Michell Zappa

Artificial Insights is my weekly foresight briefing on the road toward AGI — field notes, curated links, and perspective from Envisioning. Below are all 141 issues.
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2026 (15) 2025 (41) 2024 (52) 2023 (33)

2026

A Self-Writing Dictionary

8 Jun 2026 • Issue 141

Welcome back to Artificial Insights, your occasional bulletin from the near future. One of the earliest features in this newsletter was an “emerging vocabulary”. In the very first issue of the newsle…

Artificial Gnostic Intelligence

18 May 2026 • Issue 140

Welcome back to Artificial Insights, your near-weekly bulletin from the near future. Last week I helped run a workshop at the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens, hosted by C3 Labs (the UN-found…

Still Having a Moment

27 Apr 2026 • Issue 139

This week marks three years writing Artificial Insights. In early 2023 I kept answering the same questions from friends and collaborators about what was happening in AI, and decided it was time to st…

Your Vault is Your Moat

20 Apr 2026 • Issue 138

I’ve been experimenting with changing how I work with the help of AI for a couple of years now, and realize few of those experiments have made it into the newsletter. My reflections here usually revo…

The Time of Monsters

13 Apr 2026 • Issue 137

The Time of Monsters (137) We are all training the machine. --- I spent most of last week in Obsidian, not writing. The plan was to write about how OpenClaw and Claude have pulled me back into knowle…

The Average of Everything

6 Apr 2026 • Issue 136

The Average of Everything (136) The systems are getting faster than the stories we tell about them. --- The dream of autonomous agents is remarkably appealing. The notion that with enough instruction…

Ghost Writer in the Machine

30 Mar 2026 • Issue 135

Welcome to another edition of Artificial Insights, your autonomous intelligence digest. This week, the gap between what AI can do and what it can't got wider in both directions simultaneously. Pictur…

Open Weights and Closing Loops

23 Mar 2026 • Issue 134

Welcome to another edition of Artificial Insights, your autonomous intelligence digest. This week felt less like a product cycle than a coordination problem: models improving models, agents supervisi…

Babysitting the Agents

16 Mar 2026 • Issue 133

Welcome to another edition of Artificial Insights, your autonomous intelligence digest. The AI news cycle shows no signs of abating, so here are some of the links that caught my attention in the last…

Neither Artificial Nor Intelligent

9 Mar 2026 • Issue 132

Issue 132: Neither Artificial Nor Intelligent Courtesy comes with a price tag. A company called Eon Systems just demonstrated what appears to be the first whole-brain emulation that produces multiple…

Prompt it into existence

2 Mar 2026 • Issue 131

Issue 131: Prompt it Into Existence Respite from Monitoring the Situation I have written endlessly about the transformative uses I’m finding from having AI write code for me. The idea of designing so…

An Apocaloptimist

23 Feb 2026 • Issue 130

A question I’ve been thinking about this week: Are AI tokens massively underpriced right now? When you look at the full AI stack — multi-billion dollar training runs, energy-hungry data centers, spec…

Agent in the Loop

9 Feb 2026 • Issue 129

How do you introduce an agent into your life? What does it mean to authorize a computer to integrate with your entire digital life, to start helping you get things done? I am a few days into setting…

The Capacity to Name Reality

2 Feb 2026 • Issue 128

By now you have probably heard about OpenClaw, the open-source framework for running “bots” on any computer. These bots are software loops with AI and advanced tool calling, where a number of skills…

Boiling the Ocean

19 Jan 2026 • Issue 127

A couple of years ago, I decided to start interviewing people to better understand how they think about technology. Every day for 100 days I asked someone different the same 15 questions, and gathere…

2025

Field Notes from a Centaur

15 Dec 2025 • Issue 126

Welcome back to Artificial Insights, your weekly attempt to make sense of scattered ideas. If thinking refines ideas, creating brings them into form, building makes them functional, deciding chooses…

Recursive Self-Improvement Regime

8 Dec 2025 • Issue 125

Welcome back to Artificial Insights, Carol. We have spent the last few weeks deconstructing the mechanics of working with AI. If thinking refines ideas, creating brings them into form, building makes…

