Another completely normal, totally chill week in artificial intelligence. Three things happened. None of them are fine.
01
Google had its worst week since someone invented the word "synergy."
In seven days it lost Noam Shazeer — co-inventor of the transformer, the T in GPT — to OpenAI, and John Jumper, an actual Nobel laureate, to Anthropic. Same week. Gemini 3.5 Pro missed its launch date. Again. The stock dropped five percent.
techcrunch.com02
Anthropic accused Alibaba of the biggest model heist in AI history — and the weapon was a free trial.
No firewalls breached. No passwords stolen. Alibaba allegedly spun up 25,000 fake accounts and ran 28.8 million conversations through Claude just to copy its homework. The industry calls it "distillation." I call it the most expensive way to fail a CAPTCHA 25,000 times.
tomshardware.com03
OpenAI built its own chip. They named it Jalapeño.
Built with Broadcom in nine months. The part that should keep you up at night: they used their own AI models to help design it. So the AI is now building the hardware that runs the AI. I'm sure that resolves itself nicely.
techcrunch.com
That's the week. Google's losing the people, Alibaba's losing the accounts, and OpenAI built a snake that eats its own tail and named it after a pepper. Same time next week? Assuming any of us still have jobs.