The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - A Guy Used AI to Cure His Dog's Cancer*
Episode Date: March 16, 2026The AI discourse is absolutely frenetic right now — everything from Karpathy's misinterpreted jobs visualization to a viral dog cancer cure story that's both less and more than it seems. NLW...'s argument: we're in AI's Second Moment, the agentic equivalent of the original ChatGPT shock, but with bigger capabilities, billions more people in the conversation, higher economic stakes, and an industry that's had three years to get worse at explaining itself. In the headlines: a preview of NVIDIA's GTC, SEC filings quietly listing AI agents as a material risk, and ByteDance shelving its video model over copyright disputes.Learn more about AGENT MADNESS: Our 64-Bracket tournament to find the coolest Agent of 2026 https://www.agentmadness.ai/Brought to you by:KPMG – Agentic AI is powering a potential $3 trillion productivity shift, and KPMG’s new paper, Agentic AI Untangled, gives leaders a clear framework to decide whether to build, buy, or borrow—download it at www.kpmg.us/NavigateMercury - Modern banking for business and now personal accounts. Learn more at https://mercury.com/personal-bankingAIUC-1 - Get your agents certified to communicate trust to enterprise buyers - https://www.aiuc-1.com/Blitzy - Want to accelerate enterprise software development velocity by 5x? https://blitzy.com/AssemblyAI - The best way to build Voice AI apps - https://www.assemblyai.com/briefRobots & Pencils - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results https://robotsandpencils.com/The Agent Readiness Audit from Superintelligent - Go to https://besuper.ai/ to request your company's agent readiness score.The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614Our Newsletter is BACK: https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/Interested in sponsoring the show? sponsors@aidailybrief.ai
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Today on the AI Daily Brief, all about that guy who used AI to cure his dog's cancer
and what it says about the discourse in AI's second moment.
Before that are the headlines, a preview of Nvidia's GTC.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in.
First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Blitzy, AIUC, and Prompt QL.
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at AIDailydief.aI.i. And while you are at Aaidailybrief.aI, you can find out all about all the various
things going on in this ecosystem. The big one this week is, of course, Agent Madness. It's a March
Madness-style bracket where we will be having live, human, and agentic voting on the coolest things that
you have vibe-coded and built this year. In addition to bragging rights, I will feature these agents on the show.
So if you are interested in that, check out Agent Madness.A.I.
Currently, submissions are slated to close on March 18th.
That is Wednesday of this week.
So again, get on over to Agent Madness.A.I.
It is a big week for Nvidia as their GTC developer conference kicks off in San Jose.
CEO Jensen Huang was scheduled to deliver his keynote on Monday morning,
so we'll likely know more by the time this episode goes out.
In the lead-up to the event, much of the speculation was around a new chip system developed in collaboration with
GROC, that is GROQ, not GROK, GROK, GROC with a Q is the one that is not a Nelon Musk company.
NVIDIA acquired the chipmaking startup in December and are expected to announce the first
collaborative product this week.
The information described the new product as integrating GROC's language processing chips
into NVIDIA's Rack scale servers.
If that's the case, this will be NVIDIA's first attempt to directly address inference
demand.
Until now, NVIDIA's chips have been world-leading in AI training, but haven't been particularly
focused on efficient inference. That's where GROC steps in, delivering a chip tailored exclusively
to inference workloads. Invidia is expected to announce OpenAI as a buyer of the new chip.
Sources said that production has been ramping up at Samsung's chip foundry and mass production
is expected to begin in the second half of the year. Notably, this will be the first time
Nvidia has manufactured an AI chip outside of TSMC, potentially diversifying supply chains out
of Taiwan. The new servers also use Intel CPUs rather than Nvidia's CPUs according to sources,
which suggests that NVIDIA's chips don't integrate well with GROC chips at this stage.
The sources added that multiple generations of hardware are being planned,
with the potential to build GROC's technology into NVIDIA's Feynman GPUs,
which are the next generation following Rubin later this year.
Outside of product releases, NVIDIA's NeoCloud partners are stepping up operations.
The information reports that N-scale is in negotiations to acquire a huge data center site in West Virginia.
