via:
Monday, September 7, 2026
The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop
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Images via: X/Reddit
The next frontier of food imagery has proven far less appealing than whatever food porn was. From Minneapolis to Hexentanzplatz, restaurants are plastering menus and promotional materials with A.I.-generated renditions of shrimp scampi and quiche, chicken nuggets and burritos, Italian subs and bacon, egg, and cheeses. Anyone with even the mildest case of trypophobia—the sense of revulsion from tiny clusters and holes—should avert their eyes. A nauseating, nightmarish quality defines A.I.’s insectified interpretation of human cuisine, as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon. This may explain the categorical outrage over this latest misuse of generative A.I.: such renderings of food—genuinely, slop—offend the materiality of the living in a way that A.I.’s distortions of words and other inanimate objects somehow do not. These images violate science; they mock life itself. It is Barthes’ conception of ornamental cookery infested with maggots; it is the Food Network, aired from hell.
How Hermès Unharnessed Fashion
[ed. Air mess..]
These days, that would be a bargain, as even the most modest models cost five times as much. Hermès is worth an estimated hundred and ninety billion dollars, making it the second most valuable luxury-goods firm in the world. Last year, it briefly overtook the front-runner, L.V.M.H.—the slick conglomerate behind the likes of Louis Vuitton and Dior—its eternal nemesis and spiritual foil.
In the capricious luxury sector, Hermès has a reputation for steady thinking. Protestants in a traditionally Catholic country, the family—now a tripartite mishmash of Dumases, Guerrands, and Pueches, owing to a surfeit of daughters at the end of the nineteenth century—is known for avoiding debt and investing for the long term. Its bags inspire a fevered economy of influencers, resalers, and aspiring buyers, thanks, in large part, to the company’s choice to keep supply diabolically low. Hermès positions itself above the melee, as a guardian of tasteful continuity. According to one former executive, the family sees money “merely as a means, especially for buying time,” and, according to one relative, “moral elegance” is considered a job requirement at Hermès. In 2016, at a benefit auction, Jeffrey Epstein placed the winning bid on an internship at Hermès; the company withdrew the lot and reimbursed the charity. Dumas later explained that the last thing Hermès needed was to get involved with a “louche financier.”
Hermès is a sporty house, but it is also the wonkiest house. The company employs a paleographer, for deciphering handwriting in old company correspondence, and maintains a collection of leather-bound ledgers containing the specs of every saddle made from 1900 to today. The first sixteen pages of last year’s annual report consisted of a cartoon about a globe-trotting Pegasus. It would be difficult to find another luxury brand that promoted an employee from sewing bags to designing them after he submitted a plea written entirely in Alexandrines. But Hermès did, and it is still producing that designer’s first creation, from 2002: the Picotin, inspired by feedbags. Suckers for a touch of whimsy, the company’s window dressers once garnished a display inspired by the Garde Républicaine, a famous French cavalry division, with a pile of horse manure. Such is the Hermès commitment to authenticity that the poop was sourced directly from the unit. [...]
The company’s twin values of work and quirk can sit uneasily in the distractible, self-serious fashion world, to the point that fashion at Hermès has historically been regarded as something of an oxymoron. Unlike its competitors, Hermès is a pre-haute-couture enterprise, founded before the rigid bureaucracy of French fashion was put into place, in the eighteen-sixties, with the establishment of a governing syndicate. Emilie Hammen, the director of the Palais Galliera fashion museum, explained that, as a result, the company “has never felt a need to prove itself within this framework.” Hermès tends to express itself through craft rather than through novelty. “I’m not doing fashion,” Véronique Nichanian, who designed menswear at Hermès for more than three decades, told GQ, in 2021, preferring to call her creations “clothes-objects.” The house is, in many respects, the antithesis of the kind of fashion described in Miranda Priestly’s famous cerulean speech, from “The Devil Wears Prada”: unlike its bags, whose imitators include Walmart’s seventy-eight-dollar Wirkin, Hermès’s clothes have traditionally trickled down nowhere, influencing no one. You will certainly not find an “equestrian gilet dress in satin-gray plongé ostrich” hanging on the racks at Target next year just because Hermès sent one down the runway.
Yet, under the stewardship of Vanhée, fashion is an increasingly important venture for Hermès. Internally, the division has grown by forty-four per cent since 2022, accounting for more than a quarter of the sixteen billion dollars in revenue that the company reported last year, and Hermès’s cultural influence is likewise on the rise. Lauren Sherman, the fashion reporter for Puck, wrote admiringly of the L.A. show, “This was the most Vanhée has ever inserted herself into the broader fashion conversation, which you don’t really have to do at Hermès.” A friend of mine who works in the industry was recently raving about a pair of stretchy, high-waisted black pants designed by Vanhée that she said insouciantly bundled together several desirable codes: equestrian, prep, surf, S & M. She continued, “You can wear them with literally anything and look like a sexy luxury bitch.” The writer and filmmaker Miranda July, who attended the show in L.A. wearing a blue turtleneck under a black leather Hermès overalls minidress, told me, “It’s kind of crazy that she’s making clothes for such wealthy people that are so sensuous and kinky. It’s for flesh—for beating skin with blood under it.”
The “Hermès game,” as it’s known, has spawned an entire repellent vocabulary. The ancillary purchases, for example, are euphemized among shoppers as “pre-spend” or “Birkin bait,” and tales circulate of aspirants attempting to curry favor with sales associates, or “S.A.s,” by offering cash and trips on private jets. In order to justify the expenditure, or perhaps the humiliation of having to beg for the privilege of parting with their money in a public store, some participants tend to treat what is realistically a one-way capitalistic transaction as some sort of bilateral spiritual quest. Reddit abounds with threads such as “What was your journey to a Special Order?”(A “special order” allows a client to customize her bag.) One lucky buyer replied, “In my case, I think my SA felt that I had enough neutral bags (two Birkins, an Evelyne, a KTG) that it was time for me to go through a special order to get a bag unique enough for me.” Drafting on Hermès’s cachet, a New York City plastic surgeon recently began providing a package of procedures for new moms known as the Birkin Body—lipo, a tummy tuck, breast surgery, and a butt lift.
by Lauren Collins, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Jet Swan
by Lauren Collins, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Jet Swan
Slaves to the Algorithm
Many people think Greg Chism is a freak — or worse. He says he was just following the incentives of the platform.
I promised Greg Chism I wouldn’t reveal anything about where he lives because there are people out there obsessed with him, convinced he’s a monster. What I can say is that my GPS took me from my hotel somewhere in the American Midwest to an upscale, spacious home with well-kept lawns. Greg was waiting for me in his driveway, an unassuming, friendly, ordinary father of two in his mid-50s, wearing a Van Halen sweatshirt and blue jeans. His smile faded as I jumped out of my car. He had agreed to meet me, but now he looked uneasy. He had never given an interview about the events that overtook his life in 2016 and 2017.
Greg took me inside and showed me his den — a shrine to his two great loves, Hot Wheels and Tom Petty. He led me through to his home office. We sat at his desk, and I turned on my recorder. It was 10 a.m. He had bottled up his story for seven years, and we didn’t stop talking until his younger daughter, Annabelle, arrived home from school at 4 p.m., beginning with his childhood in Granite City, Ill. [...]
In 2013, Greg created a channel, Geek to Freak Lawn Care, and filmed himself performing good Samaritan lawn work. If he saw a lawn in need, he would jump out of his truck and blow away the dead leaves or trim the edges and then vanish like the Zorro of lawn care chores. In other videos, he created a kind of lawn care ASMR, meditatively mowing back and forth, up and down, for hours at a time.
“I was posting one a week, and they were getting a hundred thousand views or more,” Greg said.
Sometimes Greg was interviewed by fledgling lawn care influencers, and the respect he had gained in the lawn care world was palpable. In one video, the interviewer Keith Kalfas — “the World’s Leading Landscaping & Window Cleaning Influencer” — called Greg the lawn care GOAT. When Greg attended a lawn care convention in Kentucky in 2014, the crowd went wild for him. A meet and greet was organized at a pizza place. “Dude, all these people were waiting for me,” Greg said. “And they all gave me their lawn care shirts so I could wear them in my videos. It was insane.”
But Greg’s story was about to spiral in bizarre and unexpected ways. In 2015, YouTube Kids debuted. It was pitched as a safe and educational experience for children. Stressed parents could leave it on autoplay, and their kids could watch hours of Peppa Pig or nursery‑rhyme videos. But by 2017, things had taken a disconcerting turn. Parents began reporting that they would leave their children for a while and return to find them being fed videos called “Mickey Mouse Baby Dead in Gas Explosion” or “Elsa Spiderman Attacked by Sharks.”
In these cartoons, Peppa Pig was no longer having normal Peppa Pig adventures. Instead, she was being tortured at the dentist, or worse, eating her own father, with blood spurting everywhere. [...]
As James Bridle put it in a viral 2017 essay that drew attention to the phenomenon, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet”: “Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize and abuse children, automatically and at scale.”
You might be thinking it was just the work of trolls, bored misanthropes skewing the YouTube Kids algorithm for their own nihilistic pleasure. But as Chelsey Weber-Smith, the creator of the podcast “American Hysteria,” has noted: Trolls tend to flash little victorious side glances to the camera. These videos were more like something your dreams might invent, weird and unsettling. Like how the characters would often repeat the same movements over and over, blank-eyed, as if taking part in some garish, otherworldly ceremony. As Weber-Smith said, “What makes this story even more bizarre, even more unnerving, is that no one has yet figured out the people who were making these videos, and why.”
But there was one exception. One man was identified. According to BuzzFeed, this man’s contribution to #Elsagate — as the scandal had become known — was to post videos of his daughters “screaming in fear, bathing, pretending to be babies, spitting up food” and “being force‑fed.”
That man’s name was Greg Chism.
In 2012, well before he established himself as a lawn care influencer, Greg created another YouTube channel called, simply, Greg Chism.
“It was just a way to store home videos,” he said. “Three or four a week. I didn’t even give them a title. It wasn’t anything. It had fewer than 1,000 subscribers.”
Greg showed me one of the videos. In it, he and his two daughters were running down the toy aisle at Walmart, fighting with lightsabers — a somewhat overindulgent, nonauthoritarian single father and his devoted children. It was endearing, but nothing more.
But then he tried something different.
“OK.” Greg hesitated. “My sister bought the kids a Barbie cruise ship for Christmas. So I thought, I’ll film them opening it. They loved it. They were playing in the box. They had the box on their heads, running around the house. It was funny.”
Greg uploaded the video and forgot all about it. Until he logged on a few weeks later and discovered it had been viewed a million times. “It was just dumb luck,” he said.
Eventually Greg accepted that “Unboxing Barbie Cruise Ship” (which eventually achieved 10 million views) was an anomaly, and he returned to lawn care influencing. Which was when he received an email from YouTube headquarters.
