Radar Trends may feel just a bit different this month. As Mike Loukides explains, “Starting with this issue of Trends
, we’ve moved from simply reporting on news that has caught our eye and instead have worked with Claude to look at the various news items we’ve collected and to reflect on what they tell us about the direction and magnitude of change.” Here are just a few of the topics they’re considering:
In an example of consumers benefitting from competition between AI behemoths, OpenAI now gives open source developers six months of API credits for ChatGPT, while Anthropic gives them six months of Claude Max. Anthropic has also thrown open a million-token context window in Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6. Simon Willison loads up that same Opus 4.6 window with the comments individual users have made on Hacker News and creates “profiles” of them (it’s all perfectly legal) so he can avoid engaging with past trollers.
And for folks who want a little pushback from ChatGPT, there’s always the “potato prompt”—in the role of critic, ChatGPT won’t spare your feelings. Or if you prefer chatbot flattery, you can make your own digital twin with ChatGPT and instruct it to consider you a paragon of virtue. The last word belongs to Steve Yegge, who wonders whether “AI is starting to kill us all.”
Find out what Steve means, how the potato prompt works, and the other marvels brewing in tech—along with their wider implications—by following the links in Mike Loukides’s Radar Trends.