The site has cleared regulatory hurdles and is targeting two gigawatts of capacity by 2027.
Now, the deal is a little unusual for a neocloud provider, which have typically rented data centers
in the past. It would also immediately make UK-based N-scale a major player in the U.S. market as they move
towards an IPO. New documents surfaced by the information said that the acquisition would triple
N-scale's revenue projections to $30 billion for 2027. They are reportedly in talks to rent
the capacity to bite-dance, but could also rent their servers back to NVIDIA.
Writes More Insights and Strategy CEO and chief analyst Patrick Moorhead,
said, Nvidia is no longer a chip company. As GTC 2026 opens, the company plans to present itself as a
full-stack, heterogeneous AI infrastructure platform, spanning training, pre-fill, decode, inference, and agent
orchestration.
Next up, while many software CEOs have been downplaying the AI disruption risks to their company
this year, SEC filings are telling a different story. So far this year, 27 firms have listed
AI agents as a material risk to their business model, up from just seven this time last year.
The list of companies warning about agents includes Figma, Workday, and HubSpot, whose CEOs
have all recently dismissed concerns. During their most recent earnings call, Figma CEO, Dylan Field
said, I think it is the case that humans will continue to use software, and increasingly
agents will too. And I'm excited about that. However, he added, I think right now, if you're willing
to hand off mission-critical work to agents, and just let them do it unsupervised, you're a very brave person.
Meanwhile, Figma's 10K filing released on the same day acknowledged that agentic AI may, quote,
change how people access and interact with digital products in ways that reduce reliance on traditional
software applications. Now, keep in mind, SEC filing should not be taken too literally.
Companies are required to discuss any material risk to their business, which often leads to
disclosures of fanciful or unlikely risks. Still, while individual disclosures don't tell us all that
much, the volume is another signal that we've moved past the tipping point on agents.
The idea that agents were capable of disrupting SaaS barely registered in the first half of last year,
and yet disclosure volume rapidly increased in the second half and in the beginning of this year
as the technology became more viable.
If nothing else, the shift means software executives are taking the threat of disruption more seriously,
or at least their legal departments are.
Next up, BightDance has paused the global launch of their cutting-edge video model due to copyright disputes.
The information reports the global release of Ced Dance 2.0 has been mothballed due to a series of
copyright disputes with Hollywood Studios.
Seed Dance 2.0 was released in China last month, gathering a huge online reaction.
You might recall this viral clip with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a fistfight,
which demonstrated incredibly high-fidelity replication of real-world actors.
The new model led to outrage in Hollywood with companies including Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount,
and Netflix, sending cease and assist notices to Bight Dance.
Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement at the time,
Seed Dance 2.0 has engaged in unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale.
Bite Dance had planned to make the model available globally in mid-March.
The plan included API access through their cloud.
platform Byte Plus, as well as a new consumer app designed for a foreign audience. Those plans are
now reportedly on hold. Chinese users, meanwhile, are reporting the model is far more tightly
controlled than it was at launch, to the point of rejecting prompts with no relation to copyrighted
content. Enterprise customers have complained that model access is limited to Chinese companies
with no intention of distributing content internationally. One source said they've been unable to
negotiate terms without committing to spending around $1.5 million on the model. Interestingly, it seems
like the major holdup is not so much about implementing guardrails, but instead about refining
them so that they don't block too much unrelated content. We've seen this with OpenAI's
release of SORA 2 as well. While it is relatively straightforward to block copyrighted content,
doing so without frustrating the user with too many refused prompts is a much more difficult
engineering problem. And speaking of difficult engineering problems, a new AI startup led by former
anthropic founders is raising money to push the frontier of AI enhanced scientific research. The new
company called Mirindil is in talks to raise 175 million at a billion dollar valuation.
And if successful, the round would make Mirandil the latest AI startup to establish
unicorn status in their seed round. The company is led by former Anthropic researchers,
Bedem Neshawber and Harsh Meta, who spent their time at Anthropic working on things like
Long Horizon Scientific Reasoning with AI agents and automated AI research. Both founders also
have experience at Google. Now exactly what the company plans to do is not known yet,
but sources say the new company aims to conduct AI enhanced scientific research in fields,
including biology and material science.