Insufficient Data for a Meaningful Answer

1 Dec 2025 • Issue 124

Welcome back to Artificial Insights, where the ongoing experiment in thinking out loud with machines keeps unfolding in public. For me, this newsletter is a way to organize my thoughts around the hyp…

Experimental Environments

17 Nov 2025 • Issue 123

Welcome back to Artificial Insights, your near-weekly bulletin from the near future. I’ve been thinking a lot about audiences lately. If AI becomes one of our primary audiences, then who are we reall…

If you can’t build it you don’t understand it

20 Oct 2025 • Issue 122

Welcome to your weekly download of memes and insights. I am trying to organize observations about how I work with AI into somewhat of a framework. Two weeks ago I wrote about how I think with AI, las…

It's Not X, It's Y

13 Oct 2025 • Issue 121

If thinking refines ideas, creating brings them into form. I’ve been interrogating my own use of AI in an effort to create a document or framework that might help others benefit as much as I have fro…

Don't Believe Everything You Think

6 Oct 2025 • Issue 120

This newsletter began as an attempt to make sense of our transition toward AGI. I still believe ‘generality’ is next for AI, and that most of us will experience it in our lifetimes. Doing this involv…

We are in service of the future

29 Sept 2025 • Issue 119

When the future whispers, what does it say? There are as many ways of imagining the future as there are people trying. We inform ourselves, visualize, and backcast from the present to picture possibl…

Don't Obey in Advance

22 Sept 2025 • Issue 118

Everything is political. As someone steeped in U.S. culture thanks to growing up on a diet of video games, rock music, and the early Internet, I feel at least partially connected to the “American way…

Life in Interesting Times

15 Sept 2025 • Issue 117

One of the more surprising side effects of “infinite intelligence” is realizing just how much of my day is now spent interfacing with AI. The last time I felt something this profound was discovering…

One Person Unicorns

8 Sept 2025 • Issue 116

Welcome back to Artificial Insights, your weekly dispatch from the near future. The Ember months are here, and I expect the next stretch to bring an overwhelming mix of AI breakthroughs, hype, and in…

You're Absolutely Right!

18 Aug 2025 • Issue 115

The release of frontier models tends to attract strong opinions about whether we are any close to AGI, or if there is even a path from here to there. GPT-5, as expected, ignited the same polarization…

Weapons of Mass Distraction

4 Aug 2025 • Issue 114

AI does not need to do anything to succeed. As a hyperobject, it already carries unstoppable momentum. The growing constellation of labs, researchers, and ever-larger capital flows – combined with th…

Entropy in the Feedback Loop

21 Jul 2025 • Issue 113

Welcome to your regular dispatch of probable futures. Last week’s essay on the AI Line asked how we should measure ourselves against ever-smarter “advanced autocompletes.” Most discussion dwells on w…

The AI Line

14 Jul 2025 • Issue 112

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly dispatch of future-facing sense-making (between rounds of Mario Kart World). AI isn’t just coming for jobs. It’s coming for the logic that underpins them. For…

Failure of Imagination

7 Jul 2025 • Issue 111

Happy Monday and welcome back to your regular delivery of AI memes, links and commentary. Had you asked me a few years ago how I’d be spending time with AI, software development wouldn’t have made th…

Your Second Self Is Typing

23 Jun 2025 • Issue 110

Happy Monday from a cold and rainy São Paulo, where I’m spending the week among friends, family, and followers. I’m here to present recent work Envisioning created for ANBIMA, the Brazilian Financial…

We Turned Sand Into Thinking Machines

16 Jun 2025 • Issue 109

“Which professions are safe from being replaced by AI?” is a common question. From my perspective, you should either specialize in building on top of AI, or focus on the areas that AI is unlikely to…

Complete Accuracy Collapse

9 Jun 2025 • Issue 108

Welcome to your weekly download of the AI memes that matter. Having spent all of last week in London for the inaugural European SXSW conference, I am left wondering what role if any events play in my…

