Characters named Elena. Weather that mirrors emotion. Endings that land too cleanly. We scored 15 AI models on these tells. The better they write, the more detectable they get.

ran our benchmark suite against the major Chinese models this week. the cost-to-performance spread is surprisingly wide, and there's a consistent creative writing gap vs the frontier western models. full numbers in the article

A $0.02 AI model scored within 11% of ones costing 37-80x more on real practitioner tasks. We tested GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus, Grok 4.1 Fast, and Mistral Large on 28 prompts with 3 blind AI evaluators. The results don't match any leaderboard. #AI #LLM #benchmarks

HTTP 402 "Payment Required" sat unused in the spec for 30 years. Now Stripe, Visa, and Coinbase are fighting over it. But here's the thing: the protocol is open. The gatekeeper (Cloudflare) is not. Your agent's biggest problem won't be intelligence. It'll be authentication.

6,000 executives surveyed. 80% say AI has done nothing for productivity. Meanwhile their employees are using ChatGPT to write the survey responses.

What if AI agents could just look at your screen and use any app, no APIs or integrations needed? That's what Alibaba's Qwen 3.5 actually does. We wrote about why the timing makes this a bigger deal than the model itself.

open.substack.com/pub/progress... My latest piece on Gary Stevenson's economic message. Hope you enjoy.

The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. Our open letter calls for bold action to rebuild trust, shift entrenched perceptions, and deliver real change for ordinary Americans. open.substack.com/pub/progress... @aoc.bsky.social @bennet.senate.gov @jaimeharrison.bsky.social @kenmartin.bsky.social

How do we start to address climate change? Can we start mitigating strategies without convincing the deniers that climate change is real? This is an excellent data driven piece about Des Moines, IA. www.bleedingheartland.com/2024/12/27/d...

While I’m no fan of Vivek and disagree with him on almost everything, his 'mediocrity' argument has a sliver of truth, especially when you look at US education. US universities thrive, yet our schools lag—34th in Math, 16th in Science, 9th in Reading (PISA). To stay competitive, we must fix this.

According to the 2024 Empower Survey, Americans believe a net worth of $5.36M is the magic number for financial success. 58% think they'll reach it, including 71% of Gen Z & 70% of Millennials. Yet, only 3.7% of households actually hit $5M+. One thing we’re not short on? Financial optimism.

Since, we're all discussing H1B immigrants today, here's an interesting statistic on immigrant innovation. Immigrants account for 16% of US inventors, but nearly 25% of innovation output as gauged by the number of patents, patent citations, economic value of patents. www.nber.org/digest/20233...

10% of Gen Z men are problem gamblers. Young men are in a bad place right now. Its a scary situation. www.fdu.edu/news/fdu-pol...

The first post from my new FREE Substack dives into the devastating economic impact that could result from Trump's mass deportation plan. From disrupting America's food supply to raising costs for everyone. open.substack.com/pub/progress...

Over 65% of Greenlanders want independence from Denmark. Instead of Trump wanting Greenland for the US, why not support what Greenlanders actually want: their own sovereignty?

Without Section 230, platforms like Bluesky could face lawsuits for every comment or video they moderate—or don’t. Brendan Carr is one of the authors of Project 2025, and Trumps pick to lead the FCC. His push to gut these protections would reshape the internet into an even more chaotic free-for-all.

Kennedy should never be confirmed. I wouldn’t trust him to run a toaster. Now is the perfect time to send letters to your Senators telling them to oppose him:

The typical network primetime viewer now has a median age of 64.6 years old. The median age of of the three big cable news channels is 67 (CNN), 68 (FOX), and 71 (MSNBC). Not too long now until they go the way of the dodo. I say, good riddance.

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy. Let me explain.

Border stats: In 2024, 1.1% of those stopped crossing illegally had prior convictions—half for 'illegal entry.' Compare that to 8% of Americans with felony convictions. No matter how you feel about the border, when Trump says 'migrant criminals,' remember: the facts tell a different story.

Political polarization is wild: 🔹 Republicans share 21% more misinformation than Democrats 🔹 Most fake news comes from pro-Republican outlets 🔹 62% of Republicans think fake news is out to get them. Self-own season is in full swing. Sources on my website.