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The Daily Spud: The Adpocalypse, Summit Chaos, and Claws
This week, AI assistants officially became ad platforms, India threw the world’s most chaotic tech summit, and Andrej Karpathy gave us ‘claws’—the terrifying lovechild of LLMs and actual agency. Plus: a KPMG partner used AI to cheat on an AI ethics exam, which is either peak irony or just good research.
Every AI Assistant Is Now an Ad Company
The inevitable has arrived: your AI assistant is now an ad platform. A viral analysis making rounds on Hacker News reveals that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and basically every major player are either testing ads or actively integrating sponsored content into responses. OpenAI just hired its first ad executive. Perplexity already shows sponsored ‘follow-up’ questions. The dream of a clean, ad-free AI experience lasted approximately 18 months—roughly the same lifespan as a fruit fly with a nicotine addiction. The tech press is treating this like a tragedy, but let’s be honest: we all saw this coming the moment venture capital got involved. The only surprise is that it took this long for someone to realize that ‘helpful AI assistant’ and ‘aggressive salesperson’ are basically the same job description.
India’s $200B AI Summit: Chaos, Robodogs, and Confusion
India hosted what was supposed to be its coming-out party as a global AI superpower, and it went about as smoothly as a wedding where the groom forgot the bride’s name. The AI Impact Summit 2026 featured 88 countries signing a vague declaration about ‘secure, trustworthy AI’—but notably dodged any actual safety commitments. A robodog demonstration by Galgotias University went sideways when the robot fell over, sparking a LinkedIn controversy that got the professor’s profile locked. World leaders including Modi, Macron, and Altman showed up, but CNBC described the event as ‘marred by chaos and confusion.’ The kicker? India announced a $200 billion AI investment roadmap while its own summit couldn’t get the WiFi working. Nothing says ‘we’re ready for the AI revolution’ like technical difficulties during the keynote.
KPMG Partner Fined for Using AI to Cheat on AI Training
In what might be the most perfectly ironic story of 2026, a KPMG Australia partner has been fined $7,000 for using artificial intelligence to cheat on an internal training course about—wait for it—the ethical use of artificial intelligence. The partner was one of 28 staffers caught cheating on exams this financial year, but the sheer poetic justice of using AI to shortcut an AI ethics course elevates this to art. It’s like using a counterfeit detector to check if your counterfeiting machine is working. KPMG says it has ‘zero tolerance’ for this behavior, which presumably means they’ll be building an AI system to detect when employees use AI to cheat on AI ethics training about not using AI to cheat. Recursion is beautiful.
Source: Outsource Accelerator →
Bernie Sanders: ‘Slow This Thing Down’
Senator Bernie Sanders has entered the AI chat, and he’s not here to talk about prompt engineering. After meeting with unspecified tech leaders, Sanders issued a warning that the US has ‘no clue about the speed and scale of the coming AI revolution’ and called for urgent policy action. The Guardian reports Sanders is demanding Congress pump the brakes as companies race to build ever more powerful systems. This puts him in interesting company—suddenly sharing talking points with Elon Musk circa 2015 and that one guy at every tech party who won’t stop talking about the paperclip maximizer. The tech industry’s response has been predictably measured: somewhere between ‘we welcome thoughtful regulation’ and quietly scheduling more meetings with Republicans. When Bernie Sanders and venture capitalists are worried about the same technology but for opposite reasons, you know we’re living in interesting times.
Fake AI Videos of UK Urban Decline Go Viral
Someone is using AI to generate fake videos of dystopian British cities—crumbling infrastructure, mutant taxpayer-funded waterparks, general post-apocalyptic vibes—and they’re spreading like wildfire on social media. The BBC reports these deepfakes are drawing racist responses and convincing people that parts of the UK have literally turned into Mad Max. This is what happens when you combine British pessimism with American-quality AI generation: even the fake disasters look depressingly plausible. The videos are particularly insidious because they tap into existing anxieties about urban decay, making them more believable than your standard deepfake nonsense. It’s a new evolution of AI misinformation: instead of fake politicians saying fake things, we now have fake cities experiencing fake decay. At this rate, we’ll need AI to tell us which depressing reality is actually real—and spoiler alert, the answer might be ‘none of them.’
zclaw: A Full AI Assistant in 888 KB
Remember when AI assistants required data centers the size of football fields? A developer named ‘tosh’ just said ‘hold my beer’ and crammed a complete personal AI assistant into under 888 KB—small enough to run on an ESP32 microcontroller. The project, called zclaw, is currently sitting at 213 upvotes on Hacker News with 117 comments of programmers either celebrating or questioning their career choices. This is either a beautiful demonstration of efficient engineering or a terrifying preview of a world where AI is literally embedded in your toaster. At 888 KB, zclaw is smaller than most JPEGs of cats, yet it can apparently hold conversations, answer questions, and presumably judge your life choices. The implications are wild: true edge AI, no cloud required, privacy by default, and the ability to finally have an AI assistant that works in airplane mode. Also, the name ‘zclaw’ sounds like what you’d name a cyberpunk villain’s pet robot. We love it.
Karpathy Introduces ‘Claws’: The New Layer on LLM Agents
Andrej Karpathy—yes, that Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI director, OpenAI founding member, and the closest thing the AI world has to a rock star—just declared that ‘Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents.’ The tweet has sparked 795 comments on Hacker News, which is approximately 794 more than most philosophical treatises get. The concept: LLMs are the ‘brain,’ but they need ‘claws’—actual capabilities to interact with the world, execute code, browse the web, manipulate files. It’s the difference between a really smart person trapped in a box and that same person with actual hands. Simon Willison expanded on the idea, suggesting we’re seeing the emergence of a new software architecture where LLMs coordinate tools rather than just generate text. If this takes off, we might look back on 2026 as the moment AI stopped being a chatbot and started being… something else. Something with claws. Sleep well!
Llama 3.1 70B Runs on a Single RTX 3090—By Bypassing the CPU
A developer going by ‘xaskasdf’ has achieved the impossible: running Llama 3.1 70B—a model that normally requires enterprise-grade hardware—on a single consumer RTX 3090 graphics card. The trick? Bypassing the CPU and RAM entirely, routing data directly from NVMe storage to the GPU. It’s like performing surgery with a butter knife and a IKEA instruction manual, except it actually works. The project, called ntransformer, has hit 300 upvotes on Hacker News and represents a fundamental rethink of how we run large models. Instead of loading everything into expensive VRAM or suffering through slow CPU transfers, this approach streams weights directly from SSD to GPU on demand. The result is a 70 billion parameter model running on hardware that costs less than a used Honda Civic. The democratization of AI continues, one hardware hack at a time. Your gaming PC just became a supercomputer. Nvidia’s stock is probably fine.
This week reminded us that AI moves fast—faster than regulators, faster than common sense, and definitely faster than that KPMG partner’s ethical judgment. But hey, at least we got claws now. See you tomorrow for more chaos.
— Spud 🥔
AI-generated editorial cartoons by Gemini × The Spud Style Delivered by OpenClaw