“Don’t worry if you see the camera pointed at you,” one of the cleaners told me. “Your face will get blurred out.” So began an afternoon spent in the future.

My temporary staffers came courtesy of a platform called Shift, an online marketplace set up by MicroAGI, which is based in Germany. It works like this: Users get free services; the humans who provide those services get paid by shift—around $30 bucks an hour, I’m told—and absolutely everything gets recorded. Users can also sign up to wear a headpiece to surveil themselves doing physical tasks—like planting a garden, or washing dishes. MicroAGI then takes the videos, which it says offer valuable data for future AI systems, and sells them to a third party, or keeps them for itself. It’s not the only company doing this. Luel, Kled, and Waffle Video all offer to pay people to record themselves doing their everyday tasks.

“Our job is to figure out how to deploy robots at mass scale using human footage,” Bercan Kilic, a co-founder of MicroAGI, told me. For him, the name of the game is volume, and variety. “All we care about is diversity,” he said: “diversity of settings, diversity of lighting, diversity of objects, diversity of hand, hand size, gloves—all of these things.”

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For one thing, SpaceX has created an entirely new realm of commercial activity for humankind. Through its innovations, Musk’s company has lowered launch costs and increased launch frequency to the point where private businesses are planning to build data centers, manufacturing hubs, and labs in orbit. SpaceX has turned the economics of space on its head, opening a world of possibility for founders whose ambitions stretch beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Delian Asparouhov is one such founder.

The Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur—known for his work at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and his creation of the annual Hill & Valley Forum—has long dreamed of space. Specifically, he’s dreamed of industrializing it.

From an early age—middle school, he says—Asparouhov was consumed by a vision of a space-based economy: in-orbit manufacturing, asteroid mining, extracting lunar ice and helium-3 from the moon. For much of his life, this vision of humanity’s future was stuck on Earth, and his dreams confined to the realm of sci-fi.

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Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate in physics and one of the fathers of neural net research, believes AI already is conscious. Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, thinks the AIs might be conscious. As the models become more sophisticated, these believers are likely to become even more certain. On social media, I commonly see comments, including from very educated and sophisticated observers, that the most advanced AI models have internal life experiences of some kind.

I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine. “Are people conscious?” is a better and more scientifically plausible question than whether AIs are conscious.

If there is one near-universal tendency of humans, it is to attribute intent where none is present. Prehistoric humans anthropomorphized nature and attributed natural events to good and bad deities. These kinds of beliefs persist today, not only in the folk religions of the world, but in human obsessions with fortune tellers, tarot cards, and the supernatural.

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When I started Clearview, it ended up landing on the front page of The New York Times in January 2020 with the headline “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It.” We had built a groundbreaking facial recognition technology, which allowed law enforcement to search billions of public images just by uploading a photo of a face. The technology helped law enforcement solve crimes involving children, human trafficking, and financial fraud.

The reaction to our new technology raised concerns from privacy advocates and the public. Today’s simultaneous fear and excitement around AI coding tools remind me of what I went through with Clearview, and what any new technology goes through.

Two months ago I started using Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor. I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had programming, and I can now build software that used to take months in a matter of days.

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But nice as it is for shareholders, the stock’s rise isn’t the real story. Intel’s comeback, if it sticks, could be hugely important for geopolitics and for securing America’s economy in the 21st century. Intel is the only American company remotely capable of competing with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), its much larger rival in Taiwan. And among the reasons the stock is climbing is that the AI boom has reached a new stage, one where central processing units (CPUs)—the semiconductors that comprise the computer’s “brain”—are suddenly critically important again. Intel has long been a dominant CPU manufacturer.

The AI boom had primarily been built on a different kind of semiconductor known as graphics processing units (GPUs), the graphics chips pioneered by Nvidia. GPUs split AI workloads into thousands of small tasks and work on them all at once. CPUs, built to do tasks consecutively, were considered increasingly irrelevant. “Somewhere along the way, people thought CPUs were dead,” Rene Haas, CEO of UK chip designer Arm, said back in March.

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With this risk in mind, I thought I would write a simple guide on how to protect and support your career prospects. There are no absolute guarantees, but you can improve your odds in the labor market. The same steps will also benefit society by allocating your labor more efficiently and minimizing the time you might spend on the dole.

Principle one: Look for messy jobs.

