We've heard this pitch before

Hi {{first_name|friend}},

The people building AI spent the week announcing that human history has changed. It was a big week for claims and a thin one for evidence. This issue is about telling the two apart, plus a ten minute experiment that might surprise you.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said it out loud a few days ago: "We are now, like, in the singularity. This is the moment."

He has company. Elon Musk declared we entered it back in January, then said it again a couple of weeks ago. Demis Hassabis, who runs Google DeepMind, puts us in "the foothills of the singularity." Arrived, entered, foothills. Those can't all be the same place, and nobody making the claim has defined the term tightly enough to test it.

You've sat in this meeting. A vendor puts up the slide with the claim too big to check, the one about where the whole industry will be in five years, and everyone nods because who can say otherwise. I sat through plenty of those in 25 years of tech. The untestable claim was usually the one doing the heavy lifting in the pitch.

So run the same two questions on the singularity announcements that you'd run on any pitch. What would count as evidence? And who benefits if I take this at face value? The second one is revealing here. Behind each claim sits a capital raise, a share price or a subscription. Every one of them is worth real money if you believe.

For the record, I don't think we're there. But my opinion isn't really the point. The skill is.

Whether we're in the singularity or nowhere near it, tomorrow looks the same. You still check the answers. You still supply the judgment. Being the AI skeptic who uses AI was never just about the chatbot's output. It covers the announcements from the people selling the chatbots too.

Brett

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Tucker Bryant, a former Googler, put up a San Francisco billboard for ChatTJB, an AI assistant that was actually him answering every question by hand. Thousands of people asked it things and almost nobody suspected a human. He built it as satire about what he calls cognitive surrender, our habit of taking AI answers on faith. The lesson lands either way: people trusted the output without ever checking what produced it, and checking is the whole skill. Read more

29 states now have election deepfake laws in effect, California and Hawaii had theirs struck down in court and there is no federal baseline. Some states ban political fakes near an election; others only require a disclosure label. Why you should care: no law will catch a fake video before you share it. A ten second source check, who posted this and does a second outlet carry it, is still the only protection right now. Read more

Savers Value Village built a pricing tool called ThriftIQ that has priced more than 25 million items across 58 pilot stores. The CEO was specific about the guardrails: no dynamic pricing, tags never change once printed, prices stay 40 to 70 percent below retail and the point is making workers faster instead of replacing them. Why you should care: this is what sane AI adoption looks like, tight constraints with a human still in the loop. Keep it as your reference next time someone insists adoption has to mean upheaval. Read more

Companies like Imagitime and Childbook.ai sell personalized AI picture books and market them hard at grandparents. Parents are pushing back on two fronts: the stories fall flat, and the services take children's photos and personal details with vague answers about where that data ends up. Why you should care: the skeptic move is how you protect the grandkids. Before any AI gift built on a loved one's photos, read the data policy and look at a finished sample first. Read more

What would it take to convince you the hype is real this time? One sentence is fine, I read every one.

I'm on vacation with family in Maine this week, recharging and also feeling relaxed checking in on my business from my laptop (thanks to my personalized AI systems).