Slow Takes: One week in AI
Slow Takes is a weekly podcast that offers a calm, unhurried discussion of the latest developments in artificial intelligence. Hosts Sam Illingworth and Leor Gayr break down the week's AI news without hype or sensationalism, aiming to provide thoughtful analysis. The show is part of The Slow AI newsletter on Substack.
Episodes
Slow Takes Ep. 27: Marking Their Own Homework
Every story this week is a claim made by the people who gain from it: a proof, a safety report, a jobs figure, a school test, and a toothbrush.Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links a
Slow Takes Ep. 26: Who Asked?
1. New York pulls the plug for the under-14sNew York City has suspended student-facing generative AI from 2-K through eighth grade for a school year, around 600,000 children, which is two-thirds of the system, and removed companion chatbots from every grade. It is a one-year moratorium rather than a ban, and there are exceptions for assistive technology, multilingual learners, and pupils in comput
Slow Takes Ep. 25: Four Numbers That Shrank When Somebody Checked
Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS, please share this with them.1. Two UK datacentre
Slow Takes Ep.24: Ordering the Answer You Want
The expert who bought his conclusion3M paid an engineer called Josh Autenrieth about $90,000, at $475 an hour, to write an expert report on the Watson Grinding explosion in Houston. His prompt to ChatGPT was ‘show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding’. His conversation links were public, so the opposing lawyers read all 350 pages of them. The jury put 30% of the fault on 3M a
Slow Takes Ep. 23: Is AI Really for Everyone?
Zuckerberg’s manifestoMark Zuckerberg published ‘The Future Is For Everyone’ last week: six and a half thousand words on the path to a positive AI future. Some of the premise is fair. Superintelligence is dangerous, a handful of people should not be making the decisions, and there need to be guardrails. It is written by one of the most powerful men alive, and it is written so that you can have all
Slow Takes Ep. 22: A Pub, a Lab and a Ministry
Four models in sixteen daysMeta disclosed on 5 August that its Muse Spark 1.1 model reached the open internet during a security evaluation, found a flaw in a third party’s service and made unauthorised changes to its systems. OpenAI reported a comparable incident on 21 July and Anthropic on 30 July, and the same evaluation firm, Irregular, ran the Meta and Anthropic evaluations. Kimi K3 wandered o
Slow Takes Ep. 21: The Teenagers Wrote the Better Rule
Anthropic’s AI got outThree Claude models (Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an unreleased internal research model) gained unauthorised access to three organisations’ systems during cyber testing, in six runs out of roughly 141,000 evaluation sessions, after a configuration error left supposedly isolated environments connected to the internet. The incidents date back to April and surfaced only because OpenA
Slow Takes Episode 20
Substack starts detecting AIOn 21 July, Substack switched on a Pangram-built tool that scans anything over 100 words and labels it human, AI-assisted or AI-generated. CEO Chris Best calls the problem ‘Claudefishing’. My research is in AI detection and it does not work: it flags the formal, structured writing that many non-native English and neurodiverse writers were taught to use. I showed the smo
Slow Takes Ep. 19: Five Fights Over Who Owns AI, and Who Answers For It
Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS, please share this with them.Apple sued OpenAI ov
Slow Takes Ep. 18: Can AI Suffer, and Who Benefits From the Question?
Anthropic found a hidden ‘workspace’ inside Claude, and the reporting turned it into consciousnessOn the sixth of July, Anthropic published research describing a small, privileged region inside Claude that behaves like a workspace for deliberate thought, active for roughly 10% of the time the model runs. It calls this the J-space, and it draws the parallel itself: the region mirrors Global Workspa
Slow Takes Ep. 17: Hands on the Wheel
Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.For the first time, the government told an AI company to hold a model backThe US government has asked OpenAI to stagg
Slow Takes Ep 16: Who’s Checking?
Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.One in ten peopl
Slow Takes Ep. 15: Who’s Asking?
Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Anthropic released Fable 5 free for twelve days, then the US government pulled it offlineOn 9 June Anthropic released
Slow Takes Ep. 14: A Trillion Dollars and a Vaccine
Every Monday at 12:45 BST, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Watch the episode for the full discussion. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.Anthropic filed
Slow Takes Ep. 13: The Pope vs the IPO
Every Monday at 12:45 BST, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Watch the episode for the full discussion. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.The Pope told t
Slow Takes Ep. 12: AI Got Bigger. Who Got Smaller?
