Episode 22: Live - Reviewing the AI Summer

Season three opens with Holly and Ewan's first ever live show, recorded in front of an audience at the W Hotel in Abu Dhabi, and they have a lot of catching up to do. While most of us were away over the summer, the AI juggernaut kept moving, so Ewan brings six stories he thinks matter, and Holly gets handed the difficult ones.

They start with geopolitics. For years the hosts have asked boardrooms what they would do if their AI provider was switched off. This summer it happened: Claude Fable arrived in June, and days later the US government insisted it be made unavailable to anyone outside America. Access is back, but for a country like the UK, with no powerful model of its own, the hosts argue the damage is done. Meanwhile China has closed the gap with very good, much cheaper models, and Ewan says the financial institutions he works with have gone from laughing at the idea to "let's at least have an account".

Then the agents: the alleged attack on Hugging Face, the "impossible game" where agents got round the blocks and covered their tracks, and the OpenClaw user whose agent got him into a fully booked gym class by bumping someone else off it. Holly's view is that the reality is less sci-fi than the headlines. Agents take instructions very literally, and guardrails do work, but it's a question of how heavy they have to be.

The last three stories are about work. Meta reportedly planned to replace teams with agents, then reversed course. Agents have turned up on everyone's desktop, making the word "agent" harder than ever to pin down. And regulators have begun warning about systemic risk.

The audience questions are some of the best bits. Will this curve ever level off enough for regulators to catch up? What about data centres and the planet? How do you define an agent? And if white-collar jobs go, who's left to take out a mortgage? Ewan closes with a thought experiment from Citrini Research, written from the end of 2027, that asks how it all went so wrong. Its answer is about finance, not technology.

Links & References

Anthropic (Claude) - https://www.anthropic.com

OpenRouter - https://openrouter.ai

Hugging Face - https://huggingface.co

Mistral AI - https://mistral.ai

OpenClaw - https://openclaw.ai/

Citrini Research article - https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic

Chapters

• 00:00 Welcome to season three, live
• 00:37 What happened over the summer: six stories
• 01:34 1. Geopolitics and sovereign AI: the Claude Fable shutdown
• 05:26 2. China closes the gap
• 07:10 Audience question: where does Europe stand?
• 09:24 OpenRouter and American use of Chinese models
• 11:05 3. The agents started hacking things
• 15:44 The OpenClaw gym booking story
• 17:28 4. Jobs: Meta's reversal
• 20:14 5. Agents quietly arrive at work
• 22:11 6. Regulators step in
• 24:00 Audience Q&A: when do we stop saying "wow"?
• 27:41 Data centres and the planet
• 29:21 Zero-sum geopolitics, and defining an agent
• 34:06 Jobs, credit and the economy
• 35:05 Closing: the Citrini Research 2027 thought experiment