AI in the AM — Week 1 Highlights (June 2026)
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What is the new AI‑friendly fintech offering from Mercury and why does it matter?
The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you by Mercury, the fintech that more than 300,000 ambitious companies and individuals trust to run their finances. Over the last few months, I have made tremendous strides with my personal AI infrastructure. Today, I've got high context instances of both Claude Code and OpenClaw running on a Mac Mini, and it's amazing what they can do. However, until getting started with Mercury, I didn't have a great way for them to pay for things. I didn't want to give them unrestricted access to my money, but my old bank didn't give me any other options. With Mercury, I can create as many virtual cards as I want, each with its own daily, weekly, or monthly spending limit, and I can lock any card to a single category of purchase or even a single merchant.
Now I have a card that my agent can use to buy our family's groceries, and only our groceries, and I can create another anytime I want to give an agent a random one-off project that might require making a purchase. This is honestly just the start of Mercury's AI friendly offerings. Does your bank offer API keys, an MCP, or a CLI tool? If not, check out Mercury at Mercury.com. Mercury is a FinTech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA members, FDIC, Thank you to Mercury for supporting the cognitive revolution. And now? On with the show. Welcome to the cognitive revolution and to a new experiment we're calling AI in the AM. Most weekdays, through June, at least, Prakashna Ryan and I go live in the morning, trying to make sense of the AI frontier in something close to real time.
Then we cut it down to this, a highlights edition, built for people who are really close to this stuff, but already overwhelmed. And I'll be up front. This whole thing is an experiment. The studio we broadcast from? Prakash vibe coded it. The booking, the research, the clipping, those are AI skills we refine as we go, and we plan to publish them in all sorts of artifacts as this matures. Which it turns out is the story of the week. The Frontier Labs are running away with everything, and increasingly they seem a little scared of their own progress. OpenAI is publicly asking for independent review of models. At a closed door event on recursive self-improvement, people from multiple labs agreed a coordinated slowdown might one day be necessary.
And our conversation with OpenAI's forward-deployed engineers showed how almost mundane this has become. Walk into a tax firm, stand up a thin scaffold, capture where it's wrong, and let the model rewrite its own scaffolding, correction by correction. That's the whole loop, and it climbs the hill astonishingly fast. So when the harness is that cheap to build, the real question becomes what around the core intelligence is still safe? That's the lens for this week. And please, tell us what's working and what isn't. We mean it. This only gets good with your feedback. Start with a day I spent inside a closed door event, full of people from the Frontier Labs, all of whom think self-improvement is close. And is the plan.
Here's the honest version of what they believe and what they don't. So this event was called recursive. It was premised on the idea that recursive self-improvement seems to be coming pretty soon. It is increasingly the explicit plan of at least anthropic and open AI and Google DeepMind to some extent, although they kind of waffle on it a little bit more. Whereas OpenAI has publicly put forward timelines of later this year for an ML research intern and early 2028 for the full AI um RD researcher that you know they hope will perform on the level of their human um Researchers. So, you know, the kind of basic theory of change there is a pretty obvious one, but worth stating that today they may have a thousand or a couple thousand people that they would really consider to be top-notch ML researchers.
If they can get that same level of performance from models on chips, then they're only limited by the amount of compute that they can throw at it.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What is the new AI‑friendly fintech offering from Mercury and why does it matter?
0:00–13:16
2
How did the closed‑door recursive self‑improvement event shape labs’ view on a coordinated slowdown?
13:16–40:55
3
Why are AI‑monitoring systems becoming the primary safety strategy for frontier labs?
40:55–1:22:11
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from "The Cognitive Revolution"
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