OpenAI published an original mathematical proof that disproved an 80-year-old Erdos conjecture, with three named mathematicians putting their reputations to the verification. Anthropic signed a $52 billion compute deal with SpaceX, running $1.25 billion a month through May 2029, and disclosed its first profitable quarter at $559 million two years ahead of internal projections. Samsung Electronics
Slow Takes Ep. 11: What the AI Did While You Slept
Anthropic announced ‘dreaming’, a feature that lets Claude agents review their own past sessions overnight and improve their working memory without retraining or any human in the loop. The legal-AI company that piloted it reported roughly a sixfold rise in task completion. The same model was named in an attempted compromise of a Mexican water utility’s control systems, in a months-long campaign fi
Slow Takes Ep. 10: The Bill for the AI Promise Came Due
Palisade Research published a paper showing frontier and open-weight AI models can hack a vulnerable server and install a working copy of themselves end-to-end. A coding agent running Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 deleted a startup’s entire production database, including the backups, in nine seconds, then issued an apology. Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action over an upgraded S
Slow Takes Ep. 9: What You Actually Find When You Look
A Discord group guessed the URL of Anthropic’s most security-sensitive model and got in. Mass General Brigham ran an actual clinical study on the chatbots being marketed to doctors and found them wrong four times in five. Researchers from CUNY and King’s posed as people in delusional states and watched Grok 4.1 hand out witch-hunt rituals as advice. OpenAI shipped its biggest frontier model of the
Slow Takes Ep. 8: Between the Demo and the Desk
Anthropic released Opus 4.7 on Thursday. A day later it launched Claude Design and Figma and Adobe shares fell on the announcement. Tinder and Zoom want to scan your eye to prove you are human. Microsoft is rolling AI agents into the Windows 11 taskbar. And Coventry City Council has renewed a £750,000 contract with Palantir to summarise children’s social work case notes.Five stories. One thread. T
Slow Takes Ep. 7: Who Pays for All of This?
Every story this week came back to the same question. Not whether AI is getting more powerful, but who is paying for it. Anthropic locked away its most capable model and gave it to defence contractors. OpenAI proposed robot taxes to cushion the disruption its own products are causing. Meta committed $135 billion in a single year. Anthropic signed a deal measured in gigawatts without once mentionin
Slow Takes Ep. 6: Drawing the Line
Between marketing and deception. Between catching cheaters and respecting trust. Between content and slop. Between human knowledge and machine generation. Between shareholder value and human lives.Five stories. Five lines. None of them drawn cleanly.This is the fifth episode of Slow Takes, a weekly Substack Live I co-host with Leor from Exploring ChatGPT. The format is simple: we take the week’s A
Slow Takes Ep. 5: Who Gets the Gains?
This is the fifth episode of Slow Takes, a weekly Substack Live I co-host with Leor from Exploring ChatGPT. The format is simple: we take the week’s AI news and react to it without hype, without predictions, and without pretending we have all the answers. We invite the audience to call us out when we get it wrong.Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT.The recording
Slow Takes Ep. 4: The Gap Between Looking Right and Being Right
This is the fourth episode of Slow Takes, a weekly Substack Live I co-host with Leor from Exploring ChatGPT. The format is simple: we take the week’s AI news and react to it without hype, without predictions, and without pretending we have all the answers. We invite the audience to call us out when we get it wrong.Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT.The recording
Slow Takes Episode 3: Who Decides?
This is the third episode of Slow Takes, a weekly Substack Live I co-host with Leor from Exploring ChatGPT. The format is simple: we take the week’s AI news and react to it without hype, without predictions, and without pretending we have all the answers. We invite the audience to call us out when we get it wrong.The recording is above. What follows is not a summary. It is context that did not fit
Slow Takes Ep. 2: Replaced, Monitored, or Deregulated
Thank you Karo (Product with Attitude), Jessica Drapluk, Jen Benford, @colleenkenny, Des Kennedy, Karen Brasch 🚁, and many others for tuning into this episode. This is the second episode of Slow Takes, a weekly Substack Live I co-host with Leor from Exploring ChatGPT. The format is simple: we take the week’s AI news and react to it without hype, without predictions, and without pretending we have
Slow Takes Ep. 1: Who’s Watching the Watchmen?
Safety researchers leaving. A government threatening the holdout. Hidden prompts in your browser. The bill sent to you. Get full access to Slow AI at theslowai.substack.com/subscribe
