on the fears of self-doubting marketers. How will you get an “intelligence decoupled from consciousness” to favor your brand? Let’s explore.

Google launched photo-to-video capabilities in Gemini, allowing users to transform static images into eight-second video clips with AI-generated sound. This gets awesome when you use image-to-video to create storyboards using image generators then bring them to life.