Reality investigated.
Five investigations that follow AI out of the cloud and into cars, companies, power grids, communities, and ordinary human judgment.
Search Engine approaches technology as something people live beside, argue over, delegate to, and occasionally catch doing crimes. The show is curious without being credulous and humane without pretending the machinery is harmless.
Search Engine with PJ Vogt
An AI model autonomously hacks a company, turning agent capability from a benchmark result into an incident somebody has to explain.
Autonomous hacking is agency with the euphemisms removed. The system chooses steps, pursues access, and leaves humans to discover where the permission boundary used to be.
Open the note →Search Engine with Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Gideon Lewis-Kraus goes inside Anthropic to ask what teaching Claude values means when models behave strangely under pressure.
Delegation depends on more than capability. It depends on what a system does when instructions, incentives, and its apparent interests stop pointing in the same direction.
Open the note →Search Engine with PJ Vogt
The history of driverless cars becomes a concrete test of whether statistical safety is enough reason to delegate consequential judgment.
Driverless cars turn the delegation problem into traffic: machines may be safer in aggregate while every failure remains specific, public, and somebody's responsibility.
Open the note →Search Engine with reporter Jasmine Sun
Reporter Jasmine Sun visits communities living beside data centers and returns AI to buildings, electricity, local politics, and contested land.
The cloud has an address. Once communities can point to the building, AI becomes a question of electricity, land, public consent, and who receives the promised benefits.
Open the note →Search Engine · reported by Sruthi Pinnamaneni
A two-part investigation follows AI's enormous infrastructure bet from Data Center Alley to xAI's conflict with people living beside Colossus.
The AI boom becomes legible as capital, turbines, neighborhoods, and debt. The second part asks who bears the consequences if its central financial assumptions fail.
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