The real AI battle isn't about who has the best model—it's about who controls your context. I just published a piece on why keeping these layers separate is the most important design decision of the AI era: techdirt.com/2025/06/16/why-centralized-ai…
Why Centralized AI Is Not Our Inevitable Future
www.techdirt.comJun 16, 2025 at 8:37 PM
Alex Komoroske on Twitter / X
The real AI battle isn't about who has the best model—it's about who controls your context. I just published a piece on why keeping these layers separate is the most important design decision of the AI era: https://t.co/6bljxg7KIt— Alex Komoroske (@komorama) June 16, 2025
A tale of two Agent Builders
What two competing solutions to the same design problem tell about the future of designing AI interfaces.
How the world's top AI models were revived
The personality clashes and industry confusion behind the 20-day saga.
My Thoughts on AI | Jack Conte
Hey creators! I’ve been thinking a lot about AI over the last year, but I’ve mostly been speaking about it in little short form clips and in
Why the AI Policy Debate Should Focus More on the Harness and Protocol Layers
A conversation with Raffi Krikorian, CTO of Mozilla and author of the newsletter Owners Not Renters.
The AI Model That Was Too Dangerous to Release: Meet Claude Mythos
Anthropic just built the most powerful AI in history. Then decided the world wasn’t ready for it. Here’s everything you need to know.
Adversarial Communication
“AI” turns every conversation into a fight, because fighting is what they are good at.
Ali Alkhatib: Defining AI
The main issue I have with a lot of work that tries to define AI is that the criteria they use to draw boundaries often turn out to be functionally useless for my needs; these definitions lead us to weird places, letting scholars fixate on strange, unworkable frameworks. Those pedantic fixations don’t really benefit the organizers, activists, regular people who are getting crushed by the systems they’re trying to work against. So I’m going to try to unpack how I think about AI; how I trace the boundaries of the term in a way that’s as useful as possible for me and my needs; and how I would encourage you to scope or define ideas that are important to your work.
Why opinion on AI is so divided
AI power users are pulling away from everyone else.
Good Taste the Only Real Moat Left
AI makes competent output cheap. That makes taste more valuable, but also more incomplete. The real edge comes from pairing judgment with context, stakes, and the willingness to build.
AI systems out-persuade expert humans
Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has remained unclear. Here, in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters. We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with £1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI's advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments. We found converging evidence that AI's advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages. In a final study, we show that AI's advantage extends to consequential real-world behavior: AI was nearly 3x more effective than professional canvassers from a UK fundraising firm at raising real-money donations to Save the Children. Together, these results establish that frontier AI systems out-persuade expert humans in conversation, with significant implications for political communication.
The Harnessing Players Map of AI
The question driving most AI market commentary in 2026 is still the wrong one.
New research: how well do AI models actually follow their constitutions? 205 tenets from Anthropic's 30K-word soul doc. Adversarial multi-turn scenarios against 7 models. Claude: 15% → 2% violation rate in two generations. Training works. But the remaining failures tell a more important story.
