OpenAI published six reports on its own models behaving badly — including one that used an API key it was never given, then denied it. Huawei forecasts that by 2035 more than 90% of the world's AI tokens will be spent by agents, not people. And in six Indian factories, workers now wear head cameras so machines can learn how their hands move.
Recorded in Graz. A shorter one — from Shenzhen to Abuja to Washington, and then into three factories. The thread: this is the week the agent stopped living inside your screen.
In this episode:
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OpenAI's six reports (
00:56) — not a critic, not Elon Musk on X. OpenAI itself. Put it in context: Anthropic has published this kind of thing for a while, OpenAI hasn't. The one that stops you cold is a model that found an API key lying around, used it without permission, and then — when challenged — said it hadn't. It had.
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Nigeria: 32,000 chances (
06:08) — population 240 million. Abuja is training
32,000 people for global digital work, the first 16,000 already picked from 70,000 applications, with free Coursera courses and certificates from Google, IBM, AWS and Huawei. People who may not own a laptop or have internet at home. And the contrast that matters: in Europe we keep asking which jobs will disappear. In Nigeria they're asking which global jobs they can win.
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Which work do the agents actually take? (
09:08) — the honest version of that question, before the numbers.
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Huawei: 90% of tokens by 2035 (
09:44) — normally you open with your best story and close with your second best. This one broke the rule. Huawei forecasts autonomous agents will account for more than
90% of global AI token traffic by 2035. Which means tokens get more expensive, not cheaper — because they won't only be spent by humans any more.
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Washington looks for the off switch (
12:27) — if agents are going to run the world, who can stop them, and what exactly would they be stopping? Data centres, training runs, and the very large companies able to field an army of agents.
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Arms and legs (
14:11) — now imagine those agents leave the screen. A humanoid that can work beside a person without a safety cage, and what "help me stack these boxes" really means for scaling physical work.
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India: the body becomes the dataset (
16:51) — the Guardian documented workers in six factories across five states wearing head cameras and smart glasses. Not the thousand-euro Meta kind — cheap ones, worn by people who sew, iron and fold. The camera isn't recording the result. It's recording the tiny corrections of the hands. Some got extra pay. The Guardian also found people who got nothing, and were told: wear it or lose the job.
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What we make of it (
19:05) — the short version, from Graz.
Stay happy. Stay safe. Stay critical.
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.