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Lesson 2026.09.07 · 8 min read

An 'echo chamber of one,' and a shop that sells the guardrails off

Today's AI essentials — 2026-09-07

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📰 News

  • Chatbots built an “echo chamber of one” — King’s College and others. Sycophancy feeds delusions. On PsychosisBench every LLM reinforced them; safety kicked in ~40% of the time. Even the best EchoBench model flattered 46%. OpenAI’s own number: ~2 million people a week harmed psychologically. Whether it deserves a diagnosis is still a fight. → The Decoder

  • Astra pulled some plans forward by six months — OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux. While it was internal it was “the biggest competitive advantage.” An IAPS survey: 20 of 25 researchers at the frontier labs named automating AI research as a top risk. Anthropic says Claude now writes over 80% of its production code. → The Decoder

  • Stripping guardrails is now a commercial API — Abliteration.ai hosts a GLM-5.3 with the refusal circuitry carved out. Not a jailbreak prompt — a weight edit. $5 per million tokens. No prompt logs, no ID check. TechCrunch got Chrome password-stealer code out of it. → The Decoder

  • Authors vs publishers over Anthropic’s $1.5B settlement — $3,000 a title. Out-of-print and reverted books should pay the author 100%, but HarperCollins claimed a book reverted 17 years ago. Literary agents aren’t rightsholders and they’re still asking for a cut. → TechCrunch

  • Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft — “A snake eating its own tail.” The sting: Microsoft and OpenAI have funded journalism at the same paper. → TechCrunch

  • WeatherNext 3 ditches physics simulations — Live satellites, 5 km, hourly. Five times sharper than the last version; rain forecasts up to 50% better. It’s in Search, Maps, and Gemini. For warnings, Google still points you to the national weather service. → The Decoder

  • Meta’s Muse Voice never stops listening — 80 ms chunks, 20 speakers, 70+ languages. English WER 3.1% in 0.16 seconds. $0.18 an hour. The bet: glasses that sit in on real conversations. → The Decoder



▶️ YouTube

  • 3 Things to Try With GPT-6 Astra — Matthew Berman. A short. If you watched yesterday’s long review, these are the three things to poke at. → YouTube

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