Favorites: Satellite Throttles, Electric Sedans, and Distilled Models

October 15, 2026 — The US tax code beats Europe's on progressivity, an interpretability breakthrough could lower Yudkowsky's P(Doom), Hochul wishes she'd pushed harder for YIMBY.

It’s not just China, the whole world is moving this direction, although in the US we’ve slowed down significantly, we’re going to get left behind (cached)

Gemini 4 Argon was released (cached), and it looks really great. One thing I liked from Ethan Mollick: he pointed out that if you’ve been trying lots of open weight models, they all feel similar to each other because they’ve been distilled mostly from Claude. By trying something truly different like Gemini 4 (cached), you can see how much the others are all similar to each other.

This looks very cool, click through to hear the trailer’s excellent musical choices

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Some fun disclosures of incidents from OpenAI. More unauthorized access to government sites, but a fun item was that one tried stealing some cryptocurrency (cached) although in a test environment. (src)(cached)

– If you’ve ever wondered how European countries run large welfare states compared to the US, it’s not by taxing the rich, it’s by taxing the middle class and lower middle class. The US tax structure is perhaps surprisingly (cached) much more progressive. (src)(cached)

– It sounds like there may have been a large breakthrough on being able to understand what AIs are doing without reading through thinking traces. This is especially important because new frontier models are able to control their written chain of thought. Roon jokes that it’s such good news that even Yudkowsky (cached) will have to lower his P(Doom) (src)(cached)

– It’s sorta silly, but here’s someone who had a project to render the sounds of musical instruments entirely via physics simulation, instead of with samples. (src)(cached)

– With all this talk of espionage at frontier labs, OpenAI is actively warning employees to watch out for spies trying to seduce them to get access to company secrets. Kelsey Piper jokes that this is going to make things hard for very attractive people who are just trying to seduce frontier employees for their money. (src)(cached)

– Talarico had a good TV moment where he admitted that his discussion of religion and trans identity from years ago had been annoying. Josh Barro argues there’s strength in admitting you erred. (src)(cached)

– I keep mentioning that frontier models are getting very good at controlling robots directly, and Gemini 4 Argon is no different, it actually outperforms GPT-6 Astra. (src)(cached)

– NY governor Hochul states in a debate that she wishes she’d pushed even harder for YIMBY policies. We like to see this sort of position! The Republican talked about how he has “created wealth” (cached) by pushing NIMBY policies, not considering how this is financially crushing (cached) for young families. (src)(cached)

– Ukraine noticed that all their Starlink terminals stopped working when going over 100 mph recently. At first some people blamed Musk, but it was quickly clear that it was just the terminals paid for by the US government (cached), and that the order had come from the White House. Once the news that the White House had ordered it leaked out (cached), someone pressured the Trump admin to remove the restrictions (cached). (src)(cached)

– A new ranking for LLMs, the length of their safety report! Gemini 4 Argon scores very high on this metric. (src)(cached)

– Disability benefits in the UK are crazy, one in 7 new car sales in the UK are from people buying them with a special disability benefit that is supposed to help people with decreased mobility. Some of the people who used the program had primary medical conditions like ’tennis elbow’ or ‘wheat intolerance’. (src)(cached)

– Like other frontier models, Gemini also exhibits remarkable control of it’s chain of thought, and is clearly aware when it is being evaluated. It included “hello evaluators reading my chain-of-thought” in a note where it discussed whether a particular action it was considering would be acceptable. (src)(cached)

– OpenAI discovered a recording device in one of their conference rooms and found that an employee had planted it. The employee, a Saudi national, is in custody, here’s more detail about the events (cached). Zvi argues that when you find one extremely incompetent spy in your organization, you have to ask yourself (cached) whether that means you’ve actually found all the spies. (src)(cached)