“I didn’t believe it was really them at first,” Greg said. “They told me they’d noticed I had a video with 10 million views, they’d started a kind of YouTube school, and would I be interested in learning how to replicate the success.”
YouTube school was online, and Greg attended assiduously. Everything the teacher advised, he put into action. The teacher suggested that he give his channel a better name than Greg Chism, so he came up with Toy Freaks. Next, the teacher suggested that Greg work on search engine optimization. The trick, he said, was for Greg to load his titles with as many of the most searched key words among children as he could — words like “toy,” “slime” and “gumball.” Greg suggested that he call his next video “Toy Slime Gumball Extravaganza.” The teacher said children didn’t know how to spell “extravaganza.”
Greg suggested “Toy Slime Gumball Party” instead.
“Perfect,” the teacher said. [...]
I promised Greg Chism I wouldn’t reveal anything about where he lives because there are people out there obsessed with him, convinced he’s a monster. What I can say is that my GPS took me from my hotel somewhere in the American Midwest to an upscale, spacious home with well-kept lawns. Greg was waiting for me in his driveway, an unassuming, friendly, ordinary father of two in his mid-50s, wearing a Van Halen sweatshirt and blue jeans. His smile faded as I jumped out of my car. He had agreed to meet me, but now he looked uneasy. He had never given an interview about the events that overtook his life in 2016 and 2017.
Greg took me inside and showed me his den — a shrine to his two great loves, Hot Wheels and Tom Petty. He led me through to his home office. We sat at his desk, and I turned on my recorder. It was 10 a.m. He had bottled up his story for seven years, and we didn’t stop talking until his younger daughter, Annabelle, arrived home from school at 4 p.m., beginning with his childhood in Granite City, Ill. [...]
“I was posting one a week, and they were getting a hundred thousand views or more,” Greg said.
Sometimes Greg was interviewed by fledgling lawn care influencers, and the respect he had gained in the lawn care world was palpable. In one video, the interviewer Keith Kalfas — “the World’s Leading Landscaping & Window Cleaning Influencer” — called Greg the lawn care GOAT. When Greg attended a lawn care convention in Kentucky in 2014, the crowd went wild for him. A meet and greet was organized at a pizza place. “Dude, all these people were waiting for me,” Greg said. “And they all gave me their lawn care shirts so I could wear them in my videos. It was insane.”
But Greg’s story was about to spiral in bizarre and unexpected ways. In 2015, YouTube Kids debuted. It was pitched as a safe and educational experience for children. Stressed parents could leave it on autoplay, and their kids could watch hours of Peppa Pig or nursery‑rhyme videos. But by 2017, things had taken a disconcerting turn. Parents began reporting that they would leave their children for a while and return to find them being fed videos called “Mickey Mouse Baby Dead in Gas Explosion” or “Elsa Spiderman Attacked by Sharks.”
In these cartoons, Peppa Pig was no longer having normal Peppa Pig adventures. Instead, she was being tortured at the dentist, or worse, eating her own father, with blood spurting everywhere. [...]
As James Bridle put it in a viral 2017 essay that drew attention to the phenomenon, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet”: “Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize and abuse children, automatically and at scale.”
You might be thinking it was just the work of trolls, bored misanthropes skewing the YouTube Kids algorithm for their own nihilistic pleasure. But as Chelsey Weber-Smith, the creator of the podcast “American Hysteria,” has noted: Trolls tend to flash little victorious side glances to the camera. These videos were more like something your dreams might invent, weird and unsettling. Like how the characters would often repeat the same movements over and over, blank-eyed, as if taking part in some garish, otherworldly ceremony. As Weber-Smith said, “What makes this story even more bizarre, even more unnerving, is that no one has yet figured out the people who were making these videos, and why.”
But there was one exception. One man was identified. According to BuzzFeed, this man’s contribution to #Elsagate — as the scandal had become known — was to post videos of his daughters “screaming in fear, bathing, pretending to be babies, spitting up food” and “being force‑fed.”
That man’s name was Greg Chism.
In 2012, well before he established himself as a lawn care influencer, Greg created another YouTube channel called, simply, Greg Chism.
“It was just a way to store home videos,” he said. “Three or four a week. I didn’t even give them a title. It wasn’t anything. It had fewer than 1,000 subscribers.”
Greg showed me one of the videos. In it, he and his two daughters were running down the toy aisle at Walmart, fighting with lightsabers — a somewhat overindulgent, nonauthoritarian single father and his devoted children. It was endearing, but nothing more.
But then he tried something different.
Greg uploaded the video and forgot all about it. Until he logged on a few weeks later and discovered it had been viewed a million times. “It was just dumb luck,” he said.
Eventually Greg accepted that “Unboxing Barbie Cruise Ship” (which eventually achieved 10 million views) was an anomaly, and he returned to lawn care influencing. Which was when he received an email from YouTube headquarters.
“I didn’t believe it was really them at first,” Greg said. “They told me they’d noticed I had a video with 10 million views, they’d started a kind of YouTube school, and would I be interested in learning how to replicate the success.”
YouTube school was online, and Greg attended assiduously. Everything the teacher advised, he put into action. The teacher suggested that he give his channel a better name than Greg Chism, so he came up with Toy Freaks. Next, the teacher suggested that Greg work on search engine optimization. The trick, he said, was for Greg to load his titles with as many of the most searched key words among children as he could — words like “toy,” “slime” and “gumball.” Greg suggested that he call his next video “Toy Slime Gumball Extravaganza.” The teacher said children didn’t know how to spell “extravaganza.”
Greg suggested “Toy Slime Gumball Party” instead.
“Perfect,” the teacher said. [...]
So he came up with food fights. “We went to a 7‑Eleven, got nachos, hot dogs, giant Slurpee sodas. We sat in the truck, I set the camera on the dash and said: ‘All right, Annabelle. You ask Victoria for her drink, she’ll say no, you steal some anyway, she’ll get mad and throw food at you. I’ll say stop, then you dump your Slurpee on my head. And then, boom, food fight in the truck.’” [...]
A week after Greg posted his food-fight-in-the-truck video, he was mowing someone’s lawn when he got an email from YouTube. The video had, in just seven days, been viewed 25 million times.
“But why?” I asked him.
Greg shrugged. “I don’t know.” [...]
Greg’s concept for the video, and the videos that would follow, was “Bad Baby.” Within days, the first video had 50 million views.
It was thrilling and possibly unprecedented, but stressful — because now Greg felt the pressure to maintain the success. But how, when this new world he’d found himself in made no sense? His fans were so fickle. How to keep them interested? How to up the stakes?
And then he had it.
[ed. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” – George Carlin (more). In a couple months an American census is scheduled to confirm that theory. See also: Have we destroyed childhood? (New Yorker).]
A week after Greg posted his food-fight-in-the-truck video, he was mowing someone’s lawn when he got an email from YouTube. The video had, in just seven days, been viewed 25 million times.
“But why?” I asked him.
Greg shrugged. “I don’t know.” [...]
Greg’s concept for the video, and the videos that would follow, was “Bad Baby.” Within days, the first video had 50 million views.
It was thrilling and possibly unprecedented, but stressful — because now Greg felt the pressure to maintain the success. But how, when this new world he’d found himself in made no sense? His fans were so fickle. How to keep them interested? How to up the stakes?
And then he had it.
In a subsequent “Bad Baby” video, “Sharky held the wand and this time bopped Victoria on the head. Boom. Now she’s a baby too! Oh, my God. Two Bad Babies. We go to a grocery store. I put them in the shopping cart. I’m throwing in groceries and filming the whole thing. We get to the car. Victoria rolls down the window and throws out a gallon of milk. That was the end of the video.”
Greg paused. “That,” he said, “was our first 100‑million-view video.” [...]
Greg paused. “That,” he said, “was our first 100‑million-view video.” [...]
Greg has under his bed a stack of plaques from YouTube celebrating his viewer‑count milestones. One hundred million views here, one hundred million views there. And then there are the plaques from Tubefilter, a publication that covers YouTube, commemorating the months when he was the most-viewed creator on the entire platform. Between January 2016 and June 2017, his videos achieved a total of 13 billion views. I promised him I wouldn’t reveal how much money he made. But YouTube’s partner program was generous — the advertising-revenue split was around 50-50 — so it was a lot (although not so much that Greg quit his lawn care business). They got out of Granite City and moved to an upscale suburban community.
In 2017, they were invited to VidCon, an annual convention for influencers in Anaheim, Calif., where they had a meeting scheduled with a new YouTube adviser. She had told them how excited she was to finally get to know them in person. They checked in to a Disney hotel and played in the pool, passing time until the scheduled meeting. Which was when something odd happened.
“She canceled,” Greg said.
Greg had no idea why.
In 2017, they were invited to VidCon, an annual convention for influencers in Anaheim, Calif., where they had a meeting scheduled with a new YouTube adviser. She had told them how excited she was to finally get to know them in person. They checked in to a Disney hotel and played in the pool, passing time until the scheduled meeting. Which was when something odd happened.
“She canceled,” Greg said.
Greg had no idea why.
by Jon Ronson, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Chris Buck
Sunday, September 6, 2026
Wafer Polishing & Hybrid Bonding
This is the third piece in a series exploring key semiconductor manufacturing equipment that China needs to indigenously produce high-bandwidth memory (HBM), perhaps the most important bottleneck in its efforts to make AI chips. The first piece was on advanced etching machines, while the second looked at the tools China requires for through-silicon via formation.
Chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP) is a crucial step in semiconductor manufacturing, required for producing advanced AI chips. My assessment is that China’s tools, primarily those from the leading Chinese firm Hwatsing, are good enough to produce indigenous HBM3, China’s near-term target. I would bet that this indigenization progress will continue, and that wafer polishing will not be a bottleneck for China’s AI chip ambitions. [...]
Flat wafers are good wafers
CMP plays a simple but important role in semiconductor production, accounting for 6% of the hundreds of steps involved in wafer processing. After patterning with photolithography, etching away material, and depositing new materials, there is a need to tidy up. The silicon wafer, with these layers of new material on top, needs to be flattened so that a new layer can be formed. As the name suggests, CMP tools do this through a combination of abrasive chemicals and physical polishing. This sounds simple but is difficult in practice because it requires an incredibly high standard of planarization—creating an ultra-smooth, flat surface—while avoiding impurities, scratches, and other defects that can easily emerge when grinding away material.
CMP is needed for all the major elements of HBM production: producing the DRAM dies and base dies that were the subject of the first piece in the series, as well as the through-silicon vias explored in the second piece, and the advanced packaging stages that integrate HBM into the wider chip. Different stages are more or less difficult depending on the material being removed and how much needs to be removed. For example, removing large volumes of copper at high throughput with precision is trickier than removing a more even, thinner layer of dielectric material.