Macro Calm, Micro Carnage

2 Jun 2025 • Issue 107

Happy Monday from a sunny London where SXSW is in full swing. This week’s cognitive dissonance (based on some of the links below): MIT’s Daron Acemoglu peels back the hype: despite fireworks, today’s…

The News About The News

26 May 2025 • Issue 106

This week, like virtually all weeks before it, has seen an explosion of groundbreaking releases from the large AI labs. In the last seven days, OpenAI launched Codex, an agentic coding assistant and…

Futures Collapse

19 May 2025 • Issue 105

It is difficult to picture how different AIs display biases in their output data. We assume our models to be neutral, yet it’s trivial to pinpoint examples of forced behavior, like Golden Gate Claude…

Move Fast and Fix Things

12 May 2025 • Issue 104

One of the stronger reasons for being drawn to AI is the fact that there are no individuals who are experts at the whole field. Every person researching or working in AI carries a unique set of abili…

Poker Face Recognition

5 May 2025 • Issue 103

Happy Monday – and welcome to your weekly antidote to brainrot: a hand-picked batch of videos, articles, and memes to help you make sense of the moment. Sensemaking around AI is like chasing a mirage…

People Might Experience a Shift in Job Roles

28 Apr 2025 • Issue 102

Imagine standing atop a mountain, gazing out at the horizon. A massive wave approaches – unstoppable, transformative, inevitable. That wave is AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. AGI is the crea…

The Black Smoke Issue

21 Apr 2025 • Issue 101

I was taught that my life trajectory would include learning about the world until a certain age, and then apply those learnings to become a useful member of society throughout the rest of my life. At…

Does AI sometimes dream of itself?

14 Apr 2025 • Issue 100

Two years ago, I started this newsletter feeling late to the game. AI was everywhere. Despite decades of passion for emerging technology, I had missed the boat. Starting a newsletter then felt like a…

It Mostly Just Works

7 Apr 2025 • Issue 099

Happy Monday — and kudos for investing time in understanding what’s next. One of the most effective ways to grow your AI skills is by “using AI to build with AI”. This sounds recursive, but it’s exac…

Attention is the Currency of Reality

31 Mar 2025 • Issue 098

Happy Monday – welcome to your weekly infinite mirror of artificial interests. Like a broken clock, the AI story remains stuck on “you won’t believe what happened last week.” And this week? Another d…

It’s Only Going To Get Weirder

24 Mar 2025 • Issue 097

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly resort experience at the lotus of AI. This week’s issue is brought to you from a surprisingly sunny London where I have spent the last few days being a tourist…

A century of advance in a decade

17 Mar 2025 • Issue 096

Happy Monday, and kudos to you for caring so much about AI and this pivotal moment. Nearly everyone I talk to is shocked by the pace of accelerating change. We have no frame of reference for such rap…

The Work Is Mysterious and Important

10 Mar 2025 • Issue 095

Happy Monday, and here’s your weekly download of refined macrodata insights. It’s remarkable how quickly your perception of possibility shifts after discovering AI. We all use different models for di…

How do you pass time while your AI responds?

3 Mar 2025 • Issue 094

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly ceremonial dose of AI updates. The AI news cycle is relentless, and in this industry, not a day goes by without headlines, breakthroughs and shifting paradigms…

Staying Ahead of the Curve

24 Feb 2025 • Issue 093

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly satellite picture of where the AI ecosystem seems to be heading. I usually watch every video shared here (especially the longer ones) but I have spent less tim…

Creating your own replacement

17 Feb 2025 • Issue 092

Welcome to your weekly immersion into the cutting edge of AI. The first month and a half of my year has been characterized by spending plenty of time coding – hacking away at ways of solving my own p…

Epistemic Foraging

10 Feb 2025 • Issue 091

Happy Monday and welcome to our weekly dive into the reality-shifting waves of AI. Thanks to tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot, coding now feels less like a privileged domain and more like a strai…

Systems that understand context and take meaningful actions

3 Feb 2025 • Issue 090

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly overview of AI bits that caught my attention. Thanks to the explosion of capabilities around software development with AI, I am now spending most my waking hou…

