Show notes
There was way too much going on this week to not split, so here we are. This first half contains all the usual first-half items, with a focus on projections of jobs and economic impacts and also timelines to the world being transformed with the associated risks of everyone dying. Quite a lot of Number Go Up, including Number Go Up A Lot Really Fast. Among the thing that this does not cover, that were important this week, we have the release of Claude Sonnet 4.6 (which is a big step over 4.5 at least for coding, but is clearly still behind Opus), Gemini DeepThink V2 (so I could have time to review the safety info), release of the inevitable Grok 4.20 (it's not what you think), as well as much rhetoric on several fronts and some new papers. Coverage of Claude Code and Cowork, OpenAI's Codex and other things AI agents continues to be a distinct series, which I’ll continue when I have an open slot. Most important was the unfortunate dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic. The Pentagon's official position is they want sign-off from Anthropic and other AI companies on ‘all legal uses’ [...] ---Outline:(02:26) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility(02:49) Language Models Dont Offer Mundane Utility(06:11) Terms of Service(06:54) On Your Marks(07:50) Choose Your Fighter(09:19) Fun With Media Generation(12:29) Lyria(14:13) Superb Owl(14:54) A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer(15:03) Deepfaketown And Botpocalypse Soon(17:49) You Drive Me Crazy(18:04) Open Weight Models Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This(21:19) They Took Our Jobs(26:53) They Kept Our Agents(27:42) The First Thing We Let AI Do(37:47) Legally Claude(40:24) Predictions Are Hard, Especially About The Future, But Not Impossible(46:08) Many Worlds(48:45) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble(49:31) A Bold Prediction(49:55) Brave New World(53:09) Augmented Reality(55:21) Quickly, Theres No Time(58:29) If Anyone Builds It, We Can Avoid Building The Other It And Not Die(01:00:18) In Other AI News(01:04:03) Introducing(01:04:31) Get Involved(01:07:15) Show Me the Money(01:08:26) The Week In Audio --- First published: February 19th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jcAombEXyatqGhYeX/ai-156-part-1-they-do-mean-the-effect-on-jobs --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:ω a scene where two people discuss how to pronounce "fofr"". Below the tweet is a 5-second video showing a woman with long brown hair smiling in a modern living room setting." style="max-width: 100%;" />Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.