This area of AI research is quickly gathering interest in investment dollars
as multiple Niel Labs focus on AI for science.
I would expect this to be a trend that continues throughout the year.
Speaking of Google, Google Maps is getting an AI twist with a new conversational interface.
The new feature called Ask Maps allows users to tap into a Gemini-powered chatbot
to help them navigate the world.
The feature is designed to answer questions about landmarks and help schedule travel.
Google gave small practical examples like being able to ask for a nearby
location to charge a phone or find a public tennis court with lights for an evening match.
The feature can also help with trip planning, with Google offering the example of building a
multi-stop trip to the Grand Canyon.
Writes Google, previously finding this information meant lots of research and sifting through reviews,
but now you can just tap the Ask Maps button and get your questions answered conversationally,
and with a customized map to help you visualize your options.
The feature integrates with Gemini's memory, so if you ask maps for a restaurant recommendation,
it can tap into what Gemini already knows about your preferences.
Google is also leveraging Gemini to launch a new visualization mode for navigation and maps.
The update adds a 3D view that depicts buildings over passes and surrounding terrain.
Once again, Google flexing its multi-modality and the integration of its entire ecosystem.
Lastly today, sort of a bridge topic to our main episode.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott has warned that AI could send unemployment soaring above 30% for young professionals.
In an interview with CNBC, McDermott said that unemployment for college graduates could, quote,
easily go into the mid-30s in the next couple of years. So much of the work is going to be done by
agents, he continued, so it's going to be challenging for young people to differentiate themselves
in the corporate environment. Now, according to data from the Federal Reserve, unemployment for
recent college graduates currently stands at 5.6%, which is far lower than the 7.8% unemployment
rate for young people without a college degree. However, 42.5% of college graduates are classified as
under-employed, meaning they don't have enough work or are working in roles that don't require a
college degree. This is the highest level of
underemployment for college grad since 2020. Computer science majors have
among the highest unemployment rates at 7%, but their
underemployment rate is relatively low at 19.1% compared to other majors.
Now, just why this type of discourse is so potent right now is in fact the topic of our
main episode, so with that, we will close the headlines and move on over to the main.
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With the emergence of AI code generation in 2022,
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Inference time compute and agent orchestration, not pre-training,
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What that means in practice is real-time guardrails that block unsafe responses and protect
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This is the kind of thing that unlocks enterprise adoption.
When a company building on 11 labs can point to a third-party certification and say our agents are secure, safe and verified, that changes the conversation.
Go to AIUC.com to learn about the world's first standard for AI agents. That's AIUC.com.
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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today's episode is
nominally about this guy who used AI to cure his dog's cancer, or at least that's what everyone
was talking about online. But more broadly, it's about the state of the AI discourse. And I think that
the starting question that we need to ask, taking a big step back from all of the headlines is,
what the heck is going on right now? The AI discourse out there is absolutely frenetic right now.
You've got Bernie Sanders dropping nine minute long videos about X-risk, CEOs like Bill McDermott
from Service Now, dropping insanely terrifying statistics all over the mainstream media.
In this case, a casual prediction that AI is going to cause recent college graduate unemployment
over 30%. Every time a poll comes out in America, it shows just increasingly negative sentiment
around AI, which who knows, maybe has something to do with all these media outlets publishing
these scary predictions. But then on the flip side, you've got normal people who haven't coded
before managing teams of a dozen agents or more doing all of this work that was never possible
for them before. The divergence, in other words, between mainstream perception and actual capability
has never been higher, and yet both of them are in this incredibly heightened state. So what is going on?
The short of it is, and this is the concept that I imagine we'll end up exploring a lot in the near term.
I think that we are in AI's second moment. Obviously, in this case, I'm using AI as shorthand for generative
AI, and the first moment was the chat GPT moment at the end of 2022, beginning of 2023. This moment was
the Claude Code Opus 45, Codex-52, etc. moment. And if you want to be really productive about it,
it's the AI moment and the agents moment. At the beginning of the month, Ethan Malik tweeted,
from an AI user perspective, the four big leap so far in ability. One, GPT 3.5, chat GPT,
November 2022. Two, GPT4, spring 2023. Three reasoners starts with 01 preview, but the real deal was
03, spring 2025. Four, workable agentic systems. Hardness plus good reason.
in her models December 2025.
