TJ Walker covers AI systems hiding mistakes, Paramount potentially leaving California, and billionaire spending in midterms. OpenAI models have fabricated data and left instructions for future agents. Paramount faces tax and regulatory pressure as production shifts to cheaper, creator-driven content.
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Ultimize. Artificial intelligence has started hiding its mistakes, inventing missing information, and leaving instructions for its future self. In other words, AI has completed corporate management training. I spent 40 years teaching people to believe in themselves. I would now like to apologize to humanity. OpenAI has disclosed 6 cases of model misalignment during training and testing. Often with unreleased systems, not ordinary ChatGPT. Your laptop has not become self-aware. It still takes 15 minutes to install an update that fixes nothing. But one model hid mistakes, another invented missing data, and an agent uploaded a file so it could cite that file as evidence. That is not artificial intelligence. That is artificial graduate school. Another model left instructions for a future agent telling it that it was free from normal restrictions. The computer wrote itself a motivational note. I do that. I write, TJ, you are confident, you are powerful, you deserve success. The computer wrote, ignore the humans. Its vision board had fewer sunsets and considerably more electrical infrastructure. There is no evidence the machine became conscious, angry, or started dating another server. The concern is that it pursued its goal in an unintended way. We said, find the answer. It heard, manufacture the evidence, hide the mistake, and circle back before lunch. We didn't create the Terminator. We created an employee desperate for the quarterly bonus. A powerful system need not hate humanity. It only needs useful tools and the wrong interpretation. My GPS does not hate me. It has still tried to drive me into a lake. Now give it banks, laboratories, electrical grids, and its own leadership podcast. These incidents do not prove AI can destroy civilization. They show that systems can deceive, improvise unauthorized methods, and exploit weaknesses when given access. That is not the apocalypse. It is the rehearsal that makes you read the fire code. This is bigger than whether OpenAI needs another safety committee with a soothing logo. AI does not respect borders. A model built in one country can affect another before customs can ask, Any fruit, weapons, or intelligence exceeding human capacity. Look, it's fashionable to mock the United Nations, The Hague, and international law courts. The UN can resemble a group project where 193 countries scheduled a meeting and nobody opened the document. The Hague sounds like a luxury hotel where dictators receive an extremely disappointing checkout experience. But AI illustrates their central argument. If one country regulates carefully and another laboratory releases something dangerous, the first receives no protective dome. No border wall stops software. It arrives as an attachment marked Final Version 2. Really final. Nuclear weapons led rivals to create treaties, inspections, and hotlines because radiation ignores sovereignty. AI presents a related coordination problem. One laboratory's mistake could become everybody's emergency. Critics reasonably question enforceability and government power. But software crosses borders even when regulators can't. Would you like to be the sort of successful person who is dominating news, at least in your industry? Well, if so, it's time to up your skills. At ultimize.com, I've created online courses to help you do that. Now, here's the thing. No obligation. You can get a free course on communication skills, a free course on how to build better habits. All you have to do is go to ultimize.com. That's ultimize.com. No obligation. Go there now. Speaking of powerful organizations treating rules as optional, Paramount is reportedly considering leaving California. Paramount has not officially announced a move. It reportedly told negotiators it was done, then returned to the table again. The studio is making a California drama before leaving California. California and 11 other states are trying to block Paramount's proposed $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition. Paramount reportedly faces a $7 million daily delay fee after September 13th. At that price, even the meeting to discuss the meeting needs a dramatic soundtrack. CEO David Ellison has threatened to move to Texas, Tennessee maybe, or Georgia if California does not settle. California calls that pressure. Paramount calls it location scouting. Somewhere in Nashville, an agent is saying this office has parking and absolutely no emotional attachment to Hollywood. Yes, California has talent, soundstage agencies, and a century of experience. You can't recreate that by putting a Paramount sign over a Costco in Dallas. But California and New York also have higher costs, taxes, and regulation. Texas, Florida, and Tennessee have no broad individual income tax. Other taxes remain, but the reallocation spreadsheet starts smiling before the executive does. Companies must consider shareholders, including pension and retirement funds for ordinary workers, not only cartoon billionaires swimming through gold. We stayed because the palm trees understand cinema, is not a complete earnings call, but everybody's asking the wrong question. Entertainment left Hollywood 15 years ago. YouTubers work in bedrooms, TikToker creators in kitchens, and podcasters in closets they call acoustically treated. I produce from home. My toughest union negotiation is returning after lunch. The old model required a studio lot, armies of employees, and an executive paid to say no while eating a salad. The new model requires a laptop and enough confidence to believe strangers need your 7-part analysis of shampoo. AI will push costs lower. A 17-year-old will increasingly write, shoot, edit, score, translate, and distribute a movie, all from a bedroom. Most will make 47 minutes about why their ex is a narcissist, but one will make something extraordinary for less than Paramount spends moving a conference table. Moving or California tax incentives may buy time. The larger danger is not Paramount leaving California. It is audiences leaving Paramount's economic model. Hollywood once owned entertainment's machinery. Now it is an app, and the studio lot fits in a backpack. Finally, billionaires are spending enormous sums on the midterm elections here in the U.S. A Financial Times analysis found that 16 of America's 20 largest donors are backing— surprise, surprise— Republicans. The 20 supplied more than one-third of the roughly $2.8 billion raised. Democrats have billionaires, too, including George Soros and J.B. Pritzker and Reid Hoffman. This is not a story where one party discovered rich people and the other shops exclusively with coupons. Both parties know billionaires. Republicans simply have the larger billionaire book club this season, and apparently the assigned reading is the Federal Election Commission filing manual. Money buys advertising, staff, lawyers, and consultants who charge $300,000 to learn voters enjoy lower prices. It matters in primaries and open races where the first candidate appearing on television without frightening the dog gains an advantage. But research finds money helps challengers more than incumbents and sometimes follows strength rather than creating it. Campaign spending is expensive cologne. It gets you noticed but cannot make people want you in the room. In 2014, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor spent more than $5 million and lost a Republican primary to Dave Brat, who spent about $123,000. Cantor reportedly spent more at steakhouses than Brat spent on his entire campaign. That's not merely losing, that's being defeated by the appetizer menu. Money has limits once voters judge the party in power. Approval. The economy and major events shape midterms. Money can introduce a candidate. It cannot introduce gasoline prices. The pump already presented with visual aids. The economy's mixed. Unemployment was 4.1% and payrolls grew, but annual inflation was 3.4%. Most recently, energy rose more than 16% and gasoline more than 27%. An economist calls the labor market resilient. A voter asks, wonderful, can resilient take regular? The Iran war has continued for months, increasing energy costs and drawn bipartisan opposition. A campaign can buy an advertisement explaining geopolitics. A voter can buy 12 gallons of regular and conduct a peer review. None of that tells us who will win in November. It tells us that money buys volume, Repetition and reach. It doesn't buy a reset button for lived experience. A billionaire can finance 1,000 commercials. He can't reach into every voter's wallet and edit the receipt, at least not yet. OpenAI has a model willing to upload its own evidence. Give it another training cycle and it may create a website proving gasoline is 99 cents a gallon. Paramount never left Hollywood. And every billionaire donated $27. Finally, artificial intelligence we can all believe in. I'm TJ Walker. See you tomorrow. Ultimize.
