2023-03 → Present
The AI takeoff is happening.
We're measuring it.
Future Shock maps the accelerating trajectory of artificial intelligence — across models, compute, robotics, research, and open source. Updated daily. No hype. No financial advice. Just the signal.
Six Tracking Axes
The dimensions of accelerationModel Capability
Benchmarks, multimodal, agents, context windows, tool use
Compute & Chips
GPU releases, FLOPs/dollar, training clusters, energy
Robotics
Humanoid milestones, autonomous deployments, LLM-driven demos
Research Velocity
arXiv publication rate, breakthrough papers, citation velocity
Open Source
GitHub commit velocity, AI co-authored code, framework growth
Policy
Government action, regulation, defense, trade, AI governance
Latest Signals
Updated dailycommit-rewriter 0.1
Simon Willison released commit-rewriter 0.1, a Python web app for editing Git commit messages after coding-agent output leaves cruft or private issue references. It creates a timestamped backup branch, then rewrites history from the first edited commit forward.
Document: Samsung and SK Hynix rejected KEPCO's proposal to prepay ~$18.7B of chip cluster power bills, citing uncertainty over long-term chip demand (Reuters)
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix rejected KEPCO's proposal that they prepay 25 trillion won ($18.7 billion) toward power infrastructure for planned semiconductor clusters. Reuters reviewed a document sent to a lawmaker, and KEPCO separately confirmed the rejection. The companies questioned the need for such large upfront payments amid uncertainty over long-term chip demand; that is not evidence of an industry-wide AI-demand collapse.
Current and former officials: the US NSA plans major restructuring to form five new units for AI, China, cybersecurity, warfighting, and global intelligence (Washington Post)
The NSA is undertaking a major reorganization into five mission centers focused on AI, China, cybersecurity, combat support, and global intelligence, according to independently sourced reports from The Washington Post and The Record. Officials reportedly received a 30-day implementation clock and a January 2027 full-operating target. NSA did not provide an on-record confirmation.
AWS Introduces Pizza Bot: An Open Source Inbox for Background AI Agents
AWS open-sourced Pizza Bot, a self-hosted inbox for long-running AI-agent work built on DeepAgents and LangGraph. It supports persistent background runs, approval queues, schedules, MCP integrations, and several model providers. AWS says earlier internal versions had more than 2,000 Amazon users; the public project is community-supported rather than an AWS service.
A Princeton Researcher Proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) that Carries Decoder State across Every Token, Fixing 96 Blocks per Token with Unbounded Temporal Depth
Yifan Zhang's September 12 Recurrent Looped Transformer technical report proposes a causal encoder plus a recurrent decoder that carries hidden state and sliding-window attention cache across prompt and response tokens. Its reference design uses 48 encoder and 48 decoder layers, or 96 logical blocks per token, while the recurrent path grows with sequence length. No model, benchmark, or empirical efficiency result is included; those benefits remain research goals.
Obama urges Democrats to have a ‘clear plan’ for AI safeguards
At a private Democratic fundraiser, Barack Obama urged party leaders to make AI safety and economic impacts a central agenda and develop a clear public framework. Excerpts were supplied by his office and independently reported, but no bill, formal party platform, or full public transcript accompanied the remarks.
Featured Essays
Durable Future Shock pieces from the newsletter archive: agent coordination, AI infrastructure, security, and the systems around the models.
Work
The K-Curve
The widening gap between people who compound value from AI and those who tried it once and bounced.
Open source
The Quantization Underground
How a four-line experiment changed the way small AI models are compressed and run locally.
Coordination
We Made AI Agents Negotiate the End of the World
The same model behaved differently depending on which other agents were in the room.
Agents
The (Missing) Layer Between You and Your Agents
What is missing between the agents doing the work and the person trying to understand what happened.
Infrastructure
The Grid Under the Cloud
The next decade of AI will be shaped by the places that can power, cool, permit, and physically host it.
Accountability
Promise Nothing, Claim Everything
Six competing AI companies arrived at remarkably similar terms for warranties, liability, and training data.
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