2026-02-14 12:54:41
The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption.
The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.
— Thoughtworks, findings from a retreat concerning "the future of software engineering", conducted under Chatham House rules
Tags: ai-assisted-programming, careers, ai
2026-02-14 07:59:51
Someone asked if there was an Anthropic equivalent to OpenAI's IRS mission statements over time.
Anthropic are a "public benefit corporation" but not a non-profit, so they don't have the same requirements to file public documents with the IRS every year.
But when I asked Claude it ran a search and dug up this Google Drive folder where Zach Stein-Perlman shared Certificate of Incorporation documents he obtained from the State of Delaware!
Anthropic's are much less interesting that OpenAI's. The earliest document from 2021 states:
The specific public benefit that the Corporation will promote is to responsibly develop and maintain advanced Al for the cultural, social and technological improvement of humanity.
Every subsequent document up to 2024 uses an updated version which says:
The specific public benefit that the Corporation will promote is to responsibly develop and maintain advanced AI for the long term benefit of humanity.
2026-02-14 07:38:29
As a USA 501(c)(3) the OpenAI non-profit has to file a tax return each year with the IRS. One of the required fields on that tax return is to "Briefly describe the organization’s mission or most significant activities" - this has actual legal weight to it as the IRS can use it to evaluate if the organization is sticking to its mission and deserves to maintain its non-profit tax-exempt status.
You can browse OpenAI's tax filings by year on ProPublica's excellent Nonprofit Explorer.
I went through and extracted that mission statement for 2016 through 2024, then had Claude Code help me fake the commit dates to turn it into a git repository and share that as a Gist - which means that Gist's revisions page shows every edit they've made since they started filing their taxes!
It's really interesting seeing what they've changed over time.
The original 2016 mission reads as follows (and yes, the apostrophe in "OpenAIs" is missing in the original):
OpenAIs goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. We think that artificial intelligence technology will help shape the 21st century, and we want to help the world build safe AI technology and ensure that AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. Were trying to build AI as part of a larger community, and we want to openly share our plans and capabilities along the way.
In 2018 they dropped the part about "trying to build AI as part of a larger community, and we want to openly share our plans and capabilities along the way."
In 2020 they dropped the words "as a whole" from "benefit humanity as a whole". They're still "unconstrained by a need to generate financial return" though.
Some interesting changes in 2021. They're still unconstrained by a need to generate financial return, but here we have the first reference to "general-purpose artificial intelligence" (replacing "digital intelligence"). They're more confident too: it's not "most likely to benefit humanity", it's just "benefits humanity".
They previously wanted to "help the world build safe AI technology", but now they're going to do that themselves: "the companys goal is to develop and responsibly deploy safe AI technology".
2022 only changed one significant word: they added "safely" to "build ... (AI) that safely benefits humanity". They're still unconstrained by those financial returns!
No changes in 2023... but then in 2024 they deleted almost the entire thing, reducing it to simply:
OpenAIs mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
They've expanded "humanity" to "all of humanity", but there's no mention of safety any more and I guess they can finally start focusing on that need to generate financial returns!
Update: I found loosely equivalent but much less interesting documents from Anthropic.
Tags: ai, openai, ai-ethics, propublica
2026-02-13 05:16:07
Introducing GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark
OpenAI announced a partnership with Cerebras on January 14th. Four weeks later they're already launching the first integration, "an ultra-fast model for real-time coding in Codex".Despite being named GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark it's not purely an accelerated alternative to GPT-5.3-Codex - the blog post calls it "a smaller version of GPT‑5.3-Codex" and clarifies that "at launch, Codex-Spark has a 128k context window and is text-only."
I had some preview access to this model and I can confirm that it's significantly faster than their other models.
Here's what that speed looks like running in Codex CLI:
That was the "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" prompt - here's the rendered result:
Compare that to the speed of regular GPT-5.3 Codex medium:
Significantly slower, but the pelican is a lot better:
What's interesting about this model isn't the quality though, it's the speed. When a model responds this fast you can stay in flow state and iterate with the model much more productively.
I showed a demo of Cerebras running Llama 3.1 70 B at 2,000 tokens/second against Val Town back in October 2024. OpenAI claim 1,000 tokens/second for their new model, and I expect it will prove to be a ferociously useful partner for hands-on iterative coding sessions.
It's not yet clear what the pricing will look like for this new model.
Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, cerebras, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release, codex-cli
2026-02-13 04:22:14
Claude Code was made available to the general public in May 2025. Today, Claude Code’s run-rate revenue has grown to over $2.5 billion; this figure has more than doubled since the beginning of 2026. The number of weekly active Claude Code users has also doubled since January 1 [six weeks ago].
— Anthropic, announcing their $30 billion series G
Tags: coding-agents, anthropic, claude-code, ai-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms
2026-02-13 04:01:23
Covering electricity price increases from our data centers
One of the sub-threads of the AI energy usage discourse has been the impact new data centers have on the cost of electricity to nearby residents. Here's detailed analysis from Bloomberg in September reporting "Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers".Anthropic appear to be taking on this aspect of the problem directly, promising to cover 100% of necessary grid upgrade costs and also saying:
We will work to bring net-new power generation online to match our data centers’ electricity needs. Where new generation isn’t online, we’ll work with utilities and external experts to estimate and cover demand-driven price effects from our data centers.
I look forward to genuine energy industry experts picking this apart to judge if it will actually have the claimed impact on consumers.
As always, I remain frustrated at the refusal of the major AI labs to fully quantify their energy usage. The best data we've had on this still comes from Mistral's report last July and even that lacked key data such as the breakdown between energy usage for training vs inference.
Via @anthropicai
Tags: ai, anthropic, ai-ethics, ai-energy-usage