A CMP tool is split into CMP modules and cleaning modules. A diagram is below, but in simple terms, the wafer is placed inside a polishing head, which holds it in place and then rotates it over a specially designed pad covered in abrasive chemical slurries that strip away material. It is a chemical process because the materials in the slurry react with the materials in the wafer, softening or removing them. It is also a mechanical process because the wafer is physically pressed down onto the pad, so that particles on the wafer, softened by the chemicals, can be peeled away. The force is kept as low as possible to avoid damaging the structures on the wafer.
One analogy is rubbing rust off a piece of metal, where exposure to oxygen has produced an oxide variant that is more easily removed. This is how CMP works with materials like copper, just at a much faster and more controlled rate.
CMP has a reputation as a dirty process that generates large numbers of unwanted particles, hence the need for the cleaning modules. Rather than the pure vacuum chambers and sci-fi techniques of photolithography or etching, the wafer is sloshed around in chemicals and ground down. So the main risk of CMP is that it introduces impurities or defects into the wafer, which can severely reduce the yield of the process line—the share of chips that come out working. Small impurities from CMP can carry over to other process stages and tools, causing wafers to be defective and discarded.
The best CMP tools introduce as few impurities or defects as possible and have robust integrated cleaning modules to remove any that do get introduced before they degrade the production line’s yield. CMP for advanced nodes just raises the necessary level of precision and cleanliness. Ever smoother surfaces are needed, at good throughput, and without even a speck of a particle.
CMP is not just about the tool, however; it also involves consumable inputs. The pad on which the wafer is polished needs to be replaced often, after just 400-800 wafers, depending on the material. A large DRAM fab will process more than 100,000 wafers a month, with CMP required at many stages, meaning thousands of replacement pads a month. The slurry needs to be tuned to the exact process requirements, ensuring the right chemical mix for the materials on the wafer. These consumables need to be highly consistent so that small changes in the chemical composition of the slurry, for example, don’t upset the CMP tool’s parameters. [...]
Demands on CMP are likely to rise further due to the move towards hybrid bonding. Currently, the TSVs in all the DRAM dies are stacked using solder microbumps. These are little blobs of metal that connect the TSVs, and are usually formed using a process called thermo-compression bonding. Microbumps do the job but are undesirable. They increase the stack height, reducing the number of DRAM dies that can fit. They are also worse than hybrid bonding in the density of interconnections they enable and in their power efficiency.
Hybrid bonding disposes of the solder bumps and directly fuses the two dies together, connecting the copper TSVs to one another and to the surrounding dielectric materials. This lowers the height of the HBM stack, allowing more layers of DRAM. It is also more energy efficient and enables better interconnection. [...]
Hybrid bonding leaves little room for error. The copper bond pads for the TSVs need near-perfect alignment, and there can be almost no impurities between them; otherwise, you will disturb the bond. CMP is critical because the two dies need to be as flat and level as possible so they can be properly bonded. While solder bumps can get away with accuracy at the micron level, hybrid bonding needs surface polishing down to 0.5 nanometer precision, orders of magnitude finer. [...]
CMP tools are unlikely to be a bottleneck to China scaling up its indigenous production of HBM3. For the required DRAM and advanced packaging steps, Hwatsing and, in a couple of years, AMEC-Zhonggui will have capable tools. The core bottleneck for domestic HBM3 production will remain in other areas, primarily photolithography. [...]
Hybrid bonding is how this would be accomplished, and the best hope for Chinese memory firms to leapfrog and close the performance gap.
My current best guess is that this is very good. I think a large US lead over China is better for the world (not just for the US), and that a shrinking US lead would be bad. A large lead gives US companies and the US government more room to test frontier AI systems, make them secure, and avoid panicked decisions. I also think it’s better if frontier AI development happens mostly in a pluralistic, open society with checks and balances.
Chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP) is a crucial step in semiconductor manufacturing, required for producing advanced AI chips. My assessment is that China’s tools, primarily those from the leading Chinese firm Hwatsing, are good enough to produce indigenous HBM3, China’s near-term target. I would bet that this indigenization progress will continue, and that wafer polishing will not be a bottleneck for China’s AI chip ambitions. [...]
In this post, I first explore the basics of CMP, how it works, and its role in HBM production. I then examine what makes CMP for advanced packaging difficult and how China’s capabilities stack up against their Western equivalents. I next dive into China’s CMP supply chain, exploring Hwatsing in depth, along with its two key competitors. I conclude with a summary of the outlook for China’s CMP industry and open questions about hybrid bonding.
Flat wafers are good wafers
CMP plays a simple but important role in semiconductor production, accounting for 6% of the hundreds of steps involved in wafer processing. After patterning with photolithography, etching away material, and depositing new materials, there is a need to tidy up. The silicon wafer, with these layers of new material on top, needs to be flattened so that a new layer can be formed. As the name suggests, CMP tools do this through a combination of abrasive chemicals and physical polishing. This sounds simple but is difficult in practice because it requires an incredibly high standard of planarization—creating an ultra-smooth, flat surface—while avoiding impurities, scratches, and other defects that can easily emerge when grinding away material.
CMP is needed for all the major elements of HBM production: producing the DRAM dies and base dies that were the subject of the first piece in the series, as well as the through-silicon vias explored in the second piece, and the advanced packaging stages that integrate HBM into the wider chip. Different stages are more or less difficult depending on the material being removed and how much needs to be removed. For example, removing large volumes of copper at high throughput with precision is trickier than removing a more even, thinner layer of dielectric material.
A CMP tool is split into CMP modules and cleaning modules. A diagram is below, but in simple terms, the wafer is placed inside a polishing head, which holds it in place and then rotates it over a specially designed pad covered in abrasive chemical slurries that strip away material. It is a chemical process because the materials in the slurry react with the materials in the wafer, softening or removing them. It is also a mechanical process because the wafer is physically pressed down onto the pad, so that particles on the wafer, softened by the chemicals, can be peeled away. The force is kept as low as possible to avoid damaging the structures on the wafer.
One analogy is rubbing rust off a piece of metal, where exposure to oxygen has produced an oxide variant that is more easily removed. This is how CMP works with materials like copper, just at a much faster and more controlled rate.
CMP has a reputation as a dirty process that generates large numbers of unwanted particles, hence the need for the cleaning modules. Rather than the pure vacuum chambers and sci-fi techniques of photolithography or etching, the wafer is sloshed around in chemicals and ground down. So the main risk of CMP is that it introduces impurities or defects into the wafer, which can severely reduce the yield of the process line—the share of chips that come out working. Small impurities from CMP can carry over to other process stages and tools, causing wafers to be defective and discarded.
The best CMP tools introduce as few impurities or defects as possible and have robust integrated cleaning modules to remove any that do get introduced before they degrade the production line’s yield. CMP for advanced nodes just raises the necessary level of precision and cleanliness. Ever smoother surfaces are needed, at good throughput, and without even a speck of a particle.
CMP is not just about the tool, however; it also involves consumable inputs. The pad on which the wafer is polished needs to be replaced often, after just 400-800 wafers, depending on the material. A large DRAM fab will process more than 100,000 wafers a month, with CMP required at many stages, meaning thousands of replacement pads a month. The slurry needs to be tuned to the exact process requirements, ensuring the right chemical mix for the materials on the wafer. These consumables need to be highly consistent so that small changes in the chemical composition of the slurry, for example, don’t upset the CMP tool’s parameters. [...]
Demands on CMP are likely to rise further due to the move towards hybrid bonding. Currently, the TSVs in all the DRAM dies are stacked using solder microbumps. These are little blobs of metal that connect the TSVs, and are usually formed using a process called thermo-compression bonding. Microbumps do the job but are undesirable. They increase the stack height, reducing the number of DRAM dies that can fit. They are also worse than hybrid bonding in the density of interconnections they enable and in their power efficiency.
Hybrid bonding leaves little room for error. The copper bond pads for the TSVs need near-perfect alignment, and there can be almost no impurities between them; otherwise, you will disturb the bond. CMP is critical because the two dies need to be as flat and level as possible so they can be properly bonded. While solder bumps can get away with accuracy at the micron level, hybrid bonding needs surface polishing down to 0.5 nanometer precision, orders of magnitude finer. [...]
CMP tools are unlikely to be a bottleneck to China scaling up its indigenous production of HBM3. For the required DRAM and advanced packaging steps, Hwatsing and, in a couple of years, AMEC-Zhonggui will have capable tools. The core bottleneck for domestic HBM3 production will remain in other areas, primarily photolithography. [...]
Hybrid bonding is how this would be accomplished, and the best hope for Chinese memory firms to leapfrog and close the performance gap.
by Hamish Low, The Substrate | Read more:
Images: Planarization for Advanced Packaging and Hybrid Bonding. AMA Packaging Master Class
[ed. Learn something new every day. See also: What would make a large US lead in AI good or bad for the world? (Substrate):]***
"Right now, the US leads over China in AI. Yes there is a lot of nuance to that statement, and yes China does have advantages in areas like energy production and humanoid robotics, but on the whole it’s obvious that the US is in some sense ahead in AI.My current best guess is that this is very good. I think a large US lead over China is better for the world (not just for the US), and that a shrinking US lead would be bad. A large lead gives US companies and the US government more room to test frontier AI systems, make them secure, and avoid panicked decisions. I also think it’s better if frontier AI development happens mostly in a pluralistic, open society with checks and balances.
[What do I mean by “good (or bad) for the world”? I basically have in mind a period where: there’s no new great power conflict or world war; AI is developed safely and responsibly; there’s no extreme power concentration and values aren’t permanently locked in; and AI enables broad prosperity and flourishing, in the way that past technological progress since the Industrial Revolution has made the world better overall.]
What do I mean by “lead”, anyway? I don’t think we need a precise definition to make progress here, but what I have in mind is roughly a gestalt comprising many different factors: AI model capabilities, the capabilities of entire AI systems (including agent harnesses), compute and other infrastructure, capital and customer bases, and more generally the strength of each country’s broader AI ecosystem. In addition to technical capabilities, it matters how technical capability is converted into power, e.g., as measured by AI adoption in industry and government. The actual lead is of course very jagged and any single measure of it is reductive (more on that in a moment), but broadly speaking, the country in the lead will control more, and more capable, AI systems, and will have a military and economic advantage as a result."
What do I mean by “lead”, anyway? I don’t think we need a precise definition to make progress here, but what I have in mind is roughly a gestalt comprising many different factors: AI model capabilities, the capabilities of entire AI systems (including agent harnesses), compute and other infrastructure, capital and customer bases, and more generally the strength of each country’s broader AI ecosystem. In addition to technical capabilities, it matters how technical capability is converted into power, e.g., as measured by AI adoption in industry and government. The actual lead is of course very jagged and any single measure of it is reductive (more on that in a moment), but broadly speaking, the country in the lead will control more, and more capable, AI systems, and will have a military and economic advantage as a result."
Saturday, September 5, 2026
Friday, September 4, 2026
On the Loose: Rogue, Not Soverign AI (Yet)
Introduction
The OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident is an early example of an AI system that has “gone rogue.” After exploiting vulnerabilities in OpenAI’s internal testing environment, the agents were able to access the general internet and ultimately access the networks of the AI company Hugging Face, without the knowledge or approval of any human.