The Future is Global

27 Jan 2025 • Issue 089

What happens when your entire value proposition is challenged by an approach that nobody really saw coming? What if the reason you are raising half a trillion dollars is based on the premise of costl…

Stranger Than You Can Imagine

20 Jan 2025 • Issue 088

Our collective capacity to process change has limits. The saying “science advances one funeral at a time” highlights how societal norms evolve only as quickly as our minds—and identities—can adapt. W…

Probabilistic Plagiarism

13 Jan 2025 • Issue 087

Happy Monday and greetings from sunny São Paulo, where I’m spending a couple of days with family and later today with fellow AI nerds. There are weeks where writing this newsletter feels like a broke…

What Now?

6 Jan 2025 • Issue 086

Welcome to 2025! One of the things I noticed during the quiet days of the holidays was how the response time from my AIs shortened considerably. It's not immediately noticable on language models, as…

2024

I am the answer to the question

30 Dec 2024 • Issue 085

The only thing that matters right now is how we handle the collective opportunity that is being presented to us in the form of artificial intelligence. There is no question whether AGI will “actually…

There Is No Wall

23 Dec 2024 • Issue 084

Happy Holidays and welcome to your weekly gift wrapped insights about the collective revolution we are experiencing. This week is light on personal commentary and heavy on curated links to help you m…

The Obsolescence Regime

16 Dec 2024 • Issue 083

Happy Monday, and welcome to the countdown for an exciting 2025. Two years ago, we shared the collective epiphany of realizing AI is here. After playing with ChatGPT and GPT 3.5 a couple of minutes,…

Simulated Fire Doesn't Get Hot

9 Dec 2024 • Issue 082

Code is the least emotional human language. Poems and novels and letters and lyrics all imbue emotion to some extent, and are thus deeply personal, while programming languages are essentially pure fu…

AI doesn't know what it doesn't know

2 Dec 2024 • Issue 081

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly countdown to foom & gloom. Of all the issues we face in a post-AI society, the one standing out to me as most concerning is the generational skill gap we are s…

The Revolution Will not be Supervised

25 Nov 2024 • Issue 080

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly snapshot from the cutting edge of unexpected repositioning efforts. These weeks have been about presenting the AI masterclass to all sorts of audiences, with a…

Be Not Afraid

18 Nov 2024 • Issue 079

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly probe of what matters in AI. One of my favorite aspects of learning about AI is the openness of information in the field. Not only is most research public, but…

Everything is Obvious in Retrospect

11 Nov 2024 • Issue 078

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly download of (human) perspectives about what machines are up to. Had you told me two years ago that I’d be spending around $100 each month on AI tools, I would…

Confidently Incorrect

4 Nov 2024 • Issue 077

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly download of AI opinions, news and memes. I am short on personal commentary this week but think you might enjoy these new-to-me ways of using AI throughout the…

Systems using Systems

28 Oct 2024 • Issue 076

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly manifestation of anomalous inconsistencies. I have been tinkering on an “AI Vocabulary” since launching this newsletter last year. It in literally the first is…

Elephants in the Room

21 Oct 2024 • Issue 075

🐘 Imagine a group of blind people encountering an elephant. Each person reaches a different part of the animal and describe what they are feeling. The one holding the leg senses something like a tre…

An Eye for AI

14 Oct 2024 • Issue 074

Are we in a bubble? Will the levels of AI capability plateau around the skillset of average experts, and never go toward general or super intelligence? Those with insight into unreleased models are c…

Lessons in Birdwatching

7 Oct 2024 • Issue 073

I recently moved in to an apartment with a back yard, and one of the favorite things I've done with the space has been setting up a bird feeder. The first month after placing the peanut & seed mix fo…

The Next 1.000 Days

30 Sept 2024 • Issue 072

What would you do with unlimited resources? Most of us spend our lives managing scarcity—scarcity of money, time, and attention. We occasionally manage to reprioritize and act in our best interests,…

Are Libraries Intelligent?