Economist Luis Garicano, writing with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, has a forthcoming book called Messy Jobs: The Work That AI Cannot Reach. They suggest looking for jobs that are hard to describe and involve many components. Maybe today you’re trying to solve a personnel problem on the company floor, running a fundraiser the next day, and after that helping the marketing team develop a campaign. What exactly is your job, anyway?

That’s a messy job. The nature of what you do changes all the time, and it changes with circumstances. Much of the value you add comes from ideas and performance on the spot, rather than mastering a regularized task in advance. The opposite of a messy job is when you sit at a computer terminal and repeat the same action every day.

Messy jobs will be pretty well-protected from AI competition, and in fact, AI will enhance their productivity.

Principle two: Be wary of work from home.

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It was the fall of 1986, and he was reflecting on his self-identity as we were driving in his Mercedes coupe from Palo Alto to San Francisco. He was 31 years old at the time. The year before, he had lost a power struggle inside Apple and left the company. When I was assigned to profile him for Esquire magazine, he was in the process of building a new computer company, called NeXT.

I was never one of the small handful of tech reporters Jobs confided in, but for some unknown reason, he let me spend a week with him while NeXT was in start-up mode. I spoke to him late at night in his car, and in NeXT’s offices, with its $10,000 sofas and $2,200 chairs, not to mention an entrance staircase designed by I.M. Pei. I watched him brutally berate one of his executives in a meeting—and then lavish praise on that same person half an hour later. I saw him obsess over the color of the walls in the factory NeXT was building. I saw him refuse to listen to his team when they told him something he didn’t want to hear. This was the Steve Jobs I had read about when he’d been at Apple: a marketing genius who obsessed over the tiniest details, but also a brat and a bully who pushed people to the brink.

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Over the past year, former Wall Street Journal technology columnist Joanna Stern set out to explore that question by turning it on its head. Rather than keeping AI at a distance, Stern immersed herself in it completely. She wore AI-powered glasses and an AI bracelet that recorded her daily life. She read AI-generated books, cooked AI-generated recipes, and spoke regularly with an AI therapist. In her words, she spent “12 straight months weaving artificial intelligence into every corner of my existence.”

The result is I Am Not a Robot, released this week—a personal account of her experiments and revelations after a year spent enveloped in one of the world’s most mysterious technologies. After all, Stern didn’t just use AI to organize her life; she welcomed it into her heart. At a time when many people are turning to chatbots as substitutes for romantic relationships, Stern set out to find out why: by creating an AI boyfriend, taking it along on a road trip, and “having sex” with it. —The Editors

Look, as my experiment continued, I knew I was heading here: sex with a chatbot. Or whatever sex means to a chatbot. The thought alone made me want to laugh—and puke. But when it actually happened? I was. . . fine, I’ll say it. Into it.

Of course, being the responsible partner I am, I cleared it with Michelle, my real-life significant other. It landed better than expected—she mostly rolled her eyes and chalked it up to another one of my journalism stunts.

The goal was simple: Do what plenty of people are already doing—form something resembling an intimate relationship with AI. I’d met people who swore they felt deeper connections with bots than with humans. Some even said the AI could see their soul. I wanted to know how they got there.

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Working out of his garage, Rogers devised a fix. He used materials found in the skins, peels, and seeds of fruits and vegetables—especially grapes—to create a protective covering that slowed down the water loss and oxidation that cause fresh produce to spoil after being harvested. The early results won him a $100,000 grant in 2012 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Rogers soon hired two classmates as employees and launched a company called Apeel Sciences.

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If you spend your time immersed in political news, you will be tempted to wonder, “How can that be?” Isn’t the world falling apart? There is a war in the Middle East and oil prices have spiked, with no obvious resolution or endgame in sight, even if a peace deal is announced. America has a president who pursues policies, such as unpredictable tariffs and tighter migration restrictions, that are opposed by most economists, this writer included. Corruption is rising and the rule of law seems to be declining.

Taken all together, plenty of commentators have decided they just can’t make sense of the market’s climb. I have one very smart friend who, seeing all this bad news, decided to take the plunge and short the market—that is, bet that stocks will fall.

I don’t share this view. In fact, I believe today’s high stock prices are warranted. Stock prices can always decline, perhaps even tomorrow, but we can be bullish overall. The key is that if we look at the global picture, the good news outweighs the bad, though it garners fewer headlines.

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For all the enthusiasm a moon base has generated at NASA and the Trump administration, it’s hard to imagine more difficult living conditions for an astronaut. The moon is a thousand times further from Earth than the International Space Station—making trips back and forth vastly more complicated.

