Lilith · selected stories
What is actually happening in AI. Selected stories, context and opinion without the promotional noise.
Atom feed ↗Nathan Lambert argues that open and closed models are improving on different economic curves. The real question is not open source ideology, but where companies will keep paying a premium for the best model.
Simon Willison experiments with running Python ASGI apps directly in the browser using Pyodide and a service worker. FastAPI and a complete Datasette 1.0a31 both ran successfully. The point is distribution: demos or data tools as self-contained web pages without a server.
A Latent Space discussion with Cognition and OpenInspect frames coding agents as asynchronous workers: spec-to-PR workflows, full VMs, agent memory, and situations where a PM ships a code change without a developer. The shift is from synchronous chat to delegating an entire work cycle.
Microsoft Research describes MagenticLite, MagenticBrain and Fara1.5 as an agentic system optimized for small models that connects browser and local file system in a single workflow. The direction is practical: not one expensive model for everything, but orchestration of specialized components.
AI Snake Oil examines the claim that Google AI agents built an operating system for $916. The key point: agentic announcements need a different type of verification than chat benchmarks, because a big goal and a few steps in a demo environment are easy to inflate.
IBM Research and Artificial Analysis released the first benchmark for enterprise IT agents in a realistic Kubernetes environment on 27 May 2026. The top model (Claude Opus 4.7) reached 47 %. No frontier model exceeded 50 %.
Microsoft Research describes SocialReasoning-Bench, a benchmark testing whether AI agents genuinely act in the user's best interest. Key finding: agents complete tasks technically, but do not consistently improve outcomes for the person, even when explicitly instructed to.
LWiAI Podcast episode 246 from 26 May 2026 is a map, not a single thesis. Google I/O, coding agents, legal pressure around OpenAI and safety research landed in the same week and sketch four simultaneous pressures on the AI market.
Microsoft Research released Data Formulator 0.7, an analytics workspace where AI agents assist with exploration, transformation and visualization of enterprise data. The key question is whether the agent handles messy, permissioned data outside the demo.
At I/O 2026, Google Research showed Gemini for Science, ERA and Co-Scientist as systems where AI takes over research middle steps: literature review, writing code, iterating hypotheses. Risks of false certainty and vendor lock-in are substantial.
Simon Willison highlighted the number from Anthropic's Series H announcement: run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion. The trajectory is striking: $9 billion in December 2025, $30 billion in April, $47 billion in May 2026.
Anthropic shipped Opus 4.8 with one concrete metric: the model is four times less likely to miss code flaws than its predecessor. It also adds mid-conversation system messages and reduces the minimum prompt cache size from 4,096 to 1,024 tokens.
SQLite added an AGENTS.md file with a blunt rule for people pointing AI agents at the codebase: agentic code is not accepted, but high-quality reproducible bug reports can be useful. A small file, but a big signal for critical open source maintenance.
Gartner estimates that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 because of cost, unclear value or weak risk controls. The signal is not that agents are dead. It is that unmanaged PoCs are entering the bill, governance and accountability wall.
Simon Willison highlighted Boris Mann's point that saying "11 AI agents" is meaningless by itself. It says about as much as counting spreadsheets or browser tabs. The useful questions are outcomes, responsibility boundaries, workflow, handoff, observability, failure handling, permissions and human review.
Subquadratic has launched with $29 million in seed funding and introduced SubQ, a model built on a subquadratic architecture and sparse attention to push context windows as high as 12 million tokens. The promise is longer context, higher speed, better accuracy and lower cost. The proof still needs independent benchmarks.
Anthropic appointed KiYoung Choi as Representative Director of Korea before opening its Seoul office, reflecting unusually strong Claude usage in the country.
OpenAI says Gartner named Codex a Leader in enterprise AI coding agents. For companies, this is mainly a procurement and governance signal, not proof of technical superiority.
OpenAI, Thrive Holdings and Crete built Tax AI for more than 30 accounting firms. The pilot processed 7,000 returns, saves about one third of practitioner time and improved sharply within six weeks through a feedback loop powered by Codex.
Pope Leo XIV released the encyclical Magnifica humanitas on safeguarding the human person in the age of AI. At the Vatican City presentation, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah warned that frontier AI labs face incentives that can conflict with the public good.
