On Thursday evening, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini all went dark — at the same time, within minutes of each other. One day after "welcome to the AGI era", the entire AI sky was closed for maintenance for about ninety minutes.
The Saturday edition: four stories that turn out to be one story in four costumes — dependence, concentration, price and risk.
In this episode:
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The great blackout — four brains, one blink (
01:53) — Claude and Grok failed within four minutes of each other; ChatGPT and Codex followed seventy-three minutes later. OpenAI blamed a routing error, xAI pointed at its Memphis compute center, and as of recording nobody has publicly proven the outages were connected. Forget the conspiracy theories — the boring explanation is the scarier one: four brains standing on the same two legs.
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Broadcom — the boom, measured in silicon (
10:56) — Sixteen point seven billion dollars of AI chips in ONE quarter, up two hundred twenty-one percent, and a "high degree of confidence" in three hundred fifty billion over the next two years. Their downside case assumes the customers run out of land and electricity before they run out of money.
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Fable 5.1 and the "45 percent cheaper" fight (
17:34) — Anthropic says up to forty-five percent cheaper for agentic workloads; an independent benchmark measured seventeen percent MORE. Both are true — for different customers. It all turns on cache reads, and reading a pricing claim is the most useful skill in AI purchasing right now.
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One hundred fifty-three million driver's licenses (
21:32) — The FBI is investigating a dark-web service called "Nexus" that offered scans of more than one hundred fifty-three million US and Canadian licenses, reportedly sourced from a breach at IDScan.net — a company whose business is verifying identities. Why an ID scan is worth so much more in the deepfake era, and three concrete things to do about it this weekend.
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The Saturday thread (
27:35) — And notice what did NOT happen on Thursday: no planes fell, no banks froze, no hospitals stopped. This time — because this time AI is still mostly assisting, not running. The window where an AI outage is merely annoying is open right now, and it is closing.
Your weekend action, one only: make the list of AI tools your company actually depends on, and next to each one write the answer to a single question — "and what do we do for ninety minutes if it's gone?" It fits on a beer coaster, and it's the cheapest resilience plan in the industry.
📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904
AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious. 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.