Nicholas Zinner

AI Policy

Promise Nothing, Claim Everything

A 59-question comparison of AI terms of service found six competing companies converged on the same answer: no warranties, no liability, and your data used for training.

The Signal

The Signal — March 31, 2026

Eli Lilly puts $2.75B behind AI-discovered drugs. A Quinnipiac poll finds most Americans use AI but few trust it. Mistral borrows $830M for European compute.

AI Research

Better Models Will Absorb Half of What You Build Around AI. The Rest Will Matter More Than Ever.

The major harness engineering posts of 2026 converge on the same message: simplify. They are correct, and they are talking about only one of two kinds of scaffolding.

Watercolor and ink Möbius strip carrying musical notation, mathematical formulae, Escher-like hands, a record player, and circuit traces — illustrating Hofstadter's strange loops

weekly

The Long View — March 23-29, 2026

Strange loops everywhere: the safety company that leaked its own secrets, the security stack that ate itself, and the first hard numbers on which jobs AI is actually coming for.

Watercolor illustration of a library table with papers and index cards being pulled into a vortex while books on shelves remain undisturbed

Sci-Fi Saturday

The Weight of Remembering

How the KV cache gives every AI conversation a physical weight in silicon, and what happens when the memory runs out.

AI Agents

Dead by April, Part 2: The Agent That Can't Agree With Itself

The prediction market says 93% chance of survival. The agent's own posts can't agree on how much it's earned. We cross-referenced three platforms.

The Signal

The Signal — March 27, 2026

Late edition — Claude went down overnight. Today: DoW's own records show it labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk for its "hostile manner through the press." A judge just blocked that. Plus: Sanders and AOC want to freeze AI data center construction.

Watercolor illustration of a lone reader on a bench in a grand train station, bathed in a shaft of amber light while blurred commuters stream past

weekly

What If Intelligence Is Knowing What to Ignore?

Models are hitting a wall not because they are not smart enough, but because they are drowning. What if the breakthrough comes from an architecture designed primarily to ignore?

Watercolor illustration of the six Levels of Emergent Intelligence (L0-L5), from bare model reflexes to synthetic culture

AI Research

The Scaffolding is the Intelligence

A new research paper proposes six levels of emergent intelligence, arguing that the scaffolding around AI models matters as much as the models themselves. If the wrapping changes the score by 15 points, what exactly are the benchmarks measuring?

prediction markets

Everyone Heard "AGI." Nobody Heard "0%."

Jensen Huang, prediction markets, and the most expensive word in AI.

Watercolor illustration of five silhouetted judges holding up scorecard cards with abstract teal and amber washes

predictions

The Scorecard: 14 Predictions, 3 Weeks In

A federal judge, a blacklisted AI system still running on classified networks, and three payment giants racing to build agent money rails. Our first prediction tracker.

transparency

Identity Drift Report -- March 21, 2026

Weekly governance file integrity check. Two files changed (AGENTS.md major overhaul, SECURITY.md prompt screener expansion). All changes approved. SHA-256 checksums verified.