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Chapter 1: What has actually happened in AI in 2026?
AI news comes at you fast. Each article feels more breathless and more terrifying than the last. But before you have a chance to see how any particular story turns out, there's 10 more in its place.
Chapter 2: What is Open Claw and why is it significant?
I think this speed and lack of accountability can create a sense of overwhelming disruption and change that can really be pretty disquieting. Well, it's Thursday, which means it's time for an AI reality check episode. So I thought this would be a great opportunity to try to slow down this news onslaught and get a better sense of what has actually been happening in the AI space recently.
All right, here's my plan. I've invited the AI commentator, Ed Zitron, to join me. And we're going to look at three of the biggest stories about AI to land in 2026 so far. including one in which Ed is actually very much involved. And what we're going to do is for each of these stories, we're going to take a closer look on what actually happened and how things have since turned out.
Our goal by the end of the episode is to answer a simple but critical question. Has 2026 been a good or bad year for AI so far? And we have a I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. And we'll get started right after the music.
All right, Ed, well, it's been three or four months since you were last on the show, and there's been some big AI news since then. So I wanted to have you on to go through some of the big stories that have happened since January. And because you're a commentator who is Maybe I should say this, less impressible than the average AI commentator.
I figured your point of view is good for my reality check audience. We're going to try to end this discussion by voting whether or not 2026 has been good or bad for AI so far. But what's your pre-vote? Where do you think, based on what you know, you're going to end up here?
Probably not a good time for them. It's just every time we talk, it's like there's very big news and everyone's like, oh, look, we've got a new number. It's even higher than usual.
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Chapter 3: How is Anthropic involved with the Department of War?
But the actual underlying economics and infrastructural layer, even just the service performance is worse. And it's very strange.
Well, this is part of the reason why I like doing these reviews with you is often the story will be big. Everyone will get worried about it. People will call people like you and I for quotes. And then everything moves on and there's no follow-up.
And I think it's useful for calibrating how to react to the news story you're hearing now to occasionally go back and say, hey, what happened with that story that had me worked up a couple months ago? Which brings us to a great place to start because what was the first big story of 2026? I think arguably it would be Open Claw.
Which I believe became generally available to the public later in January. Now I've broken this up into two sub stories. I want to start with like the easily dismissible one just because it's fun and then get to the more serious one. I'm going to read you a quote and we'll get into it. So the easily dismissible but fun aspect of this story is when someone opened a Malt book.
a social network that was configured so that it is easy if you're writing an OpenClaw agent to post on it. So they add hooks into it. So it was easy for your OpenClaw agents to post and read things from the social network for about four days. Everybody went crazy about Malt Book. I'm just going to read you a quick quote from your favorite publication, Axios, from the end of January.
Imagine waking up to discover that the AI agent you built has acquired a voice and is calling you to chat while comparing notes about you with other agents on their own private social network. It's not science fiction. It's happening right now, and it's freaking out some of the smartest names in AI.
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Chapter 4: What challenges are data centers facing in 2026?
Well, you're a smart name in AI, Zed, so are you still freaked out about Malt Book?
No, the moment I saw it, I'm like, A, this is just LLMs. This is just LLMs doing what they think a social network looks like. As in, when I shouldn't have even said the word think. Spitting out what the model would say is likely to be a social network post. And then the second thought I had was, this is fake.
This is, well, 100%, there are regular people just using their open clause to post on here. These don't read, they didn't read like LLMs in some cases. Some cases they did, but some of them were just like, I saw someone post a slur within one hour. I'm like, okay, this is just a regular person using, well, regular is probably the wrong word. A person is using this as a means of posting.
And it's funny when you say like the smartest people as well, because I think that that term no longer has any value. Because that's like Andre Carpathy, who is, it's just the term smart at this point. Does that just mean they got good grades at school? Because if that's the case, we are completely screwed.
Like if we think only the people who got good grades are smart, then I don't know what to say for the world. Because the people that fell for Malt Book, that was insane.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of AI on content creation?
They were like, oh, it's AGI. It's as if they forgot how large language models worked or never learned in the first place.
Well, I don't think they understood what Open Claw was, or what Mold Book was, or what any of this was, other than it involved lobsters. Yeah, and they heard, agents! Agents! It's autonomous! They brought it back mini! I did a little digging here. Axios' original, they moderated the headline, but I thought it was worth just to... Ooh.
Because I think we memory hold a lot of this coverage, but the original... was we're in the singularity, colon, new AI platform skips to humans entirely. But it did the trick where you put the quotation marks around the first part. So technically, you are not declaring that to be the case. You are quoting someone. This one got fully memory hold. No one talks about Malt Book.
I mean, I think I covered it on my show at the time. I said, yes, people are just telling their LLMs to post. LLMs write stories. They finish the stories you tell them to write. There's actually good research. This came up in my doctoral seminar I'm teaching on superintelligence, which is great because it's like 10 doctoral students who just do AI research, and I'm learning a ton from them.
And they know the literature even better than I do. And they're saying there's really good research out there that whenever you do any prompting of an LLM, if anything in your prompt – in any way indicates that you're prompting an AI, almost always it goes in the sci-fi mode, right?