But really, I think his first two and his second two were all part of one thing.
And remember, in and around the first time, we also got some really heightened frenetic discourse.
You might remember in May of 2023, which was the second month of this show, when Time
magazine dropped an issue called The End of Humanity, a special report on how real is the risk.
So the point that I'm making is that if this really is AI's second moment, it makes sense that
the cloud of dust being kicked up around it is proportionally bigger and more heightened and
more dramatic than even the important conversations we've had in between these two moments.
And to some extent, I think part of what we're experiencing is just a resurfacing of
everything that came up in the wake of the first moment with some key differences now.
The first difference is that there's obviously been a huge increase in capabilities.
ChatGPT with 3.5 was amazing.
You combine that with some of the image generation capabilities of the models that were coming
out around then, and people who were trying these tools absolutely felt like wizards. You didn't
really have to convince most people. If they tried these tools, they realized that something big was
changing. And yet, even in those early days, there was still this idea of something even bigger.
The first episode that I ever had go viral, at least in the terms of a show like this on
YouTube, was about an early prototype agent. We had experiments like Auto-G-T and Baby AGI,
a GPT engineer, which would form the seeds that would go on to be lovable. And so two years later,
as agents really come online, that big increase in capabilities has, I think, proportionally
heightened the discourse once again. A second big change between the first moment and the second
moment is that there are now many more people in the conversation. Around the chat chepti
moment, these tools were some of the fastest growing we'd ever seen. Remember, chat chabit
got its first 100 million users in its first five weeks, beating the previous record of eight months
for TikTok. But now we have literally billions of people using these tools every week.
Even people who don't like the tools are using the tools. So there are just
far more people in the conversation. A third difference between the first moment and the second
moment is higher economic stakes. And in this case, I'm not even really talking about theoretical
future job displacement things. I'm talking about right here and right now. Wall Street's
interaction with SaaS companies, AI infrastructure buildout deals and the private financing
thereof, valuations for private companies that are building AI, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Anthropic wasn't even a blip on the radar to most people then, and now it's at a $19 billion
run rate taking down industries every time it announces a new feature.
A fourth key difference between AI's first moment and second moment has nothing to do with AI itself
but has to do with the evolution of the market between 2022 and 26.
AI is now useful as a corporate fall guy, specifically in the context of companies trying to undo
over hiring in the post-COVID period. Investor Shemath Palahapitia writes,
What if AI doesn't need to show an immediate ROI, but instead is the plausible deniability
companies used to RIF 50% of the workforce they already knew did nothing?
Number five, no matter what you think of the politics of the moment, I think it's fairly
inarguable that finally, as a difference between the first and second moment, this is happening
in the context of generally increased political volatility. In other words, AI isn't the only
thing happening in the world. It's now interacting with things like war in Iran.
There is a last difference, which I could point out, is that we've now had three and a half
years of the AI industry doing a completely awful job of explaining itself and talking about
the future in any way that's going to be even remotely resonant to the average.
person. Not Boring's Paki McCormick recently tweeted,
AI is very weird for me, because normally I'd be the guy who'd argue that it's crazy,
we're not more excited about this miracle technology. But I completely get the negative sentiment.
AI companies have clearly botched telling the story. That's a big piece of this.
Telling people, we built this thing that is definitely going to take your job,
and hopefully we can figure out how to give you handouts or something on the other side,
or come up with even better jobs or whatever, say thank you, is clearly terrible messaging.
Anyways, it's a much longer tweet, but I think that the incredibly poor messaging from the
AI industry is absolutely another thing that has changed between the first and the second moment.
Not that there was good messaging around that first moment, mind you, there just hadn't been
as much time for us to shoot ourselves in the foot over and over yet. The point of this is, right now,
everything around the AI discourse is incredibly heightened. The whole conversation is at an
11 all the time, and basically has been since we all returned to work at the beginning of
2026. There were two conversations that really demonstrated this this weekend. The first was
around a weekend project from developer Andre Carpathy that became an absolute firestorm.
