The AI Reader.
Tuesday, September 15, 202643 min read
Working Knowledge · What Could Go Wrong

The studies built to catch a YouTube rabbit hole mostly came up empty

Studies that tracked real YouTube viewing found extreme content clustered among a small group of already resentful subscribers, reached mostly through their own subscriptions and links from outside the platform.

10 min read9 sources
Working Knowledge · The Mechanics

A text-to-speech voice mispronounces a word for one of two different reasons

Siri says "Mobile, Ala." with the wrong vowel and "Des Moines" with its silent letters sounded out, and the two mistakes are made at different points in the same pipeline, before either one becomes a sound.

9 min read8 sources
Working Knowledge · When AI Breaks

Apple Intelligence told BBC readers a murder suspect had shot himself. He hadn't.

The line ran under the BBC's own logo, though the BBC never wrote it.

9 min read8 sources
Working Knowledge · The Evidence

Turing predicted 70 percent by 2000. GPT-4.5 scored 73 in 2025.

The study behind that headline kept Turing's five-minute clock, and swapped his average interrogator for paid volunteers and his generic machine for a coached persona.

8 min read7 sources
Working Knowledge · The Instruments

Nvidia lost $589 billion in a day, more than 100,000 times DeepSeek's training bill

DeepSeek's report priced one training run at $5.576 million, and investors who read that as the whole model's cost helped trigger the sell-off on 27 January 2025.

7 min read10 sources