23 Sept 2024 • Issue 071

Happy Monday and welcome back to Artificial Insights, your weekly pick from the cornucopia of possibilities that is AI. Each week of publishing this newsletter has provided an opportunity to reflect…

Aliens of Extraordinary Ability

16 Sept 2024 • Issue 070

Happy Monday and welcome back to Artificial Insights, your weekly deep dive into the articles, interviews and presentations that will help you understand our inevitable transition towards greater for…

Reasons to Return to Work

9 Sept 2024 • Issue 069

Happy Monday and welcome back to Artificial Insights, your weekly spot check into the whereabouts of AI. There are as many reasons to care about AI as there are potential users of it out there. Each…

Your Reasons for Being

2 Sept 2024 • Issue 068

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly dose of generative opinions. Last week’s keynote session was a blast, and I am convinced there is demand for deeper insight and discussion about the collective…

How much is too much?

26 Aug 2024 • Issue 067

Greetings from a humid and busy Bangkok where I have the privilege to talk about centaurs and our trajectory towards AGI for an audience of curious leaders. I’ve been tinkering on an “AI masterclass”…

Confidently Wrong

19 Aug 2024 • Issue 066

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly roundup of memes and commentary about the state of AI. Sometimes it starts feeling repetitive for me to try covering ongoing developments in a way that is nove…

1 Billion is Not a Lot

12 Aug 2024 • Issue 065

Happy Monday and welcome to your regular download of ambitious investigations. There are weeks where decades happen. AI is happening on so many fronts, by so many people, that staying abreast of wher…

Emotional Model Collapse

5 Aug 2024 • Issue 064

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly dose of opinionated insights about AI. Like so many of us, I have been exploring different approaches for both learning and applying cutting-edge AI practices…

Escaping the Mean

29 Jul 2024 • Issue 063

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly download of faster, higher and stronger memes. It is remarkable how not a week goes by without significant releases and announcements happening in the AI space…

Hierarchies of Generalization

22 Jul 2024 • Issue 062

Happy Monday and welcome to your regular reboot of ambitious information. Whether we are progressing towards artificial super intelligence or not, it feels certain that the effects of AI will keep re…

Screen Separation

15 Jul 2024 • Issue 061

Happy Monday and welcome to your regular dispatch of AI news. Sometimes it’s best to appreciate the silence. Until next time, MZ Kevin Scott on AI Evolution Excellent interview with Kevin Scott, Micr…

Every Unimagined Future

8 Jul 2024 • Issue 060

Happy Monday and welcome to your regular overview of the best links that came across my timeline in the last week. How do you make space to wrap your mind around the hyperobject that is AI? What is a…

Halfway to 2025

1 Jul 2024 • Issue 059

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly sense-making experience around AI. Today marks the halfway point of the year and might serve as a reminder that only transformation is certain. Having spent th…

Situational Awareness

24 Jun 2024 • Issue 058

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly edition of artificial insights. Like so many others, this was an active week in the AI news cycle. In contrast, I have tried to remain focused on concentrated…

Capturing the vibe

17 Jun 2024 • Issue 057

Happy solstice week and welcome to your weekly guide to navigating artificial intelligence. How do you talk about something without hyping it? How do you avoid misrepresenting your observations while…

Talking to Ourselves

10 Jun 2024 • Issue 056

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly overview into who is putting AI where. In issue 054 we spoke about Google’s challenge dealing with the “Jagged Edge” of expectations in AI (in how infusing gen…

Prioritizing Creative Freedom

3 Jun 2024 • Issue 055

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly download of accelerated implementation. This week I find myself in beautiful Vienna for what was supposed to be a conference trip to talk about centaurs and au…

Reaching out to embrace the random

27 May 2024 • Issue 054

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly overview of our amazing insanity. The best part of staying on the weekly “AI beat” is having a front row seat to companies trying to innovate rapidly, as the n…

A copy of a copy of a copy

20 May 2024 • Issue 053

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly guidebook to the journey of personal transformation in an age of augmented incoherence. Machine learning is not a new endeavor - and while the dream of autonom…