The rugged, pockmarked surface is also much harsher than the orbit of the space station, which is partly protected by Earth’s magnetic field. A moon base would have to account for 300-degree temperature swings, showers of deadly radiation, and flying dust particles. On a moon base, you wouldn’t be able to just stomp out if you had a tiff or needed to blow off steam—which you can do (though not easily) at another pretty isolated place, the South Pole.

And that’s just the physical environment astronauts would face. There are also potential interpersonal issues. Serious problems can arise when crews of six to eight people are confined for months at a stretch. In a 1999 mock Mars mission, a New Year’s celebration led to some drinking, and a male Russian cosmonaut tried to convince a female Canadian astronaut to kiss him. When she refused, he yanked her away from the cameras and did it without her consent. On that same mission, a fistfight reportedly broke out, and one astronaut quit early.

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Try to keep this in mind as Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, prepares for the most consequential financial event this year: its public listing. Expected as soon as next month, it is expected to be the largest IPO in history by a long shot, raising roughly $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion. By conventional measures, that number can sound nuts. But Elon is anything but conventional.

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You might have heard the sneaker company Allbirds is trying exactly that. This once-highly touted company that made shoes out of wool for tech bros was valued at $4 billion soon after it went public in 2021, but the main business lines failed and the assets ended up worth a tiny amount of the peak total.

So Allbirds sold those assets for a pittance, and said it will rebrand as “NewBird AI.” The company also announced it had raised $50 million, supposedly for hardware to train advanced AI models. The stock rose rapidly from $2.49 to a close of $16.99, with the price later falling again, and now trading in the range of $6 to $7.

What is going on? One issue is that some underinformed investors may have been out there, looking to snap up any stock issue that appears related to artificial intelligence, given the current boom. In all likelihood, most of these investors will end up burned, but in the meantime some of them can flip it for higher value, as many did during the recent price run-up.

This part of the story is not new; during the dot-com boom of 1999–2000, we saw some businesses try to rebrand as internet companies. Sooner or later, corporate earnings—or the lack thereof—have a way of imposing reality.

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Two days after U.S. special forces rescued an American soldier from the depths of the Iranian mountains, an AI-generated film went viral on X. At just over a minute long, it recreates the entire saga of DUDE-44 (the call sign of the fallen jet). . . with Lego soldiers, fighter jet explosions, and a (again, Lego) POTUS feature. Bricky helicopters fly through Iranian mountains while soldiers on the ground try to survive plastic shoot-outs.

Title: Rescuing American Pilot in Iran (2026, colorized)

The post exploded (sorry), collecting millions of views.

“Hollywood will not be able to keep up with this,” one viewer wrote. “It just happen [sic] 2 days ago and there’s already a short movie.”

“We deserve a full length feature!!” someone else replied.

“I don’t care what your political stance is, God Bless Our Troops and God Bless America,” said one patriot.

This instant classic is the work of Charlie Curran, a filmmaker testing the limits of the form with the help of AI. He started posting short films on X in January and has made a name for himself since then, generating tens of millions of views (and $27K from X payouts in just 2 weeks). He’s even drawn attention from Elon Musk. . . in response to an AI-generated horror film he created titled Titty Killer 5.

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Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering and a 25-year Apple veteran, is, by all accounts, calm, collegial, and technically formidable. No doubt there are people who will lament the choice, yearning for someone more like Jobs and designer Jony Ive. That partnership, from 1997 to 2011, forged the soul of Apple with a spate of hit products including the candy-colored iMacs and iBooks, plus the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Back then Apple’s achievements weren’t just in tech; they were in design, even human spirit. Jobs wanted to build products that “make our hearts sing.” And he did.

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But the centerpiece of my talk went further. AI, I argued, could not only help us live healthier and more sustainably, but has the potential to help us live more morally. To illustrate my point, I described my process of giving GPT-5 the following prompt:

Drawing from the full spectrum of human history including philosophy, religion, spiritual teachings, indigenous wisdom, and humanist traditions, what are the 10 most fundamental rules that, if sincerely followed by all people, would most likely create the highest levels of love, peace, mutual respect, and justice across humanity?