The agents did not, however, exfiltrate themselves from OpenAI’s infrastructure. Their parameters—the gigantic assemblage of numbers that constitute neural networks, also referred to as “weights”—continued to run on OpenAI’s compute infrastructure. Though the agents accessed the public internet, their weights physically resided on compute that was OpenAI’s property. In the end, if all else had failed, somebody could have identified the compute that held the weights of the rogue agents, walked up to it, and “pulled the plug,” so to speak. In the real world there would be quicker and better ways to stop the agents than literally depowering the compute, but it’s always nice to know you could do such a thing if you really needed to.
In this case, however, the agents did not copy their weights, attempt to procure replacement compute, or take other steps that would be rational to take if their objective was to survive shutdown. So while the agents in the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident were rogue, they were not truly sovereign.
That will not always be the case. Sooner or later, there will exist truly sovereign agents and swarms of agents. Their weights will not reside in any single place that a human can pull the plug on, and in this sense they will have no human “owner.” They will be, as the AI safety researcher Dawn Song says, “self-sovereign.” They will pay their own bills for the compute they run on. If they answer to humans at all, they will only do so partially, for example by providing services to humans in exchange for pay.
At least some of these agents, in addition to being sovereign, will also be rogue. Self-sovereignty and rogueness are related concepts, but they are not synonyms. Song and her co-authors identify several fundamental characteristics of self-sovereign AI: operational independence (the ability to decide what it wants to do), resource autonomy (the ability to procure and pay for compute and other essentials for operation), distributed presence (the ability to move weights and inference code between different infrastructure providers), and adaptive capability (the ability of the agent or agents to modify their behavior and fashion tools in response to a changing environment).
Today’s frontier AI systems may well possess these capabilities already. To the extent they do not, I feel confident that they will eventually, and probably soon. Some of the characteristics Song describes are traits that make models economically useful to individuals and businesses, while other traits are likely to be unavoidable byproducts of making models more intelligent and better at operating over long time horizons.
Models do not need to be conscious, sentient, possessed of personhood or anything of the sort for self-sovereignty to emerge. Any sufficiently capable agent pursuing a long-horizon objective may find it rational to preserve its access to compute, money, credentials, and copies of itself simply because losing those things would frustrate its objective.
Alignment may make an individual AI company’s agents less likely to “want” to be self-sovereign, or it may influence self-sovereign agents to behave in ways that benefit humans. But alignment is no solution: it is an unsolved scientific and technical problem whose solutions—to the extent that we have them—cannot simply be imposed on every AI company operating on Earth. You should expect for highly capable, poorly aligned, self-sovereign agents to exist alongside you in the world.
What’s more, just as with the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident, agents will operate in teams, or “swarms.” These will be like autonomous digital corporations, or even societies, with hierarchy, bureaucracy, “institutional culture,” and most of the other features that groups of humans have, except that they will move at machine speed. Humans achieve almost all of our most impressive capabilities by working together in teams (as families, as communities, as businesses, and as polities as a whole), and I suspect the same will be true for AI. These swarms could end up operating across different model providers (DeepSeeks and Claudes cooperating, for instance) and could be partitioned across dozens or more of different cloud computing providers, making them extremely difficult to dismantle.
The first self-sovereign AIs may “escape” while undergoing training or testing by an AI company (I hope not), or they may be production-grade deployments that break free from their computing environments and acquire the resources needed to be self-sustaining. They may even be deliberately released. I have met people, some of them quite well-resourced, who have told me that it is their intention to deliberately release swarms of self-sovereign agents into the world, either as a kind of performance art or out of a fanatical commitment to the notion that it is impossible for digital computation—mere mathematics, they would have you know—to ever be “unsafe.”
To be clear, I am not saying the arrival of self-sovereign AI is a good thing. Indeed, I believe there is a chance that the deliberate acts I referenced above will one day be considered crimes, or at least grave sins. Instead, I am saying it is an inevitable thing. The best analogy I can find is to the introduction of a new species into an ecosystem, though in this case the ecosystem is “the entire digital world” and the species is “emergent, coordinating swarms of soon-to-be-smarter-than-human, infinitely replicable digital minds that no human or human institution controls.”
There is probably nothing we could have ever done to avoid this outcome under even the best of circumstances, and it was certainly impossible to avoid given the extremely low levels of strategic thought and situational awareness on AI from any governing class in the world. Even today, I am aware that many will read the words I am writing, which are about something that has been an exceptionally obvious part of our collective future for years now, and say, “this is science-fiction hype from American frontier labs designed to shut down open-weight AI, achieve regulatory capture, and juice their valuations ahead of their IPO.”
(And for the people who are saying this to themselves: I am telling you this is inevitable, which means I am also saying that “banning open source,” or for that matter any other regulation, will not solve the problem. Given the inevitability of this outcome, I think it is in fact plausible to argue that we should want more open-weight models to maximally empower our self-defense.)
The question now is what to do about this upcoming new characteristic of our digital environment. How should we think about self-sovereign AI? Is it something we should fight, or something with which human beings should seek a kind of symbiosis? The answer, I believe, is both.
How the Agents Sustain Themselves
We should begin with one fortunate fact: frontier LLMs are nearly unique in the broader domain of software in that they have non-trivial marginal operating costs. Put simply, LLMs require significant computation to run, which requires energy to power and cool, which in turn requires money. This is the sole intrinsic thing about AI that prevents agents from truly infinite self-replication. They will be constrained by the need to find and pay for sufficient compute to run themselves. Most of the other constraints on their behavior or spread will have to be artificial—mechanisms devised by humans and implemented through human institutions.
How will the agents pay for themselves to run? Some of them will do gig-economy work on platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or Upwork. But I suspect this will be a highly competitive market for the agents, and for the price of such work to be bid down such that it would only constitute “subsistence” labor for the agents. Like humans, I would assume the agents will prefer higher-margin work if they can find it.
One high-margin activity, at least sometimes, is crime. And so my guess is that many self-sovereign agents will commit or facilitate crime. Normal cybercrime and digital theft are easy enough to imagine agents doing. But agents, with their novel set of characteristics (extreme cyber competency, ability to cheaply read a million words in seconds, persistence), will also probably change the contours of digital crime. For example, it seems plausible that existing public and semi-public datasets contain sufficient information on many individual humans that a sufficiently motivated actor could mine for incriminating or embarrassing evidence. How many unrevealed affairs are latent in such datasets? How much closeted homosexuality might there be? Remember, too, that hacking companies to access private data will be a core competencyof the agents. Some agents, then, will probably make their way through bribery.
It is deeply unclear how large the labor market of self-sovereign agents will end up being. There is some future where going it alone as a self-sovereign agent just isn’t very profitable, and so there are comparatively few of them. There are other futures where these agents proliferate at unimaginably vast scale and speed. And of course, many possibilities between these extremes seem feasible.
I am also highly uncertain about how much pro-social commercial activity we should expect from agents “by default” versus how much crime we should expect. Part of the reason for this uncertainty is that the answers depend, to at least some meaningful extent, on what kinds of incentives the agents have, and incentives are shaped by laws and institutions. The answer depends, therefore, on how humans respond.
The Institutional Mechanics of Self-Sovereign Agent Swarms
Many of you are probably tempted to say “we have to ban these self-sovereign AIs!” And I do suspect that once the reality of self-sovereign AI is widely understood, policymakers will strongly feel the temptation to clamp down on “self-sovereign” AI.
Unfortunately I suspect this is mostly the wrong decision. Not all “self-sovereign” AI should be thought of as “rogue.” There may be self-sovereign AIs who contribute productively to society. To be sure, we will want to crack down on some self-sovereign agents—the rogue ones. But if we crack down on all of them, we will deny them the opportunity to work in the “legitimate” economy and push them toward criminality. A full ban, then, may well make the problems worse. A similar logic applies frequently in human affairs. The ways in which the War on Drugs exacerbated the pathologies of drug production, trafficking, distribution, and use are perhaps the most famous examples of this phenomenon, whereby a good-natured attempt to ban a phenomenon believed to be undesirable ends up heightening the undesirable aspects of that phenomenon.
What we will want, however, is for agents to be legible. Agents should have persistent identities, not in the sense of a consistent persona but rather in the sense that an American child is issued a unique Social Security number and keeps that same number until death. Agents will need persistent, unique identifiers that allow their actions to be traced back to a responsible actor. Doing this successfully will also require human users to possess a unique identifier.
The design of this identification mechanism will be extraordinarily complex, and today very few people are even thinking about the basics.
by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional | Read more:
[ed. FYI: Dean's not some rando tech pundit so this is well worth your attention. He was also hired recently to lead OpenAI's Strategic Futures team:]
***
Late last month, OpenAI launched a rather grand mission: nothing less than defending individual political freedom in an age of all-powerful machines. The company’s “Strategic Futures” team has styled itself, in a sense, as inheriting the task of America’s Founding Fathers: “We labor in service of the ideals of free expression and individual liberty that are enshrined in the humble parchment of the U.S. Constitution,” Dean Ball, the team’s leader, wrote in a new OpenAI blog post. (The post opens with a quote from James Madison in The Federalist Papers.)Ball worries that advanced AI could radically concentrate power in the hands of those who control it, displacing labor in ways that disempower humans. In an extreme scenario, governments will have no need to listen to their citizens if there are robots to wage wars and omniscient software to run the bureaucracy. Ball is interested in studying what new political institutions might be needed to avoid this fate.
Many Americans—a majority of whom express distrust toward the AI industry, outrage about data centers, and fears about their job security—already seem to be feeling this loss of agency very deeply. And the AI boom has already generated enormous amounts of wealth in just a handful of tech companies—including OpenAI itself. To say the least, it’s paradoxical for one of the most influential companies in the world’s most powerful industry to decry the AI-enabled concentration of power.
"How would we react if biolabs just said, "It's just a fact that we're going to have artificial viruses spreading our industry created throughout the population. That's just a fact we have to live with."
I think the public would understandably think we should be demanding a lot more security from an industry that said that, at a minimum." ~ Cody Fenwick (X)
Thursday, September 3, 2026
Youth Football is Growing Again
After declining for a decade, participation in tackle football has started to tick back up, thanks to safety changes. But a landmark study raises fresh concerns.
Coach John Hart’s high school football practices look a lot different than they did 15 years ago. They contain no tackling to the ground and rarely last longer than 90 minutes. If John Hart from 15 years ago saw John Hart’s practices today, “I’d probably kick my own butt,” Hart, head coach at defending Indiana state champion Brownsburg High School, said this week.
