Fri 11 September 2026

OpenAI looked at how much its business customers actually use its products, and found something worth sitting up for. The heaviest-using companies were doing about two and a half times as much as the average one in January. By the end of June they were doing more than eight times as much.

For the whole of last year that gap was steady at about double. It has come apart in six months.

What separates the two groups is almost embarrassingly ordinary. It is not money, and it is not which company's product they buy. It is whether anyone has bothered to set up saved instructions and connections to their own systems — the equivalent of writing down how you like things done. At the leading firms about one in five people have. At ordinary firms it is one in thirty.

At OpenAI itself, nineteen in twenty people have. So even the leaders are early.

The thing to take from this is not that machines are replacing people. It is that some companies are quietly getting several times more work out of the same tools, using a feature that costs nothing.

Connor Leahy built some of the first freely available systems of this kind. He now runs an organisation arguing that building a machine cleverer than all of us should be a criminal offence.

His argument turns on a distinction most of this debate skips. You can buy uranium ore on Amazon and keep it on your desk quite safely. Weapons-grade uranium is illegal. He says AI is the same: ordinary tools are good and he uses them, but a machine that can out-compete people at everything is a different substance entirely, and the industry benefits from blurring the two.

He would pass two laws. Make it a crime to build such a machine, including trying and failing — the way attempting to build a nuclear weapon is already a crime. And require anyone running the very largest experiments to register them, because those cost billions and there are only a handful of companies that could.

His picture of where we are: driving at 120mph through thick fog, knowing there is a cliff somewhere but not where. "Before we argue about the speed, let's first pull over."

Worth noting because it answers something recorded in this knowledge base a few days ago. A panel of investors dismissed slowing down by saying there is no mechanism to do it. Leahy has named one. Whether it would work is arguable. That it exists is not.

Roman Yampolskiy is an academic who has been warning about this since 2011, and his figure gets quoted everywhere.

The title of his interview says 99.9999%. The description underneath says 99%. In the conversation itself he says 99.999%. Three different numbers for one claim, in one piece of media.

This knowledge base records that he considers the risk overwhelming. It does not repeat any of the three as a quantity, because a number that cannot hold still inside its own video is not a measurement — it is a way of saying "very".

That is not a reason to dismiss him. His argument has parts worth keeping, including a good one about medicine: we solved protein folding without building a general-purpose superintelligence, so cure the specific disease with the specific tool, keep the profits, and skip the rest.

"I thought when we got to GPT-4 that very quickly after that there was going to be much more disruption," he said. "I think I was wrong about a few things, but one in terms of the speed. The economy just has so much inertia."

Then he said something more revealing, about himself. He has a tool that could do most of his computer work for him. He still clicks between apps. He still scrolls through his email. He still keeps a to-do list the old way.

"By revealed preference, I have a better way to do it now and I still do it the old way."

If you have ever wondered why your own workplace has not changed much despite everyone agreeing it should, there is the answer, from the person with the least excuse for it.

The video has been watched 132 million times. There is no clicking in it. People pace around a room talking, while the machine does the work on screen — one job in front of them, another quietly running behind.

Two reviewers who spent proper time with it landed in the same place. One said she is "hands off my computer all the time now". Another concluded that almost any routine task done on a computer can now be at least partly handed over.

It is not uniformly brilliant. Several developers complained it writes poor website design and untidy code, and one investor said flatly that for his own work he sees no improvement in programming at all.

That contradiction is the point, and it is worth understanding. Some releases do what you already do, better. This one is being sold as letting you do things you could not do before — which is why people testing it against their usual tasks came away unimpressed, and people who tried something new came away startled.

A popular free tool called OpenClaw was rebuilt from scratch, with 933 people contributing. The headline change is that two people can now open the same working session with the same assistant — either can step in, add what they know, or take over when it gets stuck.

One of the people who built it described handing a half-finished job to a colleague. Normally that means writing everything down: why you chose what you chose, what you already tried, what is only in your head. Instead they both simply worked in the same conversation. As he put it, the session itself became the handover document.

It is early and they say so. Who owns the work, who is allowed in, who decides — all unresolved.

And it did not go smoothly. One well-known user said the update immediately broke his setup, and that this happens seven times out of ten. A useful reminder that these tools are still rough.

Asked for a picture of Times Square with the reviewer's own advertising on the billboards, it worked out who he was, found his actual short film and his website, and put them up there.

Asked to turn video-game stills into photographs, its first attempt was poor. So it went and found out which actors play the characters, used photographs of them as reference, and tried again. The result, in the reviewer's words, is a photograph that was never taken.

There is a real technical reason these newer tools follow instructions better than the old ones. Ask an older image generator for a wine glass filled to the brim and a clock reading quarter past five, and you will get a half-full glass and a clock at ten past ten — because that is what nearly every photograph it learned from looks like. The newer sort reasons about the request instead, and gives you what you asked for. The trade is that the older kind often produces a prettier picture that is wrong in the details.

The iPhone Duo folds like a passport rather than a book. Closed, it is barely thicker than the ordinary large iPhone. Open, it is the thinnest one Apple has made, and it takes the Apple Pencil, which makes it closer to a small iPad than a phone.

The compromise is how you unlock it. There is no face recognition — just a fingerprint reader in the power button. On a phone that starts at two thousand dollars and runs to $3,199, that is a real step backwards.

The change most people will actually notice is on the ordinary Pro models: the main camera now has a physical aperture that opens and closes like a proper lens, which is the first real camera change in four years.

One oddity worth recording. For the first time, Apple launched its expensive models with no standard iPhone beside them. The cheaper one is said to be coming next year.

Every figure here is Apple's own. The presenter's flight to the event was cancelled, so nobody in this report has held one.