Hype, slop, craft: the evolutionary ecology of AI There’s a patch of ground near Chernobyl that botanists call Рудий ліс, the Red Forest. In the immediate aftermath of the 1986 disaster, ¹ the radiation killed mostly everything, turning the pine trees a rust-red colour before they died. That’s poetic, but hardly unexpected – not even Polesian pines can withstand a firehose of low enriched uranium decay products.

The Latin verb agere means “to do, to act, to drive forward”. From it we get not only “agent” but also “action”, “actor”, and curiously enough, “agile”. The Romans understood what we seem to have forgotten: that agency is fundamentally about motion, about transformation, about the capacity to change the world.

This is about the time of year when I get the sudden and irresistible urge to make kimchi.

In 1790, the French Academy of Sciences commissioned a rather ambitious survey. The goal was to measure the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along the meridian passing through Paris, then use that measurement to define a new universal unit of length: the metre.

Roughly 541 million years ago, something extraordinary happened in Earth’s oceans. Over a geologically brief period of perhaps 20 million years, the fossil record explodes with an almost obscene diversity of body plans.

Around two years ago, almost to the day, I spent an absolutely frantic evening in Berkeley, going through enough coffee to power a mid-sized city, hammering away at my laptop on trying to figure out what comes after LLMs. What to most people was still barely on the horizon at the time has been a subject I have been working on in various capacities for the best part of the past decade, on and off.

There’s a cave in Ethiopia, in an area called Dikika. At some point, around 3.4 million years ago, an early hominin made some incisions on an animal carcass, leaving some notches on a bone as the makeshift knife cut past the muscle and sinew into the bone, tell-tale kerf marks that speak of the first time one of our ancestors used a tool. ¹ What happened in that cave changed everything for our species. ¹ McPherron, S.

When Pygmalion carved Galatea from ivory, he fell so deeply in love with his creation that he begged Aphrodite to bring her to life. The goddess, moved by his devotion, granted his wish. ¹ It’s a beautiful myth about art, obsession and the blurring lines between creation and creator. What the myth doesn’t tell us is whether Galatea charged a monthly subscription fee. ¹ Ovid, Metamorphoses , Book 10, 243-297.

I’ve spent the better part of this weekend putting OpenAI’s latest offerings through their paces - both the newly released open-weight models and GPT-5 itself. Armed with a selection of coding challenges, mathematical problems, and the sort of esoteric research queries that usually separate the wheat from the chaff, I’ve been conducting what amounts to a weekend-long torture test of these systems.

The Greeks loved oracles. The average temple of Apollo, who among others was in charge of soothsaying and predictery, was adorned to the gills with gifts from grateful worshippers whose inscrutable questions got equally inscrutable answers from Apollo’s oracles. None of these were more famous than the Pythia, the young ladies high as a kite on volcanic fumes at Apollo’s temple in Delphi.

There’s a curious terminological schism that nobody talks about at what passes for dinner parties for the AI crowd.