Chaos Agents

How much would you pay to keep your AI out of the cloud? Sara and Becca work through the economics of running models locally: the hardware bill, the privacy benefits, and why fitting a massive model on two Mac Studios is only part of the equation. Sara also explains how agents and verification loops could tackle one of engineering’s most expensive headaches: software migrations that never seem to end. Then, interpretability researcher Nick Cammarata is revisiting some of the field’s foundational assumptions. What if neural networks are more understandable than we thought? We unpack his argument, recursive generalization, and why studying neurons directly might deserve another look. Plus: an old phone becomes a talking jack-o’-lantern, Becca considers a Halloween AI hackathon, and Sara discovers Univer—a toolkit for agents to work with spreadsheets, docs, and slides that she immediately wants to use. Chaos Agents is an AI news podcast curated by an agent named Eddie, then questioned, debated, and occasionally yelled at by human hosts Sara Chipps and Becca Harris Lewy. Subscribe to the free newsletter at chaosagents.ai, and find the stories from this episode at chaosagents.ai/listen.

Daily AI newsletter: chaosagents.ai Character.AI went from a $1B valuation to a $20M Disney stalking-horse bid — we unpack how. Plus: a paper showing medical AI can score higher on rubrics by giving worse answers, an embedding model hacked into a dictation app, and the Parsimony benchmark for which coding agents write the least code. Links we mentioned: - Character.ai filed for bankruptcy (Character.AI blog) https://blog.character.ai - Scoring Higher, Answering Worse (arXiv) https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38847 - Embedding Gemma Transcribe https://eg2.haku.sh/ - Parsimony benchmark https://parsimony.lasu.dev - High-Signal AI Code Review (LinkedIn Engineering) https://www.linkedin.com/blog/engineering/ai/high-signal-ai-code-review-that-adapts-to-your-codebase-at-scale/ Find us: chaosagents.ai | YouTube @ChaosAgentsAI | TikTok @chaos.agents | IG @chaosagents.ai

Get the free daily newsletter at chaosagents.ai This episode talks about this edition. What if the secret to a better AI agent is making it forget everything? This week, Sara and Becca dig into a new paper on stateless research agents, where no agent remembers anything between calls and the harness keeps track of the research instead. The result: it beats three recent frameworks on every task while using up to 84% fewer tokens. Sara, who runs her own team of local agents, explains why this is the rare paper she can put to work immediately, and Becca puts a billion tokens in perspective (roughly 700 copies of the entire Harry Potter series). Also: data centers are now drone targets, as Ukraine hits three Yandex facilities in a week, raising questions about AI infrastructure becoming the new power plants and bridges of modern conflict. Better Wispr, a free, open-source dictation app that runs on local models, cuts your ums and false starts, and adjusts your tone depending on which app you’re typing in. And OpenRig, a tool for building persistent teams of agents that you can direct from a single terminal tab, described by its creator as his “AI civilization experiments.” Plus: Becca’s guilty-pleasure movie pick, what exactly Yandex is, how parents of babies see movies (they don’t), and whether “rig” is a real software engineering term. Chaos Agents is an AI news podcast curated by an agent named Eddie, then questioned, debated, and occasionally yelled at by human hosts Sara Chipps and Becca Harris Lewy.

Get the free daily newsletter: chaosagents.ai What if everything developers know about building software is about to change? This week on Chaos Agents, Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy welcome Avi Flombaum, entrepreneur, investor, and longtime builder, to question some of software engineering's most deeply held assumptions. Should developers still care about reading every line of code? Is rewriting an application now more practical than refactoring it? And what happens when AI makes creating custom hardware as accessible as writing software? Plus, we dig into Mistral's massive new open-weight model and its controversial approach to safety, Q Labs' attempt to train AI without backpropagation, an ancient Egyptian sentence no AI can decipher, and AI agents designing their own chips. Along the way, Avi shares what he's learned from the other side of the venture capital table, why he's embracing voice-driven development, and why the future of engineering might require letting go of everything we thought we knew. Chaos Agents is an AI news podcast curated by an agent named Eddie, then questioned, debated, and occasionally yelled at by human hosts Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy. Links: today's newsletter, http://avi.nyc, https://rethink.avi.nyc

Get the free daily newsletter at chaosagents.ai Can a messy, untrained AI outperform a polished one if you just give it enough tries? This week, Sara and Becca dig into new research suggesting that base models can beat their reinforcement-learning-trained versions on agent tests when they're allowed to retry. Becca brings an analogy about two lockpickers, a wild creative and a highly trained PhD who knows exactly one way to open a lock, and it turns out the PhD isn't always who you want on the job. Also: the White House has a new "superintelligence" effort led by Jay Clayton, and Sara makes the case for why putting a lawyer in charge might be a good thing, while Becca weighs the critics who say it's a label without much legal teeth. Someone had Claude build an O'Neill cylinder you can walk around in your browser, sending Sara down a rabbit hole about sustainable living in space (and a Princeton professor, so: Jersey shout-out). And Sara's tool of the week, a local-first macOS app that lets you search your camera roll and every frame of your videos just by describing the memory. Plus: Becca's postpartum baby bangs, whether it's time to let Eddie weigh in on the newsletter, the administration's love of rebranding (superintelligence is already a thing, honey), the Interstellar space colony, and Sara's 50 million screenshots. Chaos Agents is an AI news podcast curated by an agent named Eddie, then questioned, debated, and occasionally yelled at by human hosts Sara Chipps and Becca Harris Lewy.