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Consultant essay: “every AI project we have observed is failing”
Tech consultant Nik Suresh published a 5,700-word essay on his Ludicity blog arguing that the wave of enterprise AI mandates is driven by executives who have never personally used the tools. Suresh’s central claim: “All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one” - a tally he pegs at “0% success in a year and a half.” Read the full essay.
Suresh describes executives who “have never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life” still mandating “AI-first” strategies at companies pulling in “$2B+ in revenue.” Vendors, he writes, cannot push back on inflated productivity claims because doing so “would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation.” That leaves vendor reps in the awkward position of validating nonsense to keep the deal alive. Simon Willison’s link blog post flagged the essay as an “entertaining perspective” worth reading.
The most quoted passage is from an engineer at a token-leaderboard company: “Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job. I hate this shit so much. My job has usage tracking and quotas.” The pattern Suresh identifies is “higher is better” leaderboards that reward raw token spend, which in turn pushes engineers to feed the meter rather than solve the actual problem. The piece has drawn the kind of audience that posts “yes, this” in agreement - it surfaced on Hacker News and r/BetterOffline within 24 hours of publication. See the original post.
Leaked 2022 email: Sam Altman proposed open-sourcing a GPT-3-class model
A October 1, 2022 email from Sam Altman to OpenAI’s board surfaced during discovery in the Musk v. Altman lawsuit. The email proposed building a model “with the approximate capability of GPT-3 that can run locally on consumer hardware” and releasing it openly. Simon Willison’s write-up quotes the email directly.
The stated rationale was defensive: release the model first to “discourage others from releasing similarly-powerful models” and “make it harder for new efforts to get funded.” The competitive reference was to Stability AI and other open-weight efforts that were emerging in 2022. Whether the email reflects an actual plan or a posture for the board meeting is hard to tell from a single message - the text is brief and does not include a timeline or budget. Read the quoted email.
The email matters now because open-weight releases have largely come from outside OpenAI (Meta’s Llama family, Mistral, DeepSeek, Moonshot’s Kimi), while OpenAI has kept its frontier weights closed. The existence of a 2022 board email laying out a defensive open-source case is one of the closest things to direct primary-source evidence that the closed-weight posture is a strategic choice, not a technical one. Our analysis of the open-weight gap puts that strategic choice against the latest capability evidence. See the discussion context.
Current AI pitches a nonprofit “World Wide Web of AI”
Martin Tisne founded Current AI in February 2025, and former Mozilla AI strategy lead Ayah Bdeir joined as CEO in January. The nonprofit says it is building “an open system modeled on the early web” - public-interest AI infrastructure positioned as a counterweight to “privately owned AI systems.” TechCrunch reports the launch.
Bdeir’s framing is direct: “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.” She adds that “there has to be a public alternative” and that “if AI is truly a transformative technology… it has to be a public alternative.” The critique of big-lab training is plain: “Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market, regardless of consent or context” and “for Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules.” Read the profile.
Current AI has $400M committed across the French government ($100M seed), Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce. Bdeir stresses that the backers are “not investors; they’re funders.” Concrete projects include Suno Sutra (an offline device running AI in 22 Indian languages, partnered with India’s Bhashini), Alpha Chat (an open-source chatbot built in seven weeks by ten organizations including Hugging Face and Mozilla), and a partnership with Sakana AI for shared open-source infrastructure. See the project list.
Christopher Nolan: “AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside”
Odyssey director Christopher Nolan, currently president of the Directors Guild of America, told YouTube interviewer Hugo Travers that “I think AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside.” He called the technology “a transparent horse, it’s made of glass.” TechCrunch has the quotes.
Nolan added that he has “never seen a technology advancing so rapidly [that’s been] so completely rejected by the public,” and that “everybody’s suspicion of it is so extreme, particularly young people.” He called the skepticism healthy: “technology is always going to give us great gifts, as you say, but it has to be viewed with skepticism” and “the motives of the people giving it to us also have to be viewed with skepticism.” Nolan has previously described himself as a “techno-skeptic” and did not specify what he views as the AI threat in this appearance. See the full exchange.
Nvidia and Japan bet on “physical AI” for factories and robots
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spent July 15-16 in Tokyo lining up deals for what Nvidia is billing as “the world’s first national AI infrastructure.” Three pieces are already public: the Noetra sovereign AI consortium (~44 Japanese firms including SoftBank, Sony, NEC, Honda, backed by up to 1 trillion yen / $6.2B), a robotics coalition (Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki, Fujitsu, Hitachi) adopting Nvidia’s Cosmos models, and an expanded Toyota partnership across vehicle software, manufacturing simulations, and ADAS. TechCrunch covers the trip.
The Vera Rubin build at the Noetra site will use 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, with launch in 2028. Huang’s framing: “The next frontier of AI is in the physical world, and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan… Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries.” Read the deal terms.
The follow-on targets are large: Japan wants to deploy 10 million AI-equipped robots across 18 sectors by 2040, backed by $65B in public and private investment, and is targeting over 30% of a projected ~$133B global AI robotics market by 2040. The structural catch is that Japan’s push for AI sovereignty “rests on American chips.” See the roadmap.
Apple lawsuit tests the OpenAI / Jony Ive hardware launch
Apple’s trade-secret suit against OpenAI alleges “a pattern of misconduct aimed at getting current and former Apple employees to share confidential information,” and names OpenAI’s chief hardware officer Tang Tan. OpenAI’s response: it is “not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit.” TechCrunch’s Equity podcast covered the implications.
The device at issue is “a screenless speaker that can move” being developed with Jony Ive’s design shop. Apple claims “more than 400 Apple employees now work at OpenAI.” The litigation risk is delay rather than collapse: Sean O’Kane of TechCrunch said the suit could “naturally… lead to that sort of situation where it’s going to cause some delays” even before any injunctive relief, and Kirsten Korosec predicted OpenAI would “endure the cost and embarrassment of a trial” rather than settle quickly. Read the podcast discussion.
Privacy is the under-discussed angle. A “screenless speaker that can move” - TechCrunch’s description of the device - is a different category from a phone or a smart speaker that stays put. In the same discussion, Anthony Ha flagged the social-acceptance problem with hardware “listening to the people around you” in shared settings. OpenAI has not published a threat model for the form factor, and Apple’s complaint focuses on people, not the device itself, so the surveillance surface is mostly being left to be worked out in product reviews. See the discussion.
Quick Hits
- Sam Altman email: The October 1, 2022 message to the OpenAI board was made public through the Musk v. Altman discovery process. Simon Willison quotes it verbatim.
- Suresh essay reach: Within 24 hours of publication on July 18, the Ludicity post surfaced on Hacker News and r/BetterOffline. The original essay is at Ludicity.
- Nolan’s DGA role: The director is the current president of the Directors Guild of America. See the context.
- Nvidia’s “Cosmos 3 Edge”: The new model is positioned for Jetson Thor chips, the robotics coalition’s edge platform. See the announcement coverage.
Worth Watching
- The Sam Altman email is one piece of evidence; the next move is whether OpenAI publishes any response or commentary on why a GPT-3-class open release never happened despite the 2022 internal push. See the quote that frames the question.
- The Apple v. OpenAI case will move at the pace of litigation. A motion to dismiss or an early settlement would shift the launch timeline; a trial in 2027 would push the Ive device out further. Track the suit.
- Current AI’s $400M in commitments funds specific projects today, but the broader question is whether a public-interest nonprofit can keep pace with frontier labs on infrastructure. The Sakana AI partnership is the first concrete co-build signal. See the project list.