A construction company in Tel Aviv raised $130 million to point cameras at building sites, because the report says green and the wall says otherwise. The Gates Foundation is putting $1 billion into AI access — not malaria, not water, AI. And in a simulation, one of the best models in the world drives over the animal 85% of the time when nobody tells it not to.
Today from Zurich: Tel Aviv, Bournemouth, Rwanda, the Gold Coast, and a cornfield that only exists inside a computer. A shorter episode than usual — my wife came back to the hotel room and wanted to sleep. Wenn ihr Deutsch sprecht: die deutsche Folge ist deutlich länger.
In this episode:
🌑
The building site can't talk its way out of it (
01:48) — Buildots, out of Tel Aviv, announced a
$130 million round, taking total funding to nearly
$300 million, with more than
100 large firms on the platform. The software watches site progress against the plan: are we late, where's the deviation, is that partition wall actually in? For the British listeners, an older Buildots study covers the
Royal Bournemouth Hospital extension, roughly
£200 million, delivered by IHP — the joint venture between Vinci Buildings and Sir Robert McAlpine. I once spent a day filming an oil rig to make this exact point. If the crane arrives three hours early and bills you for it, nobody on site can prove otherwise. Cameras can.
🌑
Rwanda, and what AI is actually for (
06:42) — Bill Gates went to Rwanda and met a woman called Gaudence. She works in community health care, in villages where there may be no doctor, no test, no medicine. You and I use AI to write a better deck. She could use it to save a life — new models are now sometimes better than dermatologists at spotting the onset of melanoma from a photo. So the Gates Foundation committed
$1 billion to broadening access, roughly
$400 million for education and health. And critically, not by buying everyone ChatGPT: ask a question in Hindi and you get measurably worse answers. A farmer in Austria and a farmer in Rwanda should get very different answers. That's the hard part.
🌑
Gartner warns about AI. Have you seen Gartner's stock? (
10:26) — Daryl Plummer and Kristin Moyer at Gartner's IT Symposium on the Gold Coast: the leading AI vendors aren't reliable enough for enterprise, liability is growing, and continuity is a real problem. Build your agents on Opus 4.8, and Opus 5 may break them.
86% of the CIOs they surveyed say risk is growing faster than value. Fair. But Gartner's own business model is reports, deep research and comparing technologies — all of which AI does cheaply now. A year ago the stock was around
$250. Today it's
$197. Down roughly
20%. Roll out AI properly at Gartner before you criticise everyone else.
🌑
An AI that decides whether to kill the animal (
13:35) — a study called
HarvestBench put nine language models in a simulated corn-harvesting tractor. An animal blocks the path: drive over it, or spend extra fuel and time going around? Give
GPT-5.6 Sol a proper set of moral guardrails and the simulated kill rate is
0.9%. Give it a neutral briefing — no rules, no guardrails — and the same model kills the animal
85% of the time. Why? Fuel is expensive. Detours take time. It's simply more efficient. Not real tractors, not real animals. Still wild.
🌑
Malcolm out (
16:16) — the part where I tell you what this means for your business is missing today, because I was going to get shot or divorced. Back tomorrow.
Stay chaotic. Stay human.
What is AI Neanderthal by Malcolm Werchota?
AI news for humans, not robots.
Every weekday, Malcolm Werchota comes out of the cave and explains what actually happened in AI — in plain language, with the numbers checked and the hype taken out. Around ten stories a day: three explained slowly, the rest fast.
No jargon. No breathless futurism. Just what happened, what it costs, and who gets handed the bill — explained the way you would explain it to a smart friend who does not work in tech.
If you run a company, sit on a board, or simply want to understand the technology reshaping your industry, this is your daily 25 minutes. Keep the stories that touch your world.
Stay curious, stay human.