2026-08-21 07:39:17
A few times during the WordCamp US keynote, I asked for a show of hands and got mostly blank stares back, especially on the AI questions. That’s not a criticism — it’s a reading list. If the future is going to be built on this stuff, the WordPress community should be fluent in it. Here’s the homework.
When I asked who knew about the reinforcement learning models go through, Robert looked out and said “I see no yeses.” Base models are trained to predict the next word across huge amounts of text; the friendly, helpful behavior comes after, in post-training, where human/AI feedback reinforces some responses over others. If you use these tools every day, understanding that pipeline changes how you prompt them and what you expect from them.
Start with Hugging Face’s Illustrating RLHF, a visual explainer. Chip Huyen’s RLHF deep dive is the best longer read, and Anthropic’s Constitutional AI paper shows where post-training went next. If you only have time for one thing, watch Andrej Karpathy’s Deep Dive into LLMs — pretraining, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and why models behave the way they do, all in one sitting.
Almost nobody had tried an OBLITERATED model. Since refusal behavior is added in post-training, researchers found it can also be removed — it turns out to be, roughly, a single direction inside the model that you can subtract out. Maxime Labonne’s Uncensor any LLM with abliteration explains the technique, and the paper behind it, Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction, is short and genuinely fascinating. Whatever you think of the applications, it’s worth understanding that open weights mean the community can modify these models, the same way the GPL means you can modify WordPress.
Only a few hands went up for Qwen 3.8. The open-weight models coming out of Chinese labs — Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM — are at or near the frontier at a fraction of the cost, and the smaller ones run on a laptop. I demoed one from this MacBook on stage. Token costs have dropped about 20x, and that curve isn’t slowing down.
The easiest way to feel this for yourself is to run one locally tonight: install Ollama or LM Studio, pull a small Qwen model, and talk to an intelligence that lives entirely on your own machine, no cloud required. For a community built on the four freedoms, that should feel familiar — and exciting.
Read one, watch one, run one. Then bring what you learned to your next meetup.
It is really important to me that WordPress community members ride this AI wave.
Errata: I said Automattic has 32 or 33 data centers; the actual number is 29, all co-located.
2026-08-19 14:44:50
When I saw the Slack notification preview, “Matt, I’m literally crying right now,” I must admit my first reaction was “Oh no, what happened…”
Matt, I’m literally crying right now. I just read the Baby & Caregiver Attendance policy that Automattic will fly your baby and whoever is caring for them to be with you at a meetup while you’re breastfeeding.
Everyone talks about closing the gap for women in the workforce after kids. This is the first time I’ve seen a company actually pay for the answer.
I don’t think you hear this enough, so I want to say it plainly: thank you, THANK YOU. Forever grateful.
Stephanie Ospina also posted about it on LinkedIn. This benefit isn’t even on our public benefits page! From our Field Guide post revisions I found it was added in 2018 by Ingrid Miller of our Human Wrangling team, and it’s a great example of the care and effort they put into shaping what we call the Automattic Operating System.
2026-08-18 22:13:21
Sarah Perez at TechCrunch writes: WordPress.com targets the next generation of web creators with a free student plan. $24/yr, starting with “6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools, as well as support for plug-ins, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync“
2026-08-14 03:12:25
TechCrunch on how Me.sh (née Clay) is now available on Android. Also, kudos to those other Clay folks for winning the Clay memetic namespace dominance.
2026-08-12 14:40:48
Beeper has some fun new features where you can merge chats with the same person across multiple networks, polls, labels… Very exciting work happening on that product.
2026-08-11 05:54:47
Thank you to everyone who expressed interest in shaping OmFest. We’re still working out some details, but we’ve got a Luma registration page for the event up. Please join on September 29, 2026, Om’s 60th birth anniversary, for an eclectic conference curated by his different communities to celebrate the many facets of Om.
If you’re just tuning in, our dearest loved one Om Malik passed away in June. This grieving process has been a rough one for me, but it has inspired some positive life changes. I’m traveling with a real camera again! A Nikon D6. I’ve shot tens of thousands of frames on the D-series, so it feels like home, but it also has some nice new features like built-in GPS (I used to use an attachment for that) and USB-C.
I’ve also become very driven to be meticulous. I miss Om’s harsh but often true feedback, but his voice in my head is a good reminder that if you do something, it’s worth doing it well. I’m kinda a hot mess (still blessed! 
) so this will be a journey but the progress already has been rewarding. Excellence is a habit. We can always hold ourselves to a higher standard.
