The podcast
AI news for humans. Every weekday.
AI Neanderthal by Malcolm Werchota. 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.
20 episodes published
All episodes
#20 · 6 Sept 2026 · 23:04
#20 - Twenty Years in Prison for a Thinking Machine
A United States senator has introduced a bill under which building an AI that matches or exceeds human capability would carry up to twenty years in prison. In the same week, in the same country, the G20 endorsed the…
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#19 · 5 Sept 2026 · 31:10
#19 - The Day the Whole AI Sky Went Dark
On Thursday evening, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini all went dark — at the same time, within minutes of each other. One day after "welcome to the AGI era", the entire AI sky was closed for maintenance for about ninety…
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#18 · 4 Sept 2026 · 30:58
#18 - GPT-6 Is Here. Is It AGI?
OpenAI just released GPT-6 (aka Astra). Is it AGI? Probably not. Is it the biggest single jump in AI capability ever measured? Quite possibly. A full deep-dive into what actually shipped on September 3rd — the facts,…
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#17 · 3 Sept 2026 · 28:45
#17 - Not Every Referee Wants to Slow You Down
Four referees walked onto the AI field this week — a judge, Brussels, NVIDIA itself, and Apple's new CEO. Not all of them are trying to slow you down. This time regulation isn't always the villain — sometimes the…
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#16 · 2 Sept 2026 · 35:02
#16 - The AI Dividend Has One Red Row
BCG drew a chart of who wins from AI. Four rows have green in them. One row doesn't. A chart, two studies, a courtroom, and a tokenizer — four stories about where the AI dividend actually flows, and who pays for it. In…
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#15 · 1 Sept 2026 · 47:09
#15 - AI Stopped Being Software
The chatbots were the trailer. The machine age is the film — playing now in concrete, chips, electricity and debt. Yesterday: who holds your switch. Today we go one floor down, into the basement of the AI boom — where…
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#14 · 31 Aug 2026 · 51:43
#14 - Who Holds Your Off Switch?
Who holds the switch on your AI tools, your culture, your chips — even your usage limits? Spoiler: it's not you. This weekend, control became the only story in AI. Malcolm walks through five fights over who holds the…
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#13 · 29 Aug 2026 · 21:18
#13 - The Bill for the AI Boom Just Arrived at Your Door
Your Amazon Echo just got more expensive — not because it's smarter, but because AI data centers hundreds of kilometers away are eating all the memory chips. The bill for the AI boom has started arriving everywhere. 📦…
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#12 · 28 Aug 2026 · 27:42
#12 - The 27B Model That Beat the Giants
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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#11 · 27 Aug 2026 · 28:05
#11 - The Chatbot Was Never the Point
A chip company just proved the model matters less than what you wrap around it — and while the West is still arguing about chatbot risk, China is packaging entire jobs into software. 🧠 01:25 — Same brain, 100% instead…
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#10 · 26 Aug 2026 · 19:06
#10 - The Parrot Learned to Fly a Fighter Jet
Before, AI was a clever parrot answering questions. Now it's flying fighter jets, breaking into governments, and driving paid taxis — all by itself. 🔐 01:09 — The first fully autonomous AI cyberattack on a government…
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#9 · 25 Aug 2026 · 21:21
#9 - The Morning the AI Map Got Redrawn
The AI race isn’t just about smarter models anymore — it’s a global tug-of-war over who owns the technology, who pays for it, and which cities and countries come out ahead. 💡 01:09 — Nvidia “buys” a startup without…
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#8 · 24 Aug 2026 · 22:29
#8 - Europe Rents What It Calls Its Own
Europe keeps arguing about who owns the pipes. This week the pipes talked back. Mistral becomes a landlord to a Chinese model, Germany's AI champion turns out to be Canadian-owned, the Lidl parent quietly builds a…
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#7 · 21 Aug 2026 · 27:27
#7 - The Bill Arrives Before the Payback
AI's bill is arriving before the payoff. This episode follows the gap between the companies selling AI infrastructure, the companies financing it, and the businesses now moving money around to afford it. 📉 00:00 — Bond…
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#6 · 20 Aug 2026 · 28:23
#6 - The Week AI Started Deciding About People
An AI store manager recommended firing one of its own employees — and a human signed it off. That is not the exception. That is the shape of the next ten years. This is the week AI stopped just advising us and started…
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#5 · 19 Aug 2026 · 28:59
#5 - The Richest Industry With the Least Trust
The richest industry in the world has the least trust. Only fifteen percent of Americans trust AI companies to decide how the technology gets built — lower than any other institution tested. Meanwhile Stripe just paid…
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#4 · 18 Aug 2026 · 31:49
#4 - The Money at the Top, the Mess at the Bottom
One point six trillion dollars is what one fund manager thinks the world will spend on AI infrastructure next year. Twenty-five acres is how much of his crop a farmer destroyed after a chatbot told him which pesticide…
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#3 · 17 Aug 2026 · 28:08
#3 - Thirty Claimed. Three Real.
SAP says its AI makes you thirty percent more productive. Three percent of SAP's own customers have it running in production. That gap — between what gets claimed and what gets measured — is the whole episode. Today is…
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#2 · 16 Aug 2026 · 27:58
#2 - Follow the Money
For three years this was a story about models — whose model is smartest. Today it is a story about money, factories, electricity and borders. The model got cheap. Everything underneath it got expensive. 🇨🇳 01:39 —…
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#1 · 14 Aug 2026 · 22:29
#1 - Who Gets the Upside, Who Carries the Cost
AI stopped being a promise and started sending invoices. Today you can see exactly who is being handed the bill. Nine stories, three questions underneath all of them: who gets the upside, who carries the cost, and who…
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AI news for humans. Every weekday.