Wednesday, 9th September 2026
I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce. [...]
We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field.
I'm continuing to have a lot of fun with GPT-6 Astra and Blender (see my TIL).
As a big fan of the Imperial Fabergé Easter eggs, I've always thought it would be fun to make some new ones that celebrate popular culture.
Yesterday I decided to try out the new ChatGPT Images 2.5 by running this prompt:
Generate a photo of a faberge egg that's themed after the TV show Pluribus - research first
It gave me this - honestly not bad for a first attempt!
Then, just to see what would happen, I pasted that image into Codex running GPT-6 Astra (high) and prompted:
Use your blender local skill to create a blender model of this faverge egg
(Here's the skill file, which I created like this.)
It churned away for 17m51s and built me several .blend files. I already had this vibe-coded Blender viewing experiment lying around, so I added that to my tools collection and now you can use it to see my Pluribus blender model in your browser:
