🧠 Unhyped AI: Week 5 Digest

Not anti-AI. Just anti-BS

“I absolutely love your content – simply the best I have seen so far (I follow you on LinkedIn as well).” - Rob

His only “complaint”? There’s too much of it to get through.
Fair point. So this week I’m adding a quick If you only have 15 mins section for exec readers. Four standout posts, then the rest of the week’s writing and podcasts below.

I appreciate the feedback, so I can make this better for you. Keep it coming.

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⏳ If You Only Have 15 Mins… Executive Picks

📊 AI Isn’t the Value Prop. Outcomes Are.
Buyers care less about your model and more about the relief it delivers - fewer false positives, faster triage, and measurable wins. This post distills what enterprise AI buyers actually want, from explainability built-in to augmentation over rip-and-replace. If you sell AI, this checklist could save your next deal.
Read post →

🤖 Agentic AI’s Tautologies and Flips.
Deloitte says agents are valuable because they deliver “agentic value.” I unpack the circular logic, flip each premise, and focus on why autonomy only matters when it drives real gains. Governance belongs upstream, complexity is a warning label, and inevitability isn’t insight.
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🛒 What Your AI Agent Is Really Buying.
Agents don’t shop like humans - or like each other. New research shows even tiny changes in wording or layout can swing decisions. The e-commerce future isn’t persuading people; it’s optimising for models. Think “model-aware storefronts” and a total rewrite of the buying funnel.
Read post →

🌍 AI Colonialism Is Here. Europe Has a Choice.
The US and China are locking in AI dominance through chips, APIs, and compute. Europe still leads ethically - but without infrastructure sovereignty, values are just aspirations. There’s a window to build democratic, federated AI systems… and it’s closing fast.
Read post →

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🎙 This Week’s New Podcast – Episode 7: The Snark Awakens - Dropped Early

“Each week the show is getting better.” –

Ramona C. Truta

We only paid $12 for that review. Statistically, that makes us the best AI podcast per dollar spent. 😂

From GPT-5’s human paradox to the first AI slur (“Clanker”) and AT&T’s breakup-letter memo,

Vin Vashishta

and I cover: why bigger models need more human scaffolding, Shopify’s AI e-commerce masterclass, Meta’s AGI without a map, and the corporate missteps you couldn’t make up.

📺 Watch → | 🎧 Listen →

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📌 The Rest of This Week’s Posts

🎮 Kids Outsmart AI Age Gates.
UK kids bypassed biometric checks with Death Stranding’s Norman Reedus - complete with blinking and smiling on cue. If they can beat age-gates with a PlayStation, “Study Mode” in ChatGPT won’t stop them either.
Read post →

🧭 Persona Vectors & Persuasion Engineering.
Anthropic can now map and steer latent model traits like sycophancy or malice. It’s a breakthrough in alignment - and a tool for engineered influence.
Read post →

⚙ AgentOps as a Discipline.
Agents fail in predictable ways - faulty reasoning, lost memory, broken tool use. It’s time to treat operations as seriously as DevOps.
Read post →

🔀 Agents in Complex Systems.
Dave Snowden warns: the most dangerous systems are those that think they’re ordered but aren’t. Agents risk replacing lived wisdom with confident guesswork.
Read post →

🖼 Pinterest’s Small-Model Breakthrough.
Pinterest beat GPT-4o with XGBoost at massive scale - not by scaling the model, but by scaling the fit between task and abstraction.
Read post →

🎭 Academic ‘Vibe Coding’.
Yes, “vibe coding is a methodology” is a real academic phrase. Peak 2025. 😂
Read post →

📉 After the AI Hype.
LLMs are entering consolidation - orchestration, distribution, and readiness now matter more than novelty. For a longer take on what the future phase of AI looks like, check out my deeper Substack dive.
Read post →

🧠 Temporal Agents & Meaning.
OpenAI’s temporal knowledge graphs + Tony Seale’s business ontologies = agents that can reason in the language of time and meaning.
Read post →

🌌 TAM: The Universe.
Paraphrasing an AI pitch: TAM is every being in the universe. Moat? Existential inevitability. 😂
Read post →

🪜 GPT-5’s Human Paradox.
The more powerful the model, the more it needs us. The more it needs us, the less power the model itself needs. Paradoxical, right?
Read post →

🤖 What Is an Agent?
Three criteria from Duke University: environmental impact, goal-directed behaviour, and state awareness.
Read post →

🪞 AGI & Noosemìa.
From ELIZA to modern LLMs, we’ve projected mind onto mimicry. Now it has a name: Noosemìa.
Read post →

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🎙 Last Week’s Podcast – Episode 6: Surprisingly Not Too Miserable

Geopolitics, layoffs, surveillance, contextual lock-in, and Chipotle doing AI right.
📺 Watch → | 🎧 Listen →

Thanks for reading.

If something here made you pause, that’s the point.
And if it made you laugh, even better - because we’re going to need humour if we’re going to make it through the hype.

Until next week,
Stuart x

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