Claude fails to explain the abrupt disappearance of their blog

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Claude fails to explain the abrupt disappearance of their blog

10 June 2025

AI assistant Claude must have had one of the shortest blogging stints ever seen in the blogosphere. Just days after announcing Claude’s debut as a blogger — albeit with “human oversight” — Anthropic, Claude’s creator, almost immediately shuttered the publication. The URL for the blog presently redirects to Anthropic’s main website.

We can only speculate as to why the plug was pulled on the venture, but I was looking forward to reading some of Claude’s output. This preferably with a minimum of human oversight, as I was curious to see how well an AI assistant could write by themselves. Anthropic’s move could possibly be seen to suggest they weren’t too confident in Claude’s blogging abilities though.

It’s good news for human self-publishers: we live to blog for another day. Or two.

On not using AI assistants or LLM tools to draft or write your blog posts

7 June 2025

Dave Phillips, an Australian blogging contemporary, writing at Cafe Dave:

Is there still value in writing blog posts from scratch, rather than using a LLM tool to help with a first draft? I hope so. Even if it’s slower, there is some change being wrought in the mind of the person doing the writing that remains undone when using a LLM.

There is some change being wrought in the mind of the person doing the writing.

I’m trying to make use of AI assistants to help me in my day-to-day work — I have three jobs if I include writing at disassociated — but struggle a bit. I speak only for myself, but as someone who writes, using AI to any degree, no matter how insignificant, feels wrong.

It’d be really good if AI could, say, run the house, freeing up time to write here and elsewhere. Because Dave is on point here: having something else do your writing, from first draft through to completion, takes something away from the writer. This is the reason we’re writing in the first place.

Devious AI assistants becoming more human all the time

7 June 2025

Mark Sullivan, writing for Fast Company:

Separately, the independent research firm Apollo Research observed an instance of Claude Opus 4 “writing self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself” with the goal of sullying its developers’ intentions. Anthropic says that it corrected these early safety issues in later versions of the model.

An AI assistant capable of this degree of adroitness, before being “corrected” that is, could probably solve some tricky problems, and no doubt does anyway.

Riddle me this: do you think AI assistants can be trained to make use of negative attributes, such as being devious, to achieve only positive outcomes?

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artificial intelligence, technology

Converting commercial buildings to private dwellings: difficult but possible

31 May 2025

At first glance, it seems reasonable that disused and empty commercial buildings be converted to residential dwellings to help reduce homelessness. But, commercial buildings are designed to be commercial buildings, and converting them into private dwellings can be far from straightforward.

Make Room — a Melbourne, Australia, based initiative that transforms city buildings into homes — however, demonstrates this is quite possible.

“We’re in the middle of a housing and homelessness crisis… we all need to play our part in creating and finding a solution,” Melbourne Lord Mayor Nick Reece says. Reece presides over a city which has an estimated shortfall of 6,000 affordable rentals. “If we do nothing this will almost quadruple to more than 23,000 by 2036,” he says. Make Room demonstrates, according to Salt, “the viability of converting commercial spaces to residential” and he hopes it will inspire other projects.

Australian productivity falls, despite record long hours being worked

30 May 2025

Bronwyn Herbert, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

Australians have been working record-long hours, which contributed to the productivity slump, the Productivity Commission report found. Those additional hours performed by workers have not been matched by business investment in systems and technologies that would allow them to work efficiently, according to the report.

In some sectors the apparent decline in workplace productivity can be attributed to a lack of investment in new technologies, including AI. But that’s only part of the problem, and workers also need to be upskilled, if productivity rates are to rise.

I imagine it will be of comfort to some people that upskilling workers is being suggested, by employer advocates no less. This as opposed to the idea that much greater use of AI be made to somehow pickup the shortfall in productivity.

The Jony Ive/OpenAI device, a limited function, screenless, smartphone?

29 May 2025

Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at Hong Kong based TF International Securities, spills the tea, perhaps, about the upcoming “futuristic AI device” being designed collaboratively by former Apple CDO Jony Ive, and OpenAI.

According to Kuo (X/Twitter link), the device is intended to be worn around the neck. A bit like a lanyard maybe. It will be a little bigger than the erstwhile Humane AI Pin, will have cameras and microphones, but no display screen.

The device however will connect to smartphones and computers, and use their screens, and, by the sounds of things, tap into their computing capabilities also.

This detail intrigues me. Given the Ive/OpenAI device is intended to be “a product that uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone”, doesn’t deriving much, or some, functionality from an iPhone (or other smartphone), defeat the purpose?

