Show notes — Episode 1
The week of 6 June 2026. A source under every claim, so you can dig in and check the work.
1. AI keeps getting cheaper to run
MiniMax released M3 (open-weight, 1M-token context) on 1 June. Its sparse-attention design cuts per-token compute at long context to about a twentieth of the prior M2 model, with roughly 15.6× faster decoding, by the company's own figures (independent benchmarks are still thin). The point is the cost curve, not any single model.
Sources: MiniMax, VentureBeat. Cut from the draft: a claim that a 100-billion-parameter model was trained for $1.25/hour. It could not be verified and does not hold up, so it was removed.
2. The shift from chatbots to agents (a read on direction, not a single event)
The year's effort is moving toward systems that complete multi-step tasks rather than just answer questions, with smaller, specialized open models alongside.
Sources: Stanford HAI AI Index 2026, InfoWorld.
3. Regulators move on software that manages people
Meta's internal Model Capability Initiative records employees' keystrokes, mouse movements, and on-screen activity on work laptops, turning it into training data so Meta's AI agents can learn office tasks. CTO Andrew Bosworth told staff there was no opt-out on a work laptop; after weeks of backlash, Meta scaled it back on 1 June (a 30-minute pause and an exemption process). Colorado's AI Act (effective mid-2026) and Illinois HB 3773 restrict AI in hiring and firing, and bipartisan federal bills would require human oversight and disclosure of AI in personnel decisions.
Sources: Fortune, HR Grapevine, Lexology.
4. Competition crowding out cooperation
The WEF Global Risks Report 2026 ranks geoeconomic confrontation (trade wars, sanctions, export controls) as the top global risk for the year, ahead of armed conflict, with multilateral cooperation weakening. The US-China tariff pause from last autumn left the structural disputes (tech export limits, Taiwan) unresolved.
Sources: WEF Global Risks Report 2026.
5. Ungoverned water disputes
India put the Indus Waters Treaty into abeyance on 23 April 2025 after the Pahalgam attack; it remains suspended, with Home Minister Amit Shah saying India will never restore it. Ethiopia inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile on 9 September 2025, with no binding agreement with Egypt and Sudan downstream. China began building the world's largest hydropower dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet on 19 July 2025, with no treaty governing the Brahmaputra it shares with India and Bangladesh.
Sources: The Diplomat (Indus), Al Jazeera (GERD), Al Jazeera (Yarlung Tsangpo).