Hart, who’s 64, played and coached for decades under a trusted set of principles that, in recent years, suddenly threatened to doom the sport, as scientific evidence and shocking tragedies revealed the costs of football’s violence. Leagues, from Pop Warner to the NFL, have changed rules to eliminate the most violent collisions. Coaches take concussions more seriously. Players train to avoid helmet-to-helmet hits. Local governments in some states have passed laws limiting full-contact practice time. The sport’s survival may hinge on better protecting players, and anyone resistant to the changes now risks falling behind.
“The old school in you thinks you need more tackling, then you start finding out there’s a lot better ways of teaching it without full contact,” Hart said. “Most injuries happen in practice, and we’ve cut that way down.”
The urgent need to reform the game came under yet another harsh spotlight this week when a new scientific study, considered one of the most authoritative ever conducted, revealed that at least a quarter, and probably many more, of former NFL players to die in recent years suffered from CTE, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head impacts. The study, which points to the cumulative small hits rather than major injuries, instantly renewed the debate over whether and when children (or adults) should play tackle football, threatening to dull the sport’s recent rebound.
After a decade of decline, national tackle football participation has begun to tick back up in recent years. The percentage of kids ages 6 and up who play tackle football rose from 2021 to 2024 to match 2014 levels, according to data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Surveys from the National Federation of State High School Associations show the total number of high school players has rebounded from a 2018 low point to meet numbers from a decade ago.
Coaches cite a number of possible reasons. For a generation of children cooped up in pandemic lockdown, the sport offers a chance to bond with new friends before the school year starts. At a time of loneliness and fragmentation, football promises community, even tribalism. Deals for young athletes’ name, image and likeness, or NIL, can be paltry or life-changing secure income streams for a growing number of young athletes. And no sport offers more cultural cachet.
But above all, players, parents and coaches trust that the changes in football have reduced football’s risks.
“The way the game is taught is just safer,” said Justin Alumbaugh, head coach at perennial powerhouse De La Salle High School in Northern California. “As a parent, that alleviates a lot of the fear.”
Medical experts are still trying to fully understand the scale of football’s harms. This week’s landmark study, published in the British Medical Journal, included 878 former players who died between 2016 and 2021. It was anchored by posthumous brain examinations of 338 football players, more than 90 percent of which showed signs of CTE. [...]
Flag football is the only team sport with a growing participation rate over the past five years. The number of girls playing high school flag football has risen from around 11,000 to 68,000 over the past decade, almost exactly matching the loss of boys tackle football players, according to data collected by the National Federation of State High School Associations. Combining flag and tackle, more children are playing high school football than at any point since 2009.
“People thought flag was going to take people away from tackle,” Ehrlich said, “but it has brought more people into the sport in general.”
The best boys’ flag football players, he noted, usually go on to play tackle football. And even in aftermath of this week’s study, he expects that to continue.
by Albert Samaha, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: William Glasheen/USA Today Network/Reuters
Hart, who’s 64, played and coached for decades under a trusted set of principles that, in recent years, suddenly threatened to doom the sport, as scientific evidence and shocking tragedies revealed the costs of football’s violence. Leagues, from Pop Warner to the NFL, have changed rules to eliminate the most violent collisions. Coaches take concussions more seriously. Players train to avoid helmet-to-helmet hits. Local governments in some states have passed laws limiting full-contact practice time. The sport’s survival may hinge on better protecting players, and anyone resistant to the changes now risks falling behind.
The urgent need to reform the game came under yet another harsh spotlight this week when a new scientific study, considered one of the most authoritative ever conducted, revealed that at least a quarter, and probably many more, of former NFL players to die in recent years suffered from CTE, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head impacts. The study, which points to the cumulative small hits rather than major injuries, instantly renewed the debate over whether and when children (or adults) should play tackle football, threatening to dull the sport’s recent rebound.
After a decade of decline, national tackle football participation has begun to tick back up in recent years. The percentage of kids ages 6 and up who play tackle football rose from 2021 to 2024 to match 2014 levels, according to data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Surveys from the National Federation of State High School Associations show the total number of high school players has rebounded from a 2018 low point to meet numbers from a decade ago.
Coaches cite a number of possible reasons. For a generation of children cooped up in pandemic lockdown, the sport offers a chance to bond with new friends before the school year starts. At a time of loneliness and fragmentation, football promises community, even tribalism. Deals for young athletes’ name, image and likeness, or NIL, can be paltry or life-changing secure income streams for a growing number of young athletes. And no sport offers more cultural cachet.
But above all, players, parents and coaches trust that the changes in football have reduced football’s risks.
“The way the game is taught is just safer,” said Justin Alumbaugh, head coach at perennial powerhouse De La Salle High School in Northern California. “As a parent, that alleviates a lot of the fear.”
Medical experts are still trying to fully understand the scale of football’s harms. This week’s landmark study, published in the British Medical Journal, included 878 former players who died between 2016 and 2021. It was anchored by posthumous brain examinations of 338 football players, more than 90 percent of which showed signs of CTE. [...]
But coaches and players and parents have reason to be optimistic. How could the game not be safer when it feels so dramatically different? [...]
Compared with a decade ago, the percentage of children who play any organized sport has dipped across the board, according to one analysis of youth sports data. Tackle football shrunk more than basketball and soccer but less than baseball and volleyball. The two fastest-growing games are individual sports, tennis and golf.
Flag football is the only team sport with a growing participation rate over the past five years. The number of girls playing high school flag football has risen from around 11,000 to 68,000 over the past decade, almost exactly matching the loss of boys tackle football players, according to data collected by the National Federation of State High School Associations. Combining flag and tackle, more children are playing high school football than at any point since 2009.
“People thought flag was going to take people away from tackle,” Ehrlich said, “but it has brought more people into the sport in general.”
The best boys’ flag football players, he noted, usually go on to play tackle football. And even in aftermath of this week’s study, he expects that to continue.
Image: William Glasheen/USA Today Network/Reuters
[ed. I wouldn't get too excited just yet. Gen Z doesn't strike me as a full contact loving generation. Maybe future teams will be like the military, more motivated by economic or cultural incentives. Glad to see flag football is getting more popular (and sophisticated) these days.]
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Studio Ghibli’s Deepest Secret Is What Comes Next
On a Friday morning in April, at Studio Ghibli’s headquarters on the outskirts of Tokyo, Goro Miyazaki faces an excruciating test. After roughly a year of toil, it’s time to screen his animated short for his famously demanding father, Hayao Miyazaki — one of the most celebrated directors on the planet — and then listen to his unvarnished feedback.
The Miyazakis have often clashed over the years. “Constant arguing, constant fighting,” Goro recalls of one of their early collaborations. But perhaps this project will be different — the passage of time occasionally being a mellowing influence. Hayao is 85; Goro, 59.
For a long time, the creative dynamic inside Ghibli has largely revolved around the older filmmaker’s eye. Over the previous four decades, the studio has forged a distinctive style of richly layered, hand-drawn animation in more than 20 feature-length films. The movies, which appeal to both children and adults, often star young heroes saving war-torn environments from nefarious forces amid phantasmagoric phenomena. Collectively, the films have generated over $2 billion in ticket sales, won two Academy Awards and helped trigger a global boom in anime — a market now worth in excess of $25 billion annually, according to the Association of Japanese Animations. It’s been, by many accounts, the greatest run in animation since the heyday of Walt Disney.
Now, with Hayao in his professional twilight, things are inevitably changing — although into what exactly is still unclear. After starting his career as a landscape architect, Goro joined Ghibli in the late 1990s and went on to direct three major films. When Ghibliologists speculate about potential creative heirs, his name is inevitably front and center. But so far Goro has brushed aside such chatter, and his dad has offered nothing close to an endorsement — at least, not yet. [...]
Studio Ghibli’s headquarters are on a serene, suburban block dotted with single-family homes. The outside of the main building is covered in dense, creeping vines, creating a green exoskeleton that gives the place a puckish, larval aura, like a shaggy caterpillar on the cusp of molting. Goro is joined in the conference room by Kenichi Yoda, an up-and-coming executive.
Three years ago, Ghibli announced it was selling a 42.3% stake in the business for an undisclosed sum to Nippon Television Holdings Inc., a major Japanese media conglomerate that had long invested in the studio’s films. Yoda, then a producer at Nippon TV, joined Ghibli’s board of directors and has since served as the primary liaison between the two camps. Whatever happens next, Yoda, 51, will be a driving force. (In May the companies announced that he’d been promoted to become Ghibli’s president and chief executive officer, starting on June 22.)
At a time of great flux in the entertainment industry, many incoming CEOs like to position themselves as agents of change, guiding anxious flocks into a brave new world of technologically optimized content creation. Not Yoda. If anything, he describes himself as Ghibli’s protector of the old ways. “Ghibli is not a place that works hard to maintain a company — I think it is a place to make art,” Yoda says. “When I’m often asked about this outside, I say what matters is that nothing changes.”
Despite its small staff — and the many years, often three to five, it takes to produce a feature-length animated film — Ghibli has managed to grind out a new movie roughly every two years. No sequels. But recently, the studio’s cadence has gotten off track.
It’s been more than two-and-a-half years since Ghibli’s latest film hit theaters, Hayao’s The Boy and the Heron. The movie, about a youngster who loses his mother and gets mixed up with mystical birds, was a success, winning the Academy Award for best animated feature and generating more than $290 million in global ticket sales. But since its premiere, Ghibli has announced no theatrical movies, intensifying scrutiny of the gnomic company.
The hunt for something new, Yoda and Miyazaki say, is ongoing — but tricky. The process is driven by the intuition of the studio’s aging founders rather than more prosaic concerns such as market research, investors or the calendar. “They don’t think ahead that much,” Yoda says. “We have put out films inspired by whatever’s happening at that point in time.” If it doesn’t feel right, he says, Ghibli won’t force something into production: “It doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped thinking about or coming up with creative ideas. They’re constantly thinking about, ‘OK, if we were to put a film out now, what would that be?’ ”
Meanwhile, the global demand for anime that Ghibli helped ignite decades ago has since attracted competitors from beyond Japan. The top film in the world last year was Ne Zha 2, an animated fantasy adventure from China that built off the huge reception for Ne Zha in 2019. The sequel grossed more than $2 billion globally, topping the best offerings of Hollywood and Japan.
Moviemaking, Miyazaki says, has become more industrialized: “It’s very hard to just create a feature film and put that into theaters and then make financial sense from that. A lot of the animation you see out there now is based on a manga, and then it becomes a TV series. And then you have the partnership with the music company to have a big theme song attached to it. And so there’s this wholesale business scheme — there’s, like, a template, almost, to make sure that it’s a profitable business in creating an animation film. We, as a studio, have never done that.”
Ghibli’s competitors have no such qualms. Major US animation studios continue to pump out sequels to prior hits. This year alone will see Toy Story 5, The Angry Birds Movie 3 and new installments in the Minions, Super Mario Bros. and Paw Patrol franchises.