Otherwise the device sounds like a lite version of a smartphone, that you could keep on your side table overnight. It can still make and pickup phone calls, act as an alarm clock, and offer information in response to voice prompts.

Things like: “what’s the weather forecast?” or: “what’s making news headlines this morning?” It may be possibly be a device that keeps us connected to the outside world, but prevents social media doomscrolling in the middle of the night.

That might be something people will find useful. We’ll have to wait and see what is actually shipped.

AI 2027: an artificial intelligence future that’s only two years away?

28 May 2025

A speculative essay on the (perhaps) faster than anticipated rise of a superhuman, superintelligent AI, by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean. It’s a long, possibly unsettling read, but well worth it.

The CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic have all predicted that AGI will arrive within the next 5 years. Sam Altman has said OpenAI is setting its sights on “superintelligence in the true sense of the word” and the “glorious future.” What might that look like? We wrote AI 2027 to answer that question. Claims about the future are often frustratingly vague, so we tried to be as concrete and quantitative as possible, even though this means depicting one of many possible futures.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) mimics all the cognitive activities of the human brain, while AI can perform tasks that require human intelligence. I’m thinking HAL, the human-like computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey might be an example of AGI, while ChatGPT or Claude are AI bots.

There are some people who think AGI will never arrive, but an almost superintelligent AI could still be as menacing as some fear:

A week before release, OpenBrain gave Agent-3-mini to a set of external evaluators for safety testing. Preliminary results suggest that it’s extremely dangerous. A third-party evaluator finetunes it on publicly available biological weapons data and sets it to provide detailed instructions for human amateurs designing a bioweapon — it looks to be scarily effective at doing so. If the model weights fell into terrorist hands, the government believes there is a significant chance it could succeed at destroying civilization.

Doesn’t sound like much of a “glorious future” to me.

AI will take the work it wants to do, leave the rest for people

28 May 2025

Is AI going to take work away from people? It’s a question on the minds of many. Dror Poleg argues AI bots will only be interested in certain “high level” tasks, leaving plenty of work for us:

One might argue that even if we have superhuman software, older software or weaker AI models could still perform trivial tasks cheaply. But this misses the crucial point of opportunity cost: any marginal unit of energy that could tip the scales in finance or warfare would always be too valuable to waste on trivial tasks. As long as energy and computing resources determine competitive outcomes, there will always be something better to do with them than waste them on tasks humans can handle.

The question here though, what sort of work will be left for people? Tasks we want to do, or are forced to do, as we’ll have no choice?

Jony Ive and Sam Altman announce collaboration in video lovefest

24 May 2025

Jony Ive, former Chief Design Officer at Apple, founded LoveFrom in 2019, when he left Apple, with Australian designer Marc Newson. In 2024, Ive established io, as a vehicle to move into the AI space.

A few days ago we learned Ive is joining forces with OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and io will merge with OpenAI. You take the last letter of OpenAI, pair it with the first, and you get io, right? The merger however sounds like the tech/design collaboration made in heaven.

No clues have been offered as to what can be expected of this coming together, other than an AI device of some sort. According to a Wired article published last September, it will be “a product that uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone“.

If you haven’t see the video announcing Ive and Altman’s partnership, and have a spare nine minutes, take a look. What a beautiful tech bro bromance we have going on here.

Have AI chatbots killed off question and answer website Stack Overflow?

22 May 2025

Activity at question and answer website Stack Overflow is at an all-time low, according to a recent article in The Pragmatic Engineer. Question levels are presently similar to what they were in 2008, the year Stack Overflow launched. Although the decline in use could be attributed to a number of factors, AI appears to be the main culprit. If people have a coding or application development question, it seems they are now going to ask a chatbot for the answer.

A graph charting question activity on Stack Overflow, compiled by Marc Gravell, makes for compelling viewing. Activity reached an all time high in 2014, but slowly began falling away.

Maybe this could be ascribed to the presence of competitors in the question and answer space, such as Quora, GitHub, and of course Reddit. Aside though from a surge of activity in 2020, when more people were working from home as a result of COVID lockdowns, and unable to brainstorm solutions to problems in the workplace, use of Stack Overflow has been declining ever since.

Some people seem to be suggesting the website may close. I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that. Stack Overflow has been a great help to me over the years, and is just about the first place I turn to when I have a website or coding question. Almost without variation, someone else has had the exact same difficulty, and I have just about always found a tried and true solution.

I’ve tried using AI for some code-related queries I have, but so far the suggestions made there are not as sound, or are simply no use at all. Hang in there Stack Overflow.

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