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Articles on AI, engineering and complex systems

Original writing, published when there is something worth saying. Every analysis separates what was checked against the primary source from what is my own reading — and says which is which.

August 3, 2026

ChatGPT: the 900 million came from a funding announcement — and the ruler is in another document

The two numbers holding up any "ChatGPT statistics" page — 900 million weekly active users and 50 million subscribers — come from the same sentence of a US$ 110 billion funding announcement. I went and read the post: the definition of "weekly active user" is not there. It exists, but it lives in another document, published four months later, with a narrower scope. And the denominator has a traceable paternity: the COO measured 400m against total population, OpenAI's paper with the NBER measured 700m against the adult population, and the page that gave me this story went back to total — "10% became 11%" looks like progress and is a switched ruler. On the same ruler it would be 11.3% and 14.5%. Plus the Brazil step: Portuguese is ChatGPT's second non-English language, and two outlets described the same OpenAI briefing with different metrics in the opening line.

#ia#chatgpt#openai#estatisticas#fact-check#brasil
August 2, 2026

How many people use AI? I checked the giant numbers — they count accounts, not people

2.42 billion people use generative AI, says the headline — but the source itself warns against reading that number as people. I checked every step of the pyramid against primary sources, added the step no international version has (Brazil), and the result changes the reading: the world’s paying users are ~1% of humanity, and the coding-agents bubble is 0.14%. You are not behind — the feed is the bubble talking to itself.

#ia#adocao#estatisticas#fact-check#brasil
August 2, 2026

Noisy-TV in LLM agents: I swept four literatures for the trap — nobody has formalized it, and I measured it in my own agent

In 2018, a curiosity-driven agent froze, hypnotized, in front of a TV tuned to static — the noisy-TV problem, which reinforcement learning spent seven years taming. I swept four literatures for the same trap in the curiosity instrumentation of LLM agents: nobody has formalized it. And it is not hypothetical — in the experimental agent I keep on my own machine, the instrument's noise (σ=0.177) is larger than the signal it is supposed to measure.

#agentes#llm#curiosidade#noisy-tv#embeddings#reinforcement-learning
August 2, 2026

AI statistics in 2026: the scoreboard, checked number by number

Data centers "will consume more than 1,000 TWh in 2026 — the equivalent of Japan," the AI statistics roundups repeat. I went and checked: the IEA itself has retired the number; the current series measures 485 TWh. I checked the most-circulated AI statistics one by one, at the primary source, and the scoreboard has checks-out, half-truth, fossil, and zombie — with one pattern: the omitted denominator ("53% of the population" was the US, ages 18-64). Plus the Brazil step no international version has: 84% of university students have already used genAI, while the country sits outside the top 15 for private investment.

#ia#estatisticas#fact-check#energia#brasil
August 1, 2026

V4-Flash-0731: DeepSeek published the table where it loses 9 to 0 — and that is the best piece of the launch

The headline says DeepSeek’s cheap model beats the house flagship. The model card says more: Opus 4.8 wins all nine rows of the table — published by DeepSeek itself. Why announcing your own defeat works when you cost 89 times less, what the jump from 7.3 to 54.4 with no new architecture says about post-training, and what the first 48 hours outside the harness confirmed and debunked.

#deepseek#llm#api#benchmarks#open-weights