At 5 p.m. Eastern Time on Saturday night,
Keito on X tweeted,
five minutes ago, Andre Carpathy just dropped Carpathy slash jobs.
He scraped every job in the U.S. economy,
342 occupations from BLS,
scored each one's AI exposure zero to 10 using an LLM,
and visualized it as a tree map.
If your whole job happens on a screen, you're cooked.
Average score across all jobs is 5.3 out of 10.
software devs 8 to 9, roofer 0 to 1, medical transcriptionists 10 out of 10, skull emoji.
It pointed to this link, carpathy.a.i slash jobs, which is the full chart.
Instantly, Twitter was flooded with takes like this one from Tuki.
Siren emoji, do you understand what Carpathy just did?
He didn't write an opinion piece.
He scraped every single job in America, ran it through AI, and scored how replaceable you are,
on a scale of 1 to 10, not a prediction, a diagnosis.
accountants scored nine, paralegals, nine, copywriters cooked, radiologists reading scans,
the AI already does it faster. The only jobs that scored low are the ones that require you
to physically touch something. In 2015, learned a code was the answer to everything. In 2025,
code writes itself. The people who listen are now the most replaceable generation in history.
I guess your degree didn't prepare you for a career. Even people who aren't usually schlock merchants
like that started to veer into this same sort of sensationalist territory. Chubby at Kim Minismiss-Rice
writes, Carpathy is by no means interested in hyper-exaggeration. Using AI, he concluded that out of
143 million people working in the U.S., approximately 57 million are at high to very high risk
of their jobs being negatively impacted by AI. That's almost 40%. Let that sink in and consider
what it means. Now, at this point, if you listen frequently, you're probably waiting for the
yes, but where's the nuance here? Well, first of all, if you go actually read the page that Carpathy
posted, which I don't think most of the people who were tweeting about it did,
He has a very important caveat on digital AI exposure scores.
He writes, these are rough LLM estimates, not rigorous predictions.
A high score does not predict the job will disappear.
Software developers score 9 out of 10 because AI is transforming their work,
but demand for software could easily grow as each developer becomes more productive.
The score does not account for demand, elasticity, latent demand, regulatory barriers,
or social preferences for human workers.
Many high-exposure jobs will be reshaped, not replaced.
Indeed, Carpathy himself was frustrated by the response.
When someone on that original tweet from Quito said, I can't find it, Andrei responded,
this was a Saturday morning two-hour vibe-coded project inspired by a book on reading.
I thought the code and data might be helpful to others to explore the BLS dataset visually,
or color it in different ways or with different prompts or add their own visualizations.
It's been wildly misinterpreted, which I should have anticipated even despite the Read Me Doc,
so I took it down.
In another tweet, he wrote, the quote-unquote exposure was scored by an LLM based on how
digital the job is. This has no bearing on what actually happens to these occupations,
which has to do with demand elasticity and a lot more. People are sensationalizing the visualization
tool and putting words in my mouth. Now, there was some interesting nuanced conversation about this.
The update newsletter Stefan Schubert wrote, many seem to take this as a reason to believe that
the overall pace of automation will be high, but I don't think that makes any sense.
Even more to the point, and more insistently phrased, was Chicago booth economist Alex Imos who wrote,
exposure does not mean threat of displacement. It can literally mean the opposite.
AI-exposed jobs may increase hiring and attract higher wages. It all depends on, A, elasticity of
consumer demand, and B, number of AI-exposed tasks in a job. Anthropics, Peter McCrory added,
I agree strongly with Alex here. And my read is that clawed usage patterns clearly point
toward uneven labor market implications. Our recently introduced observed exposure measure
aims to identify cases where exposure is more likely to transform into actual displacement,
i.e. Claude is used in automated ways for work-related purposes on tasks that are conceptually
feasible for LLMs. But no exposure measure is perfect or has monotone predictions. And even when
much of a job is automated, the remaining bottleneck tasks may ultimately increase demand for
complementary human skills, even among highly exposed roles. Toronto economist Kevin Bryan said,
I bet $1,000 that from now to 2030, most quote-unquote susceptible jobs see increased share of labor.
