From October 1‑12 2026 I posted a series of observations on LinkedIn about rapid AI advances across security, academia, productivity, education, healthcare, infrastructure, policy and culture. I highlighted emerging threats, academic shifts, productivity gains, tutoring benefits, cloud‑dedicated VM moves and policy changes, and I recorded several decisions for my own practice.
Decision: enable 2FA everywhere – I concluded that enabling two‑factor authentication across all my accounts reduces the attack surface as AI lowers the cost of sophisticated individual attacks.
Decision: retire GPT‑based products – I decided to stop using OpenAI GPT‑based tools because they are now obsolete and migration to private plugins is clunky for collaborative work.
Decision: move AI compute to dedicated cloud VMs – I am shifting AI workloads to cloud‑dedicated virtual machines such as Claude Cowork, Grok Bot and Dot for better performance.
AI gains mean the costs of mass targeting individuals with very sophisticated attacks that used to require teams of hackers are dropping.
Rather suddenly, cyborgs are starting to dominate math research.
AI access raises test scores, and a smaller gain persists a week later. Gains remain for students who use AI as a tutor (“augmentation”) and fade for students who have AI write for them (“automation”).
New paper in The Lancet: in an urgent care setting, the advice of the obsolete Gemini 2.5 Pro & Gemini 2.5 Flash (without access to patient medical records) were rated of similar quality to doctors by other physicians.
What makes the new AI systems so much more powerful is that they give AIs dedicated computers to work with.