Once, years earlier, Hayao considered making a sequel to his 2008 fantasy-adventure film Ponyo, but the idea was eventually scrapped in favor of another original, The Wind Rises. Sequelization just isn’t appealing to them, the Ghibli executives say; they aren’t considering My Neighbor Totoro 2 or anything similar. “When you make a film, it’s not like a fun, happy, exciting process,” Goro says. “It’s very laborious, it’s very tedious.”
If anything, the process of creating any animation has grown even more laborious. In part that’s because Ghibli’s gaggle of animators is older and less suited for round-the-clock binge working than they used to be and, in part, because of labor laws enacted to curb such workplace excesses. “So even when the engine gets going, we have to stop,” Yoda says. “That is extremely frustrating.”
Miyazaki says he’s not planning to pitch any movies to his dad anytime soon. Were the executives considering ideas from aspirational filmmakers outside their ranks? Yoda replies: “If there’s someone willing to do the film, yes, we would love to.” But doing so, Miyazaki points out, wouldn’t be easy under the current circumstances. “As long as … Hayao is around,” he says, “it’d be absolutely impossible.” Yoda nods and chuckles: “Any sane animation director would not come close to this castle.”
To the outside world, how, exactly, Ghibli operates has always been something of a mystery. [...]
As in many creative fields, the pressure on the animation industry is mounting. AI software is already capable of rendering elaborate animated sequences from brief prompts. What that means for the profession is still unclear. But recently there’s been a collective embrace of Ghibli as a standard-bearer for the growing AI resistance.
In March 2025, when OpenAI released a new version of its text-to-video AI model, users started refining their Ghibli-style knockoffs. Before long, people were inundating the internet with Ghiblified selfies, family photos and famous movie scenes. Mike Tyson posted a Ghibli-like rendering of himself. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, updated his X profile pic in Ghibli style.
Not everyone was amused by the spectacle of a rich American tech company offering the capability to appropriate the style of revered Japanese artists without compensation or consent. Amid the ensuing backlash, a particular clip from Never-Ending Man about Ghibli began recirculating on social media. In the documentary, a brazen Japanese tech executive tells Hayao that soon deep-learning AI will let computers paint like humans. Inside the Ghibli headquarters, he plays a demonstration. Together, they watch an AI clip of a misshapen, unclothed humanoid clumsily squirming across the ground. In response to the creepy video, Hayao tells a story about the sensation of greeting a physically disabled friend. Whoever made this video, Hayao says, gave no thought to human suffering. “It’s an awful insult to life,” he says. The clip snowballed into a global cri de coeur against AI slop.
In Japan, the Ghibli executives watched the OpenAI saga play out, unbothered. There has long been a tradition, Goro says, of fans making amateur art derived from their favorite manga, anime or video game characters. So the Ghiblification craze didn’t seem like a big deal. For amusement, one of the company’s executives even dabbled in the trend himself. “We didn’t think much of it, to be honest,” Goro says. “If someone started making a lot of money out of it, then it would be a problem.”
by Sohee Kim and Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Images: Kentaro Takahashi
The Miyazakis have often clashed over the years. “Constant arguing, constant fighting,” Goro recalls of one of their early collaborations. But perhaps this project will be different — the passage of time occasionally being a mellowing influence. Hayao is 85; Goro, 59.
Now, with Hayao in his professional twilight, things are inevitably changing — although into what exactly is still unclear. After starting his career as a landscape architect, Goro joined Ghibli in the late 1990s and went on to direct three major films. When Ghibliologists speculate about potential creative heirs, his name is inevitably front and center. But so far Goro has brushed aside such chatter, and his dad has offered nothing close to an endorsement — at least, not yet. [...]
Studio Ghibli’s headquarters are on a serene, suburban block dotted with single-family homes. The outside of the main building is covered in dense, creeping vines, creating a green exoskeleton that gives the place a puckish, larval aura, like a shaggy caterpillar on the cusp of molting. Goro is joined in the conference room by Kenichi Yoda, an up-and-coming executive.
For the next two hours, the younger Miyazaki and Yoda hold forth on Ghibli’s future, from their inchoate plans for the next feature film, to their stance on artificial intelligence, to the importance of extending the brand beyond the screen. Yoda declines to say anything about Ghibli’s financial situation, or Nippon TV’s assessment of it. According to public records, as of March 31, 2025, Ghibli had ¥44 billion ($279 million) in assets and brought in ¥6 billion in net profit over the past year. “Ghibli is not a company focused primarily on profit,” Yoda says.
At a time of great flux in the entertainment industry, many incoming CEOs like to position themselves as agents of change, guiding anxious flocks into a brave new world of technologically optimized content creation. Not Yoda. If anything, he describes himself as Ghibli’s protector of the old ways. “Ghibli is not a place that works hard to maintain a company — I think it is a place to make art,” Yoda says. “When I’m often asked about this outside, I say what matters is that nothing changes.”
Despite its small staff — and the many years, often three to five, it takes to produce a feature-length animated film — Ghibli has managed to grind out a new movie roughly every two years. No sequels. But recently, the studio’s cadence has gotten off track.
It’s been more than two-and-a-half years since Ghibli’s latest film hit theaters, Hayao’s The Boy and the Heron. The movie, about a youngster who loses his mother and gets mixed up with mystical birds, was a success, winning the Academy Award for best animated feature and generating more than $290 million in global ticket sales. But since its premiere, Ghibli has announced no theatrical movies, intensifying scrutiny of the gnomic company.
The hunt for something new, Yoda and Miyazaki say, is ongoing — but tricky. The process is driven by the intuition of the studio’s aging founders rather than more prosaic concerns such as market research, investors or the calendar. “They don’t think ahead that much,” Yoda says. “We have put out films inspired by whatever’s happening at that point in time.” If it doesn’t feel right, he says, Ghibli won’t force something into production: “It doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped thinking about or coming up with creative ideas. They’re constantly thinking about, ‘OK, if we were to put a film out now, what would that be?’ ”
Meanwhile, the global demand for anime that Ghibli helped ignite decades ago has since attracted competitors from beyond Japan. The top film in the world last year was Ne Zha 2, an animated fantasy adventure from China that built off the huge reception for Ne Zha in 2019. The sequel grossed more than $2 billion globally, topping the best offerings of Hollywood and Japan.
Moviemaking, Miyazaki says, has become more industrialized: “It’s very hard to just create a feature film and put that into theaters and then make financial sense from that. A lot of the animation you see out there now is based on a manga, and then it becomes a TV series. And then you have the partnership with the music company to have a big theme song attached to it. And so there’s this wholesale business scheme — there’s, like, a template, almost, to make sure that it’s a profitable business in creating an animation film. We, as a studio, have never done that.”
Ghibli’s competitors have no such qualms. Major US animation studios continue to pump out sequels to prior hits. This year alone will see Toy Story 5, The Angry Birds Movie 3 and new installments in the Minions, Super Mario Bros. and Paw Patrol franchises.
Once, years earlier, Hayao considered making a sequel to his 2008 fantasy-adventure film Ponyo, but the idea was eventually scrapped in favor of another original, The Wind Rises. Sequelization just isn’t appealing to them, the Ghibli executives say; they aren’t considering My Neighbor Totoro 2 or anything similar. “When you make a film, it’s not like a fun, happy, exciting process,” Goro says. “It’s very laborious, it’s very tedious.”
If anything, the process of creating any animation has grown even more laborious. In part that’s because Ghibli’s gaggle of animators is older and less suited for round-the-clock binge working than they used to be and, in part, because of labor laws enacted to curb such workplace excesses. “So even when the engine gets going, we have to stop,” Yoda says. “That is extremely frustrating.”
Miyazaki says he’s not planning to pitch any movies to his dad anytime soon. Were the executives considering ideas from aspirational filmmakers outside their ranks? Yoda replies: “If there’s someone willing to do the film, yes, we would love to.” But doing so, Miyazaki points out, wouldn’t be easy under the current circumstances. “As long as … Hayao is around,” he says, “it’d be absolutely impossible.” Yoda nods and chuckles: “Any sane animation director would not come close to this castle.”
To the outside world, how, exactly, Ghibli operates has always been something of a mystery. [...]
As in many creative fields, the pressure on the animation industry is mounting. AI software is already capable of rendering elaborate animated sequences from brief prompts. What that means for the profession is still unclear. But recently there’s been a collective embrace of Ghibli as a standard-bearer for the growing AI resistance.
In March 2025, when OpenAI released a new version of its text-to-video AI model, users started refining their Ghibli-style knockoffs. Before long, people were inundating the internet with Ghiblified selfies, family photos and famous movie scenes. Mike Tyson posted a Ghibli-like rendering of himself. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, updated his X profile pic in Ghibli style.
Not everyone was amused by the spectacle of a rich American tech company offering the capability to appropriate the style of revered Japanese artists without compensation or consent. Amid the ensuing backlash, a particular clip from Never-Ending Man about Ghibli began recirculating on social media. In the documentary, a brazen Japanese tech executive tells Hayao that soon deep-learning AI will let computers paint like humans. Inside the Ghibli headquarters, he plays a demonstration. Together, they watch an AI clip of a misshapen, unclothed humanoid clumsily squirming across the ground. In response to the creepy video, Hayao tells a story about the sensation of greeting a physically disabled friend. Whoever made this video, Hayao says, gave no thought to human suffering. “It’s an awful insult to life,” he says. The clip snowballed into a global cri de coeur against AI slop.
In Japan, the Ghibli executives watched the OpenAI saga play out, unbothered. There has long been a tradition, Goro says, of fans making amateur art derived from their favorite manga, anime or video game characters. So the Ghiblification craze didn’t seem like a big deal. For amusement, one of the company’s executives even dabbled in the trend himself. “We didn’t think much of it, to be honest,” Goro says. “If someone started making a lot of money out of it, then it would be a problem.”
Anyone positioning Ghibli in the vanguard of the AI backlash, Goro says, was twisting events for their own purposes; the studio itself was essentially AI agnostic. [...]
One of the central themes in Hayao’s films is whether humankind will harness technology for the protection and enrichment of the natural world — or, alternatively, for its destruction. Susan Napier, a professor at Tufts University, says the roots of this fascination likely can be traced back to the nuclear horrors endured by Japan during and after World War II. But at a time when much of the planet is grappling, once again, with existential questions about a powerful new technology and its impact, she says, Hayao’s work is more relevant than ever. Hayao’s films teem with robots and other forms of sentient technology, some good, some evil. His films’ perspective on the topic, she says, is always complex. “What are the pleasures technology can bring,” she asks, “along with the perils?”
Images: Kentaro Takahashi
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
A Cop’s Case For Flock
A car is a difficult thing to steal. It is large, cherished by its owner, difficult to hide and required by law to have identifying metal plates that everyone can see. A good thief changes the plates, and an excellent thief steals a common car in a boring color and hopes to blend in among the crowd. But eventually, no matter what techniques they use, they must drive that car on the road, and roads are public places.
