Generative AI 101

A take-home midterm at Brown University averaged 96, then the same students averaged 48 on the in-person final, and that gap tells the whole story. Host Emily Laird walks through how economist Roberto Serrano, a professional game theorist, caught roughly fifty suspected AI cheaters without detection software: he simply designed a test the fakes could not afford to sit. This episode covers the statistical fingerprint of unedited ChatGPT proofs, the students who confessed by dropping the course, and why a room full of desks outperformed the entire AI-detection industry. If you evaluate people for a living, Serrano just handed you the template.

 

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Apple just sued OpenAI for trade secret theft, and the complaint reads less like a spy novel and more like a group chat with subpoena power. Host Emily Laird walks through the two former Apple employees at the center of the case: the engineer who allegedly kept his company laptop and downloaded a thousand pages of schematics, and the executive accused of asking job candidates to bring actual Apple parts to interviews. Along the way, she breaks down the one legal doctrine that explains why hiring 400 former Apple employees is perfectly legal but keeping the offboarding document is not. Seven minutes, zero hype, and a reality check on what happens when the AI hardware race runs straight through Cupertino's supply chain.

 

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Meta paid contractors to pose as children, flood rival chatbots with prompts about suicide, eating disorders, and abuse, then log every response in spreadsheets. The company calls it "industry-standard safety benchmarking," but the operation had no consent, no disclosure, and no shared findings: the four things that make red teaming legitimate. Host Emily Laird walks through the Wired investigation, the 45,000-prompt testing rounds, and the court testimony showing what Meta knew about its own failure rates while it was busy documenting everyone else's. This is the difference between a shield and a sword, and the paperwork says sword.────────────

 

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Host Emily Laird breaks down why chatbots so often agree with your worst instincts, then shows how a pre-mortem prompt turns that people-pleasing machinery against your plan. The stakes are practical: job offers, house purchases, program launches, hard conversations, and every other moment when agreement feels comforting but costs you later. This episode is a reality check on AI sycophancy, decision stress-testing, and the simple question that can make a yes-machine finally tell you what might fail.──────────────

 

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Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs, and the savings cover roughly two days of its AI infrastructure spending. Host Emily Laird runs the arithmetic the press release skipped: a $190 billion capex bill, an Xbox division losing 64 cents on every dollar, and a $625 billion backlog where nearly half the money traces back to one cash-burning customer. This is the story of a company growing 18 percent while shedding a trillion dollars in market value. The layoffs were never a savings plan, they were a message.

 

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📑READ DEAN BALL'S ESSAY

https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/what-should-be-done
 

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You now know more about Microsoft's recent layoffs than you did before you arrived.