Kevin Schaul

Trump defies GOP critics by signing controversial order threatening states over AI laws Trump’s latest executive order attempts to punish states that regulate artificial intelligence technology, a policy that has triggered division in the GOP.

Trump has signed an order directing the federal government to sue states that pass AI laws that threaten America's "global AI dominance." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2... by @gerritd.bsky.social

How interesting that OpenAI did not have to train a new video model to start generating Disney characters ... :| https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

"Parsing PDFs with Antigravity" Another win for using AI to do journalism tasks *in a reproducible way* aka by writing code you can check and rerun -> https://mattwaite.github.io/posts/2025-11-24-parsing-pdfs-with-antigravity/

Caught up on some blogs post-Thanksgiving and gotta recommend these two gems:

"You should write an agent" I endeavored to do this myself one week, and then somehow just 30 minutes later it was done) -> https://fly.io/blog/everyone-write-an-agent/

OpenAI no longer dominates the AI race

Made a chart showing how OpenAI's lead has evaporated, according to the Artificial Analysis intelligence index

Full story -> 🎁 https://wapo.st/3Xy8Xnz

My Nieman Lab prediction for 2026: The AI bubble may pop but people’s use of AI for information won’t and it's better if we start taking this seriously.

I got to the end of your prediction and thought I was looking in the mirror

Interesting study -> New research suggests AI chatbots can shift people’s political views more effectively than campaign ads on TV. https://wapo.st/49RSstP

Chart: Weekly active users of ChatGPT

Chart: Capital expenditures of major tech companies

On the one hand, ChatGPT is super popular. On the other hand, AI companies need to make SO MUCH revenue.

Bubble or no bubble? More data here -> 🎁 https://wapo.st/3KfxpXE

What OpenAI Did When ChatGPT Users Lost Touch With Reality

So many nuggets in here, like “Mental health experts told his team, for example, that sleep deprivation was often linked to mania. Previously, models had been “naïve” about this, he said, and might congratulate someone who said they never needed to sleep.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/t...

Chart: Weekly active users of ChatGPT

Chart: Capital expenditures of major tech companies

On the one hand, ChatGPT is super popular. On the other hand, AI companies need to make SO MUCH revenue.

Bubble or no bubble? More data here -> 🎁 https://wapo.st/3KfxpXE

New from me: Four reasons AI is — and is not — a bubble

🎁 https://wapo.st/3KfxpXE

We present Olmo 3, our next family of fully open, leading language models.
This family of 7B and 32B models represents:

1. The best 32B base model.
2. The best 7B Western thinking & instruct models.
3. The first 32B (or larger) fully open reasoning model.

Unfortunately I ran out of credits halfway through my first task :(

Screenshot of Agent Manager panel

Screenshot showing an in-progress task

They’re really leaning into the idea that coders are gonna become AI managers. Rather than managing all your coding agents manually, there's an inbox with ongoing tasks.

Google’s releasing an AI-powered code editor called Antigravity. Like a combination of Claude Code and an agentic web browser, but altogether in one GUI. https://antigravity.google/blog/introducing-google-antigravity

A scroll of your Facebook timeline will tell there's been a nuclear attack, Peyton Manning has come out of retirement and signed with the Packers, Epstein was found alive in Florida, an NFL player was suspended for supporting Trump, a whistleblower said the moon landing was fake. Nonstop unreality.

I’m starting a new series of interviews with all the leading open model labs around the world to show why people are doing this, how people train great models, and where the ecosystem is going.

I feel very tired now after another long day at work so wanted to pop in ...

Another glimpse into what people really use ChatGPT for, and it's ... really something

https://wapo.st/3LzQUL2

Set up a git scraper for LMArena leaderboards. This csv has all the text ranks since May 2025, and will be updated as rankings change. https://github.com/kevinschaul/lmarena-leaderboard-history/blob/main/history.csv

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, and it internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day, company documents show.

Hell of a story right here www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Crawl’s attorney wrote: “I confirm that Common Crawl has initiated work to remove your members’ content from the data archive. Presently, approximately 50% of this content has been removed.” I spoke with other publishers who’d received similar messages from Common Crawl. One was told, after multiple follow-up emails, that removal was 50 percent, 70 percent, and then 80 percent complete.

By writing code to browse the petabytes of data, I was able to see that large quantities of articles from the Times, the DRA, and these other publishers are still present in Common Crawl’s archives. Furthermore, the files are stored in a system that logs the modification times of every file. The foundation adds a new “crawl” to its archive every few weeks, each containing 1 billion to 4 billion webpages, and it has been publishing these regular installments since 2013. None of the content files in Common Crawl’s archives appears to have been modified since 2016, suggesting that no content has been removed in at least nine years.

Yet the nonprofit appears to be concealing this from visitors to its website, where a search function, the only nontechnical tool for seeing what’s in Common Crawl’s archives, returns misleading results for certain domains. A search for nytimes.com in any crawl from 2013 through 2022 shows a “no captures” result, when in fact there are articles from NYTimes.com in most of these crawls. I also discovered more than 1,000 other domains that produce this incorrect “no captures” result for at least several of the crawls, and most of these domains belong to publishers, including the BBC, Reuters, The New Yorker, Wired, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, and, yes, The Atlantic.

Must-read story on Common Crawl — the scraped internet data behind many LLMs. They tell publishers they are making progress on takedown requests, but ... nope!

Glad we have journalists with tech chops like @alexreisner.bsky.social who can test their claims

www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

🗣️📈 Today, I'm happy to release a new tool empowering chatbots like AnthropicAI's Claude to create charts with Datawrapper, a leading newsroom tool for publishing data.

GitHub - kevinschaul/datawrapper-mcp-server: A model context protocol server for interacting with the Datawrapper API A model context protocol server for interacting with the Datawrapper API - kevinschaul/datawrapper-mcp-server

Nice! Just wondering, any benefits to using the python lib instead of the raw API? We've been using this for a while over at wapo. github.com/kevinschaul/...

Even after using this stuff for years, I rarely know whether something is going to work until I try it. Just me?

Tried to find some cheap ram in Atlas browser. Did a bunch of impressive looking clicking and then made up fake prices. Nice.✖️ https://kschaul.com/link/2025-10-21_just_tried_out_atlas/

Generated renderings of my dining room with different wallpapers while at the store. I find Image-to-image editing quite useful for stuff like this ✔️

It looks unavailable to me

Asked ChatGPT to check an Amazon link daily and let me know when the item was available for purchase. Every morning I got a message that the item was available. It wasn't. Pretty annoying that stuff like that still doesn't work.✖️

Look up a new paper on a small ai model that did well on arc agi. It came out a week or two ago

Asked ChatGPT to find a recent paper about a small AI model that did well on arc agi. Was pleasantly surprised that it found it immediately ✔️ https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04871

I keep a running log of how AI did on real tasks. Notes from the last few weeks: 🧵