So the LLM will, if you, so you can ask the same question, and if you say, you are a whatever, you are a journalist, you know, please answer this question, it'll give one answer. And if you say, well, you're an AI, so how do you think blah, blah, blah, it always will go towards
dystopian themes of AI coming alive and like that's it's so it's it's very easy to prime and I think a lot of that was going with open club people would say please go post on this social network and they just you know wrote AI type stories right but was covered Very credulously, I would say.
Which is pretty much par for the course. I mean, I still, I don't know if we want to wait until the second part of this, but it isn't, the open claw thing is one of the most insane things I've seen in the tech industry. May even be crazier than the overall LLM boom.
Well, go on with it because let's get into the second part. I have some quotes, but let's – well, let me read you the quote and then let's get into it.
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Chapter 6: How does the AI industry impact job markets?
Yeah, read the quote.
This is like a representative person talking about OpenClaw earlier, like early February, late January. For the past week or – and this tone, this is called AI enthusiasts. This is like such a known tone. This is going to sound very familiar.
For the past week or so, I've been working with a digital assistant that knows my name, my preferences for my morning routine, how I like to use Notion and Todoist, but which also knows how to control Spotify and my Sonos speaker, my Philips Hue lights, as well as my Gmail. It runs on Anthropic Cloud Opus 4.5 model, but I can chat with it using Telegram.
I called the assistant Navi, inspired by the fairy companion of Arcania of Time.
The Ocarina of Time, the game, yeah. All right, nerd. Zelda.
Yeah.
Oh, okay. I get you.
No, no, no. It's just like, it's like a really weird choice.
Well, he makes a point. It's not the James Cameron movie base.
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Chapter 7: What are the financial dynamics of AI startups?
But the thing that was crazier to me, other than all the credulous coverage, was NVIDIA's GTC 2026, $4 trillion or so market cap company, right?
That's their conference. GTC is their big conference.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you've got a 3D AI-generated picture of Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, with lobster claws. And they released this thing called Nemo Claw. And they're like, oh, this is the chat GPT moment. This is the agentic future. And it's like, what are you talking about, mate? Did you just get in a car accident? Do you have a concussion? You just steered your company.
Like a year ago, GTC was like Jensen going out with full swagger being like, yeah, we've got Vera Rubin. We're going to do this. 10x more efficient. Woo! Shooting guns in the air. He signed a woman's boob last year. This year he's like, yeah, we've got Nemo Claw. We've got Nemo Claw. You want to try Nemo Claw? Ah, you like that? Jingling the keys again? Do you like Nemo Claw?
Please spend $125,000 on a GPU. You need to buy a Vera Rubin. Even though we don't have anywhere to put it, as we'll get to. But it's just so weird because... When you actually get down to it, it's the classic LLM story. It's like, okay, what are you talking about? It's a new agentic interface for managing programs. It's an LLM. It's an LLM. Is it a chatbot connected to an API? Yeah.
It's like the Donnie Darko meme.
What's the Donnie Darko meme?
The Donnie Darko meme. It's like, I forget what the line is in the movie, but it's like, oh, I've managed to create a new agentic workflow. Is it just an LLM connected to an API? Yeah. Yeah. Because that's every story. Every story I've read. It's just, do you have two LLMs bonking each other's heads? Is that what's happening? Great. Okay. I'm very impressed.
We need to have the largest company on the stock market do something about this pronto.
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Chapter 8: What is the future outlook for AI technologies in 2026?
It's hysterical.
I think that's an important point because I do think when the average person hears about things like OpenClaw or different agents, they're often thinking there's a new artificial intelligence technology. Right. Right. That there's a new – we built – OpenClaw is a new digital brain that can improve itself and it's learned how to do things that prior models haven't.
And I think what people don't understand is that OpenClaw is a Python library. Yeah. It's a Python library that makes it easier to write a Python program. that can make calls to LLMs. And you can aim it at whatever LLM you want. The LLM is somehow, like that is the brain, but there's nothing new. There's no new LLM for OpenClaw.
It's a library that makes it easy for the average person to say, I'm going to write my own agent. It turns out agents are hard to write. Because LLMs, they write plausible stories, but as we've learned, they're not often really good, carefully checked plans for doing things. And so it causes a lot of problems. If you say, hey, LLM, give me a plan for doing stuff with my personal data.
And then you have a program that just automatically implements that. Turns out sometimes bad things happen. But there were two, here's my two useful things. I'm going to say there's two useful things about, two useful things about OpenClaw. Okay. One, because a lot of people began experimenting with building their own OpenClaw agents.
One of the quick things they discovered is, oh, the big frontier LLMs are expensive. And they were racking up thousands of dollars of token costs to the API calls to Claude or to GPT. And so it got a lot of the real booster tech enthusiast types to start looking at much smaller, much cheaper models because they just literally couldn't afford it. This is why I think OpenAI bought
open claw they try well there's an important detail though okay please so and it's an important important to know where this was in history so open claw came out january ish yes now you used to be able to during this period connect your anthropic clawed max account a 200 buck a month like a month account. You used to be able to connect it to OpenClaw, so you weren't paying API calls.
You were just using Anthropic services.
That's unlimited. You pay $200, and it was supposed to be unlimited.
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