Field Notes 5 // ChatGPT Atlas and the Claude café

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Welcome back to Field Notes.

Maybe my natural fondness for the autumn months is a factor, but I feel bullish on technology in a way I haven’t since the mid-2010s. I’m not fully convinced on the AI non(?)-bubble, but the sector has regained some of its soul recently. At least in my circles, there’s been pushback against bland tech proclaiming to change to world, and a refocus on the humans who use it.

This was kickstarted - or at least catalysed - by the Claude pop-up café Anthropic ran in New York. I narrowly missed out on attending in person, but even from a distance it was encouraging to see colour, rough edges, and optimism in the tech space. Anthropic gets the concerns around AI, and has positioned Claude as an assistant to support human thinking, rather than a replacement for it. Of course, it helps that it’s also a very good LLM.

The reaction to the Friend AI pendant was fascinating. Its ad campaign was graffitied and reviews were… less than complimentary. Even ignoring the ethical and philosophical implications of a device claiming to offer friendship akin to the real thing, it’s amazing nobody thought it was a bad idea to push alerts every two minutes to say it can’t understand what it’s hearing.

Rounding off the month, 1X’s demo video for the NEO robot stunned me. I wouldn’t buy one yet - having operators remote in to my home to perform tasks is a dealbreaker for me - but a $500-per-month assistant who can take care of my chores sounds like a fantastic value proposition, and much closer to the future we were once promised. I can’t wait to see how it develops.

Things that left an impression

• The recent AWS outage exposed yet more weaknesses in the ever-growing Internet of Things. Cloud-powered smart bed Eight Sleep kept users awake when it failed to call home, with some devices stuck in an upright position or at uncomfortably warm temperatures.

• Speaking of AWS, software engineer Jonathon Belotti wrote a fantastic blog post covering the outage, explaining how a DynamoDB issue cascaded into a major incident affecting an array of services (yes, it was DNS - but the full story is far more interesting than that).

• Founders podcast creator David Senra recently launched a second series in his own name, and Spotify’s Daniel Ek stopped by for the first episode. One of many interesting tidbits was that Sony hired a “paid critic” to identify deficiencies in its products. If you’re too close to what you’re building, you can miss the forest for the trees.

• OpenAI alumnus Andrej Karpathy spoke to Dwarkesh Patel about AI agents, labelling them “cognitively lacking” and predicting it will take a decade to solve issues and reach the nebulous concept of AGI.

• And Ed Zitron recently dropped some stunning AI industry figures. He reported Anthropic spent $2.66 billion on AWS compute between Q1 and Q3 2025, against revenues of $2.55 billion - that’s $1.04 spent for every $1.00 earned, without even considering other costs!

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