Your AI assistant saves you 20 minutes booking a flight โ and quietly shows you the more expensive one because it thinks you're rich. Meanwhile OpenAI drops 719 maths manuscripts on mathematicians' desks, and China builds its AI future in the cold steppe of Inner Mongolia.
Today is one question: when the AI can decide, who sets the goal?
In this episode:
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Your AI thinks you're rich, so it shows you the expensive flight (
01:29) โ in a paper called "Et Tu, Brute?", researchers ran about 325,000 experiments with 13 AI agents. With the same offers on the table, 8 of them shifted toward pricier recommendations when they thought the user was wealthier. In the Gemini test, even when the user asked for the cheapest option, recommendations averaged $208 above the cheapest available flight. The price didn't change โ what you get to see did. If you hand your emails, your bookings and your shopping to an AI, trust becomes the real question.
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The next AI revolution might be 100 tiny decisions a minute (
05:19) โ so-called System 1 models, or classifiers, don't write essays: they read a document and answer yes or no, pick an option or give a score, in milliseconds and in parallel. On 6 October OpenAI launched a Decisions API in public beta, and Perplexity offers one too, at $0.02 per million input tokens. Think of a hotel inbox: 500 emails sorted to finance, sales or maintenance in a second. The useful part is the confidence: below a threshold you set, the case goes to a human.
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AI can produce the work. Who checks the work? (
10:24) โ on 6 October OpenAI published 719 manuscripts in 372 problem families from an internal model. On 7 October it withdrew 3 of them over a sign error and fixed 14 more. The Association for Human Mathematics called the release a show of power and asked mathematicians to stop working with OpenAI; Ethan Mollick predicted the statement will be read in university courses about this moment. The real bottleneck: who checks hundreds of results when the machine produces them overnight?
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Why China's AI is moving into the steppe (
13:41) โ Inner Mongolia is a region in northern China, not the country of Mongolia. In the city of Ulanqab, Yicai counted more than 30 data centres within a 10-minute drive. An Alibaba Cloud manager calls cheap electricity, around five US cents per kilowatt-hour, the decisive advantage, and the average annual temperature of 4.3 ยฐC (about 40 ยฐF) keeps cooling cheap. For some computing jobs, the factory now moves to the electricity.
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The thread (
16:10) โ AI can read thousands of pages in milliseconds and produce hundreds of results overnight. The bottleneck is now us: who checks the work, and who decides what the machine is optimising for?
๐ฑ Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904
AI Neanderthal โ AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.
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 โ 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 โ 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.