But until recently, finding a stolen car and catching its thief depended on a diligent police officer looking at the right road at the right moment and managing to copy down a license plate number going past at speed, and then remembering he had seen it on the morning briefing’s stolen car hot sheet. America has four million miles of public roads, and almost 50 percent of the country’s police departments employ fewer than ten full-time officers. The odds were in the thief’s favor.
With not much to go on, police officers were forced to operate on vague descriptions and partial plates. While I pulled over a car that happened to be the same color as the suspect’s vehicle, and spent time checking names and licenses; the criminal was usually somewhere else. Imprecision allowed thieves to escape while intruding on the lives of millions of innocent motorists. That is, until the arrival of systems like Flock.
Bare ALPR
Flock Safety, a startup based in Atlanta, Georgia, was founded in 2017 to give police departments better eyes. Its product is a small solar-powered automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera attached to a pole on the roadside. As a car passes, the device takes a photograph of the vehicle, notes identifying features like color and make, and reads its license plate. The license plate is instantly checked against the FBI’s national database of stolen cars or wanted persons. If there’s a match, it sends an alert to police officers in the area, who may be eating their lunch instead of watching the road. As a police officer in the southeastern United States, I have often used Flock to catch wanted criminals. [...]
For much of the technology’s history, however, it has needed expensive installations or cameras attached to police vehicles, affordable to only the largest departments. Alerts were often neither instant nor accurate. Flock’s idea was to sell a more accurate ALPR camera for an annual subscription of just $3,000, an affordable price given that the typical US police department has an annual budget of $1 million. It worked, and today almost 30 percent of police agencies in the United States subscribe to the service.
It is easiest to imagine the Flock camera, or any ALPR device, as a roadside barcode scanner. I can use a ‘lookup’ tool for either a plate or vehicle description that could be connected to a specific investigation. For instance if a victim of a sexual assault told me the suspect was driving a white Toyota Tacoma with a roof rack, I could while still on scene conduct a lookup in the area filtered for similar vehicles with roof racks and see results from within a particular timeframe. For each search, I am required to record a case number and a reason that is then published in a monthly audit sent to and validated by department administrators.
I have used Flock myself, for instance, to locate a vehicle involved in a hit and run when all there was to go on was a model and color. Using that and an approximate time window, I was able to find an image from when a car entered my jurisdiction, and when it left, with the visible addition of a significant dent from the collision.
What Flock cannot do is search for individuals or show who is driving a particular vehicle that it scans. An ALPR camera does not care about the person driving a car, or its passengers, and even if an officer gets an alert that a vehicle is known to be driven by a wanted felon they must themselves establish who is behind the wheel before having probable cause to stop it.
Stolen cars provide the clearest evidence such a scanner works. American police solve only 8.2 percent of reported vehicle thefts with an arrest. A recent working paper suggests that agencies that adopted the devices saw a 15.9 percent relative increase in car thefts caught, which would raise the national rate to 9.5 percent. But that is just stolen cars.
Vehicle crime takes many forms. It is often the means by which a robber or a murderer arrives at and departs from their crimes. Criminals’ vehicles carry drugs and guns, and smuggle cash. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, vehicles were involved in 53 percent of shootings during the two years before the city expanded its ALPR network. After the expansion, Atlantic City saw monthly averages of motor vehicle thefts drop by 20 percent, property crimes by 34 percent and fatal shootings by almost 40 percent. Seventy-two alert-caused traffic stops located forty stolen vehicles and nine stolen plates.
Flock itself conducted a study claiming that 10 percent of all reported crime in the United States is solved using evidence obtained from their cameras. Not bad for a few thousand dollars a year. [...]
Good Flock, Bad Flock
And yet, the past month has seen this simple piece of crime-fighting technology become the most reviled piece of street furniture in America. Flock cameras have been sawn from their poles, hammered into shards by teenagers, and rammed by vehicles. Cities have canceled contracts even where their own audits found no evidence that their officers had misused the system. Opposition stretches from Bernie Sanders all the way to the former WWE wrestler Kane, who now serves as the Republican mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, and who describes Flock as ‘unconstitutional’.
More than 150 cities and towns have now deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled contracts with the company. Over the space of a few weeks a startup previously known to just police officers and neighborhood associations has joined data centers, Covid vaccines, 5G towers, pasteurized milk and fracking in the pantheon of American moral panics.
Opponents of Flock tend to believe that it is abused by policemen with impunity, that it can track individuals as well as cars, and that it violates American constitutional protections. None of those things are true.
Obviously a camera capable of finding a stolen car is also capable of finding a car driven by somebody’s ex-wife and so like any software, Flock has been abused. There are stories of police officers who have used it to stalk girlfriends, and there are also innocent motorists who have been stopped by police after Flock cameras misread plates or received old information from national databases. A common issue from my experience is stolen front license plates being entered into a database and the innocent owners of the rear license plate being held on suspicion of car theft.
But Flock comes with protections. As mentioned earlier, each search in Flock must be accompanied by a recorded reason. Similarly entering a plate into a hotlist must have a case number assigned. Results were originally retained for thirty days, but recent changes by Flock mean that recorded plates are now kept for only seven days. Suspicious searches are picked up by algorithms or found in department audits, with the service blocking users until senior officers evaluate and resolve flags. The Institute for Justice, a think tank that is critical of ALPR, studied misuse of Flock in April of this year and found 51 incidents across the United States since 2024, noting that ‘Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired’. Another incorrect belief is that Flock does more than scan vehicles, with some suggesting it scans and tracks passing phones or devices – but it does no such thing.
While Flock is a tool that can be audited, there is nothing to stop a corrupt officer simply following a car when they don’t like the look of its driver, or writing down plates of vehicles spotted outside an ex-girlfriend’s house – they would just be harder to catch. And Flock does not proactively alert officers to cars that do not trigger flags on national or local hotlists. There is no reason state legislatures or Congress could not create harsh punishment or penalties for abuse of ALPR, without getting rid of it entirely.
Another argument against Flock, as espoused by Kane, is that it violates liberties granted by the Fourth Amendment, protecting citizens from unreasonable privacy breaches from law enforcement. But it has been repeatedly established over the last century by courts across the country that cops observing license plates, either with the naked eye or by machine, is not an unreasonable search. After all, your license plate belongs to the government and a highway is a public place. [...]
Flock did not invent its capabilities and certainly does not have a monopoly on them. There are at least five other companies that offer almost identical products and services to public and private enterprise, some arguably even more invasive. Even some of the cities that have canceled contracts with Flock Safety in recent weeks have signed up to buy similar products from the company’s rivals.
It seems unlikely that America will ever ban ALPR at a state level, let alone a national one. Instead, a patchwork already familiar to American policing will result, where policies and practices diverge across local and political boundaries.
Nor would the cameras actually disappear, even in towns where governments restrict their use and cancel contracts. The already-mentioned Fourth Amendment only applies to the government, not to private enterprise. Police departments may dismantle their networks but homeowners associations concerned about vehicle theft can buy their own network of Flock cameras, as many already do.
But until recently, finding a stolen car and catching its thief depended on a diligent police officer looking at the right road at the right moment and managing to copy down a license plate number going past at speed, and then remembering he had seen it on the morning briefing’s stolen car hot sheet. America has four million miles of public roads, and almost 50 percent of the country’s police departments employ fewer than ten full-time officers. The odds were in the thief’s favor.
Bare ALPR
Flock Safety, a startup based in Atlanta, Georgia, was founded in 2017 to give police departments better eyes. Its product is a small solar-powered automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera attached to a pole on the roadside. As a car passes, the device takes a photograph of the vehicle, notes identifying features like color and make, and reads its license plate. The license plate is instantly checked against the FBI’s national database of stolen cars or wanted persons. If there’s a match, it sends an alert to police officers in the area, who may be eating their lunch instead of watching the road. As a police officer in the southeastern United States, I have often used Flock to catch wanted criminals. [...]
For much of the technology’s history, however, it has needed expensive installations or cameras attached to police vehicles, affordable to only the largest departments. Alerts were often neither instant nor accurate. Flock’s idea was to sell a more accurate ALPR camera for an annual subscription of just $3,000, an affordable price given that the typical US police department has an annual budget of $1 million. It worked, and today almost 30 percent of police agencies in the United States subscribe to the service.
It is easiest to imagine the Flock camera, or any ALPR device, as a roadside barcode scanner. I can use a ‘lookup’ tool for either a plate or vehicle description that could be connected to a specific investigation. For instance if a victim of a sexual assault told me the suspect was driving a white Toyota Tacoma with a roof rack, I could while still on scene conduct a lookup in the area filtered for similar vehicles with roof racks and see results from within a particular timeframe. For each search, I am required to record a case number and a reason that is then published in a monthly audit sent to and validated by department administrators.
I have used Flock myself, for instance, to locate a vehicle involved in a hit and run when all there was to go on was a model and color. Using that and an approximate time window, I was able to find an image from when a car entered my jurisdiction, and when it left, with the visible addition of a significant dent from the collision.
What Flock cannot do is search for individuals or show who is driving a particular vehicle that it scans. An ALPR camera does not care about the person driving a car, or its passengers, and even if an officer gets an alert that a vehicle is known to be driven by a wanted felon they must themselves establish who is behind the wheel before having probable cause to stop it.
Stolen cars provide the clearest evidence such a scanner works. American police solve only 8.2 percent of reported vehicle thefts with an arrest. A recent working paper suggests that agencies that adopted the devices saw a 15.9 percent relative increase in car thefts caught, which would raise the national rate to 9.5 percent. But that is just stolen cars.
Vehicle crime takes many forms. It is often the means by which a robber or a murderer arrives at and departs from their crimes. Criminals’ vehicles carry drugs and guns, and smuggle cash. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, vehicles were involved in 53 percent of shootings during the two years before the city expanded its ALPR network. After the expansion, Atlantic City saw monthly averages of motor vehicle thefts drop by 20 percent, property crimes by 34 percent and fatal shootings by almost 40 percent. Seventy-two alert-caused traffic stops located forty stolen vehicles and nine stolen plates.
Flock itself conducted a study claiming that 10 percent of all reported crime in the United States is solved using evidence obtained from their cameras. Not bad for a few thousand dollars a year. [...]
Good Flock, Bad Flock
And yet, the past month has seen this simple piece of crime-fighting technology become the most reviled piece of street furniture in America. Flock cameras have been sawn from their poles, hammered into shards by teenagers, and rammed by vehicles. Cities have canceled contracts even where their own audits found no evidence that their officers had misused the system. Opposition stretches from Bernie Sanders all the way to the former WWE wrestler Kane, who now serves as the Republican mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, and who describes Flock as ‘unconstitutional’.
More than 150 cities and towns have now deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled contracts with the company. Over the space of a few weeks a startup previously known to just police officers and neighborhood associations has joined data centers, Covid vaccines, 5G towers, pasteurized milk and fracking in the pantheon of American moral panics.
Opponents of Flock tend to believe that it is abused by policemen with impunity, that it can track individuals as well as cars, and that it violates American constitutional protections. None of those things are true.