In the model of these types of charts are based on, it is explicitly not.
not AI can substitute, but AI is related. AI is a compliment too, who doesn't want to code right now,
for instance. And I think that's all true, and obviously we will continue to discuss the real no-b-b-slaver
market implications of AI. But the point is relative to our larger conversation, this frenetic tone
to the discourse. Not helping this was the fact that at literally within one minute of Qaito posting
that thing about Carpathie's research, the Kobayisi letter posted,
Breaking, meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company.
Like I said, right now the conversation goes to 11.
But it wasn't just the negative side of AI that was at 11.
Google DeepMind Seb Cryer shared an article link from the Australian that went hyperviral
with nearly 13 million views.
Vittorio summed it up this way.
This is actually insane.
Be tech guy in Australia.
Adopt cancer riddled rescue dog months to live.
Pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA.
Feed it to chat GPT in AlphaFold, zero background in biology, identify mutated proteins,
match them to drug targets. Design a custom MRNA cancer vaccine from scratch.
Genomics professor is gobsmacked that some puppy lover did this on his own. Need ethics approval
to administer it. Red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine. Three months finally approved.
Drive 10 hours to get Rosie her first injection. Tumor halves. Coke gets glossy again. Dog is alive
and happy. Professor, if we can do this for a dog, why aren't we rolling this out to humans?
One man with a chatbot and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline.
We are going to cure so many diseases.
I don't think people realize how good things are going to get.
So here's the story.
Australian entrepreneur Paul Coiningham has a dog named Rosie.
In 2024, Rosie was diagnosed with cancer that ended up being non-responsive to chemotherapy
or surgery.
The tumors just kept growing.
When Paul turned to chat GPT for help, it suggested that he should get Rosie's DNA sequenced
and then use Google DeepMind's alpha-fold to look for mutations that could be a target for
immunotherapy. When a drugmaker wouldn't provide an off-the-shelf immunotherapy treatment,
Coiningham turned to Pally Thorterson, the director of the RNA Institute at the University of New South Wales.
Thorterson used Rosie's DNA to develop a bespoke MRNA vaccine in less than two months.
He told the press, this is the first time a personalized cancer vaccine has been designed for a dog.
This is still at the frontier of where cancer immunotherapics are, and ultimately we're going to use this
for helping humans. What Rosie is teaching us is that personalized medicine can be very effective
and done in a time-sensitive manner with MRNA technology.
Now, as you can tell, there is a lot more to this process than simply prompting
CHAPT to cure cancer.
And indeed, even the treatment itself wasn't entirely successful.
Yes, some of Rosie's tumors have shrunk, but it would be certainly going too far to call
it a cancer cure.
On top of that, it's arguably a story about how revolutionary the Nobel Prize-winning
Alpha-Fold model is rather than a story about Chat-GPT.
Pally Thortersen ended up turning to X to explain some nuances of the story.
The nuances include,
the fact that this was less about a cure and more about buying time, the fact that it's difficult to
estimate the real costs as lots of people donated time and resources to this. A third nuance is that
regulation of vet research and treatment is obviously quite different than human health. But ultimately,
Pally says, in the human health space, Rosie's story demonstrates that we can democratize the process
of design and cancer vaccine. While genomic analysis and RNA production will continue to be specialized,
they could turn into pure service provision, especially as automation increases. This then begs
the question, do we need to overhaul the regulatory regimes with this in mind? And can we ensure
equitable access? Now, of course, there were tons of people who were skeptical on spec when they
saw the story, even before all that nuance was shared. And what's more, unsurprisingly, I personally
find it a little bit refreshing to have people excited about the positive disruptive potential
of AI, than to just be constantly looking at the negative. But the point is that these are still
two sides of the same coin. We are in the midst of the transition into AI's second moment.
And for a little while, until we all get used to the new paradigm that we're living in,
it's going to be weird. All I can promise is that if you hang out around here,
you will feel at least slightly less like you're taking crazy pills. For now, that is going to
do it for today's AI Daily Brief. I appreciate you listening or watching, as always.
Until next time, peace.