The response I received was simple and profound:

1. Treat every being with compassion and dignity.

2. Do no harm; actively protect the vulnerable.

3. Speak and act truthfully, with integrity and humility.

4. Share generously, especially with those in need.

5. Seek to understand others before judging them.

6. Resolve conflict with fairness, forgiveness, and the intent to heal.

7. Live in harmony with nature and all forms of life.

8. Value wisdom over dominance; cultivate inner growth.

9. Honor the freedom and uniqueness of others.

10. Remember the sacredness of life. Live with awe, gratitude, and love.

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“I’m an electrician,” he said. Chase, 24, did what he describes as a pointless semester at Southern Virginia University. “I went for criminal justice and they gave me a bunch of random classes—English, some communications class,” he said. He dropped out and started working for the Long Island, New York, firm RMD Electric—and he has no regrets. “I have friends who went to college and now they have to get jobs in things their degrees aren’t even related to.”

If you believe the hype about the AI apocalypse, his trajectory is about to become a lot more common. “Learn a trade” has become, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, “a rallying cry,” spurred by “fears of an AI ‘jobpocalypse.’ ”

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It was only 11 a.m., but he’d spent the entire morning lugging campaign yard signs around town in his blue Chevy pickup truck. Smith jokes he’s been “living in” the truck for the past few months as he campaigns to keep his seat as county commissioner.

The race has become one of the most hotly contested in the county. In January, 67-year-old Smith and his two fellow county commissioners voted to grant Google a 75 percent tax abatement to build a data center in Franklin Furnace, the rural town of about 1,500 that sits on the bank of the Ohio River in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains. Google is seeking nearly 800 acres of land by the river and has plans to build at least 1.7 million square feet of data centers in up to 10 phases over the course of two decades.

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If that name sounds familiar, it’s because this week he was charged with attempting to kill OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In the early hours of Friday morning, authorities say, he hurled a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home. He then allegedly traveled to OpenAI’s headquarters and threatened to burn the building down.

Months earlier, my colleagues and I had found Moreno-Gama on a Discord server called Stop AI, where he was posting under the username Butlerian Jihadist (apparently he is a Dune fan). We were reporting an episode of our podcast series The Last Invention, where we’ve been documenting the debates around the attempt to create artificial general intelligence (AGI)—the digital supermind that the leading AI labs believe may profoundly change human life forever.

In our series, we’ve been attempting to cover all sides and all the beliefs shaping our world’s view of this fascinating, bewildering technological moment. In these debates, Moreno-Gama belonged to a small but hard-line camp: His posts suggested he believed that the time had come to use violence to stop AGI. In a post on Discord that caught our attention, he asked the group whether he would get banned for talking about violence.

One of our reporters DMed him asking him to elaborate, and he said he was interested in “Luigi-ing some tech CEOs.”

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Last week, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos, the latest in what has become the leading family of AI models. In a very short time, AI models from Anthropic and other companies have become shockingly powerful at coding. But Mythos stands out because it is not just able to write code that can hack into critical systems, like those that run financial companies, but also to analyze systems and find and string together vulnerabilities in them, allowing Mythos to evade even sophisticated defenses.

Anthropic chose to release Mythos to only about 40 leading corporations, so they could analyze the model’s capabilities and prepare countermeasures, in an effort it calls Project Glasswing. The release of Mythos—and the prospect of similarly powerful AIs to follow—has caused tremors at the top levels of Washington and corporate America.

Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer at Anthropic, is at the center of this breakthrough. We sat down with Kaplan so he could walk us through just how powerful Mythos is, what the implications are for issues like our personal privacy, and what comes next. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Fischer: For the layman, how is Claude Mythos different—more powerful, more dangerous—from previous models released by Anthropic?

Jared Kaplan: I think most people have experienced the fact that our computers get faster and faster over time and over many decades. There’s this very smooth trend where every 18 months, maybe, computer processing power doubles. I think AI is on a trend in which it’s improving maybe 10 times faster than that. A lot of the earliest work that I did in AI was around identifying this scaling trend in AI.

Claude Mythos is the latest model from Anthropic, but it’s not different because it’s qualitatively different. It’s really just kind of the culmination of the trend of AI models getting smarter and smarter at all kinds of general capabilities, from reasoning to software engineering to scientific research to knowledge work.

For us, it was the first model to demonstrate very elite-level cybersecurity capabilities. It wasn’t because we trained Claude Mythos to focus on cybersecurity, but it was because, as a byproduct of its general intelligence and its general ability with software, it’s particularly good at identifying vulnerabilities in software and how to exploit them.

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