A dozen people in London just built an AI scientist that beats Claude Opus and GPT-5.5 at reproducing real research — and it's not the biggest model that's winning anymore, it's the smallest one with the best plumbing.
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01:28 — A 27B model just out-scienced the giants Inherent, founded by ex-DeepMind researchers, built Faraday: a model small enough to run on your phone, tested by having it reproduce 310 real experiments from 100 scientific papers. On its own benchmark it beat Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 — partly by calling GPT-5.5 Codex as a tool when it needs to code. Small brain, big harness.
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06:22 — A unicorn in 48 hours, after 2 years of silence Rillet, an AI accounting startup, raised $100M and hit unicorn status two days after going public — but it had been building in stealth for two years first. 600 customers, a partnership with EY, and it's already replacing pieces of Intuit, NetSuite, SAP and Oracle. One investor called it a "warm start," not a cold one.
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10:53 — Your credit score just moved into ChatGPT Experian now lets you pull your real credit score, history and score band straight into the ChatGPT app. It's classified high-risk under the EU AI Act, so it's launching in the UK first, not Europe. 86% of surveyed users said they'd trust ChatGPT to do the analysis.
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16:00 — Harvard cloned a professor HBS launched a $700, 8-week startup bootcamp where the feedback on your pitch can come from an AI avatar of a real professor, built on HeyGen. A New York Times reporter pitched "Uber for bananas" to a cloned VC and got criticized exactly like the real thing would. Malcolm's take: it's not replacing the professor, it's scaling him to 10,000 students at once.
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20:01 — The World Bank's AI report flips the usual assumption Only 4.5% of jobs in developing countries are at risk from generative AI automation — versus 14% in rich countries, because rich countries have more of the knowledge work AI is good at. But the productivity upside is roughly equal, 16-17%, on both sides. Cheap open-weight models running on a basic phone can now bring expertise to a village that would have waited a century for it.
None of this is a theoretical debate anymore. AI news for humans, not robots.
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.