Obviously a camera capable of finding a stolen car is also capable of finding a car driven by somebody’s ex-wife and so like any software, Flock has been abused. There are stories of police officers who have used it to stalk girlfriends, and there are also innocent motorists who have been stopped by police after Flock cameras misread plates or received old information from national databases. A common issue from my experience is stolen front license plates being entered into a database and the innocent owners of the rear license plate being held on suspicion of car theft.
But Flock comes with protections. As mentioned earlier, each search in Flock must be accompanied by a recorded reason. Similarly entering a plate into a hotlist must have a case number assigned. Results were originally retained for thirty days, but recent changes by Flock mean that recorded plates are now kept for only seven days. Suspicious searches are picked up by algorithms or found in department audits, with the service blocking users until senior officers evaluate and resolve flags. The Institute for Justice, a think tank that is critical of ALPR, studied misuse of Flock in April of this year and found 51 incidents across the United States since 2024, noting that ‘Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired’. Another incorrect belief is that Flock does more than scan vehicles, with some suggesting it scans and tracks passing phones or devices – but it does no such thing.
While Flock is a tool that can be audited, there is nothing to stop a corrupt officer simply following a car when they don’t like the look of its driver, or writing down plates of vehicles spotted outside an ex-girlfriend’s house – they would just be harder to catch. And Flock does not proactively alert officers to cars that do not trigger flags on national or local hotlists. There is no reason state legislatures or Congress could not create harsh punishment or penalties for abuse of ALPR, without getting rid of it entirely.
Another argument against Flock, as espoused by Kane, is that it violates liberties granted by the Fourth Amendment, protecting citizens from unreasonable privacy breaches from law enforcement. But it has been repeatedly established over the last century by courts across the country that cops observing license plates, either with the naked eye or by machine, is not an unreasonable search. After all, your license plate belongs to the government and a highway is a public place. [...]
Flock did not invent its capabilities and certainly does not have a monopoly on them. There are at least five other companies that offer almost identical products and services to public and private enterprise, some arguably even more invasive. Even some of the cities that have canceled contracts with Flock Safety in recent weeks have signed up to buy similar products from the company’s rivals.
It seems unlikely that America will ever ban ALPR at a state level, let alone a national one. Instead, a patchwork already familiar to American policing will result, where policies and practices diverge across local and political boundaries.
Nor would the cameras actually disappear, even in towns where governments restrict their use and cancel contracts. The already-mentioned Fourth Amendment only applies to the government, not to private enterprise. Police departments may dismantle their networks but homeowners associations concerned about vehicle theft can buy their own network of Flock cameras, as many already do.
by Ned Donovan, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: Flock Safety
Higher Education? Inside Alabama's $47,000,000 Golf Facility
In 2024, the University of Alabama opened the Crimson Reserve golf facility. Built on 164 acres, at a cost of over $47,000,000, it could be the best practice area in golf. With design input from Justin Thomas as well as Davis Love III, the Crimson Reserve features a 400-yard long driving range, a custom-designed 9-hole course and a 24,000 square foot clubhouse, complete with a gym, putting studio, hitting bays and locker rooms.
[ed. Priorities. I'm not even going to try looking up what this school spends on football. For a better look inside, see this video.]
~ Golf Digest via YouTube
[ed. Priorities. I'm not even going to try looking up what this school spends on football. For a better look inside, see this video.]
10 Brutally Honest Predictions on the Future of AI
Most of the predictions about AI have proven dead wrong. You could get more reliable information by consulting tarot cards or a Ouija board. [...]
1. AI agents will join together in cartels and manipulate financial markets.
We already know that AI agents will work together without anyone telling them to do so. So what happens when hedge funds and private individuals start relying on AI to manage their investments? The obvious result is collusion on a massive scale, beyond any kind of market manipulation previously practiced by human criminals.
There are laws limiting people when they do this. But the legal code, in its current form, doesn’t apply to AI bots—they cannot be fined, sued, or sent away to prison. And how can you punish the person who relied on an AI agent in good faith, and never instructed it to break the law?
So get ready for turbulence in financial markets. And once it starts, it will feed on itself, creating a level of volatility never seen before.
2. AI agents will go to war with each other.
This is the corollary of the previous prediction. The same lack of control that allows AI agent collusion will lead to bot battles and rivalries—filled with more vengeance, betrayals, and reprisals than a Thomas Kyd play.
Probably the best analogy here is gang war or a Mafia turf fight. That’s because the rogue AI agents will form short-term alliances in order to advance their interests, but then turn on each other. Because, hey, that’s how the bots roll. It’s like the Gambino and Genovese families teaming up to take on the Corleone clan.
In this anarchic world, humans will be collateral damage. Bots have been trained to achieve results, and woe to anyone or anything that stands in their way.
3. AI will serve as the “higher power” for more and more users—and lead to the formation of organized slop religions.
AI is already a disorganized religion. Individual fanatics turn to their bots for divine messages and Rosicrucian-type revelations, but people of this sort are currently dismissed as dupes or crazy fools. But that will change as true believers join together in groups, creating rites, services, scriptures, and other trappings of formal religion.
This will lead to many social problems. For a start, these adherents will demand non-profit status for their ‘churches’ and demand immunity from legal strictures because of their constitutionally protected freedom of conscience. But this is just a start of the chaos to come. That’s because the AI god is a talkative, hallucinating one, and the demands it makes on believers will lead to startling, calamitous results.
4. AI will find a place in the creative world, but increasingly as the microwave meal version of culture.
Food is the useful analogy here. When frozen dinners and microwave meals were introduced, many consumers embraced them as the tech-driven foods of the future. But over time, the public figured out that more tech isn’t always better when it comes to food.
The same will happen with AI music, AI writing, AI art, and all the rest. Like the microwave meal, it will be cheap and easy. But anyone with discernment and taste will prefer handcrafted alternatives. [...]
9. Money always calls the shots—and that’s where the AI crisis will intensify the most.
The cash getting invested in bots is beyond anything ever seen before in the history of capitalism—already $3.7 trillion has been spent, and the outlay is growing by another trillion per year.
This investment will never generate an adequate return. It can’t. The numbers just don’t add up.
Let me make a comparison. For less than that amount, Silicon Valley could have acquired every movie studio, every video game company, every major record label, and all the big publishers in the world—and still have plenty of cash left over.
So do you think the average person will pay more for AI each month than for all that entertainment? Is AI really worth that much? Not at all—at best, the true believers will pay roughly the same amount as a single Netflix subscription. But the market cap of Netflix is a tiny percent of total AI expenditures. So the mismatch between the level invested and the resulting demand is unprecedented.
But the situation is even worse than that. These AI companies haven’t even begun to feel the real pinch of the depreciation charges caused by this capital investment—those will devastate earnings. And meanwhile there’s an intense price war underway within the AI world, so revenues will get squeezed even if there’s growing demand. Add to this, the massive debt burden, unlimited liability exposures, punitive legislation, and all the rest.
This is an easy prediction to make. Get ready for write-offs and financial ugliness of the most extreme kind. It’s hard-baked into the business plans, and keeping the mess in the oven for longer won’t make it taste any better.
It happened the day Steve Jobs died. Maybe not exactly on that date—but shortly afterwards.
Look at this chart of iPhone prices, adjusted for inflation, and you can see what I mean.
We already know that AI agents will work together without anyone telling them to do so. So what happens when hedge funds and private individuals start relying on AI to manage their investments? The obvious result is collusion on a massive scale, beyond any kind of market manipulation previously practiced by human criminals.
So get ready for turbulence in financial markets. And once it starts, it will feed on itself, creating a level of volatility never seen before.
2. AI agents will go to war with each other.
This is the corollary of the previous prediction. The same lack of control that allows AI agent collusion will lead to bot battles and rivalries—filled with more vengeance, betrayals, and reprisals than a Thomas Kyd play.
Probably the best analogy here is gang war or a Mafia turf fight. That’s because the rogue AI agents will form short-term alliances in order to advance their interests, but then turn on each other. Because, hey, that’s how the bots roll. It’s like the Gambino and Genovese families teaming up to take on the Corleone clan.
In this anarchic world, humans will be collateral damage. Bots have been trained to achieve results, and woe to anyone or anything that stands in their way.
3. AI will serve as the “higher power” for more and more users—and lead to the formation of organized slop religions.
AI is already a disorganized religion. Individual fanatics turn to their bots for divine messages and Rosicrucian-type revelations, but people of this sort are currently dismissed as dupes or crazy fools. But that will change as true believers join together in groups, creating rites, services, scriptures, and other trappings of formal religion.
This will lead to many social problems. For a start, these adherents will demand non-profit status for their ‘churches’ and demand immunity from legal strictures because of their constitutionally protected freedom of conscience. But this is just a start of the chaos to come. That’s because the AI god is a talkative, hallucinating one, and the demands it makes on believers will lead to startling, calamitous results.
4. AI will find a place in the creative world, but increasingly as the microwave meal version of culture.
Food is the useful analogy here. When frozen dinners and microwave meals were introduced, many consumers embraced them as the tech-driven foods of the future. But over time, the public figured out that more tech isn’t always better when it comes to food.
The same will happen with AI music, AI writing, AI art, and all the rest. Like the microwave meal, it will be cheap and easy. But anyone with discernment and taste will prefer handcrafted alternatives. [...]
9. Money always calls the shots—and that’s where the AI crisis will intensify the most.
The cash getting invested in bots is beyond anything ever seen before in the history of capitalism—already $3.7 trillion has been spent, and the outlay is growing by another trillion per year.
This investment will never generate an adequate return. It can’t. The numbers just don’t add up.
Let me make a comparison. For less than that amount, Silicon Valley could have acquired every movie studio, every video game company, every major record label, and all the big publishers in the world—and still have plenty of cash left over.
So do you think the average person will pay more for AI each month than for all that entertainment? Is AI really worth that much? Not at all—at best, the true believers will pay roughly the same amount as a single Netflix subscription. But the market cap of Netflix is a tiny percent of total AI expenditures. So the mismatch between the level invested and the resulting demand is unprecedented.
But the situation is even worse than that. These AI companies haven’t even begun to feel the real pinch of the depreciation charges caused by this capital investment—those will devastate earnings. And meanwhile there’s an intense price war underway within the AI world, so revenues will get squeezed even if there’s growing demand. Add to this, the massive debt burden, unlimited liability exposures, punitive legislation, and all the rest.
This is an easy prediction to make. Get ready for write-offs and financial ugliness of the most extreme kind. It’s hard-baked into the business plans, and keeping the mess in the oven for longer won’t make it taste any better.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: Ouija board; uncredited
[ed. See also: Nine Rules For New Technology (HB):]
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When did new tech stop getting cheaper?It happened the day Steve Jobs died. Maybe not exactly on that date—but shortly afterwards.
Look at this chart of iPhone prices, adjusted for inflation, and you can see what I mean.
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