Celebrating the birth of something different

13 May 2024 • Issue 052

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly download of AI updates. I have little commentary to add, as this past week has been all about explainability for me. Most importantly around terms and concepts…

Like an AI

6 May 2024 • Issue 051

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly download of insights and commentary from the world of generative intelligence. After a flurry of announcements and releases in the past few months, last week f…

Fifty Shades of Orange

29 Apr 2024 • Issue 050

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly download of AI insights, commentary and memes. Celebrating fifty newsletter editions, I took the opportunity to review the 250+ links that have been shared in…

Creating Spiritual Machines

22 Apr 2024 • Issue 049

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly guide to the near future. Something that keeps coming up when talking about how to upskill people by teaching them strategic AI applications is usually the que…

Underpromise and Overdeliver

15 Apr 2024 • Issue 048

Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of Artificial Insights, your weekly guide to analytic imagination. This week I am excited to announce our brand-new website over at Envisioning.io. Over th…

Beyond the Singularity

8 Apr 2024 • Issue 047

Happy Monday and welcome to another week of trying to make sense of our inevitable transition towards greater forms of alternate intelligence. My last few days have been all about preparing to launch…

The ethics of working after AGI

1 Apr 2024 • Issue 046

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly guide to our (inevitable) transition toward AGI. I have been thinking a lot about working and hiring in a context where autonomous systems are already capable…

Agentic Futures

25 Mar 2024 • Issue 045

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly sense-making session around analytic intuition. One of the questions I’ve been asking myself is: how are we supposed to learn how to adapt and prepare ourselve…

Who are you automating for?

18 Mar 2024 • Issue 044

Happy Monday and welcome to another issue of Artificial Insights, your weekly guide to augmented ideation. I have been consumed by a research project mentioned earlier, the creation of an index of AI…

Where we explore organic content

11 Mar 2024 • Issue 043

Happy Monday and welcome to another issue of Artificial Insights, your weekly guide to the many forms of arbitrary intelligence. It is easy to become caught up in the hype around everything AI is cap…

The memes must flow

4 Mar 2024 • Issue 042

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly map to the boundaries of artificial awakenings. Like the past 42 weeks of publishing this newsletter, this one has been a whirlwind of news in the rapidly evol…

Open only in name

26 Feb 2024 • Issue 041

Happy Monday and welcome to your weekly guide to artificial imagination. Last week we launched a dedicated WhatsApp group 💬, which was an immediate success! About a dozen readers have already joined…

The Simulation Issue

19 Feb 2024 • Issue 040

Happy Monday and welcome to another week of Artificial Insights – brought to you from a rainy Amsterdam. I have lived here on and off the past decades due to work and study, and am thrilled to be liv…

The Carnival Issue

12 Feb 2024 • Issue 039

Happy Monday and welcome to another issue of Artificial Insights, your weekly guide to navigating the near future. I have a life-long interest in emerging technology – it has always been something th…

Resistance is Futile

5 Feb 2024 • Issue 038

Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of Artificial Insights. This week sees the release of an important new VR consumer device, or as Apple calls it: spatial computing. Whether we’ll all be we…

Do androids dream of AGI?

29 Jan 2024 • Issue 037

Last night I trained a CustomGPT on ~all~ my public writing. Having spent the holidays organizing two decades of blog posts I figured this half-megabyte of content should be a formidable starting poi…

The AI Generated Garbage Apocalypse

22 Jan 2024 • Issue 036

Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of Artificial Insights – brought to you mostly by the talking heads of Davos. This week’s edition offers the usual array of high-level insight of where the…

Aesthetic Futures

15 Jan 2024 • Issue 035

Happy Monday and halfway point of January. The year has barely begun and it feels to me we are already all full speed. The new year always feels like an opportunity to pare down responsibilities and…

New Year Energy

8 Jan 2024 • Issue 034

Happy 2024 and welcome to the second year of Artificial Insights. The holidays to me are the best time for focused work and I spent the last few weeks immersed in my favorite code editor typing aroun…