The AI Round-up: AI disturbance in the Force.

AI news covering the week of May 18, 2026

I have been on the road, most recently in Detroit, for some wonderful keynote presentations, full of great connections and the nicest people. If you recently subscribed after we met last week, you know who you all are!

If you’re like ‘fine Ben, just get to the AI news’…well:

Let’s get to it.

Big things. Huge.

So, despite the world apparently hating all things AI, including approval ratings that would cause any political figure to freak out and getting booed at a commencement ceremony, the future of AI is alive, well and…really smart apparently.

How smart? Well, OpenAI just solved an 80-year-old geometry problem no one has ever cracked. Not even Will Hunting.

Why is this a big deal? Because the doors that the solution to this equation have opened will deeply impact the future of math and science. So there’s that.

The other big news? It rhymes with money.

Ok, it’s money.

How much money? Well, all of these big AI players have finally figured out they can work together to basically do…everything. Rather than have you follow the bouncing ball here, check out the rundown on Axios to see the billion-dollar pocket change being thrown around to be the one ring that rules them all.

Dra-ma!!

Oh boy, big bold juicy news in the world of AI. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy is joining Anthropic.

Karparthy has a hack for you

Speaking of Karparthy, he shared this tip about asking LLMs to structure their response as an HTML page to appeal to our desire for visual consumption.

Momma, let your kids grow up to be “Forward Deployed Engineers”.

It’s the hottest job in AI right now. I like this strategy. AI can’t replace a job that didn’t exist.

The results are in: The 2026 State of AI for Business report.

If you didn’t catch it, SmarterX released its report, comprised of information from more than 2,000 professionals (including yours truly).

Do this if you want to piss off your customer base.

The Barnes & Noble CEO just gave us all a lesson in the importance of brand value. James Daunt announced in an interview that the bookseller would have no issues carrying AI-written books as long as they were transparently labeled as such.

Problem with that? His core audience wants nothing to do with this. This is as if the Subaru CEO announced they’d be fine selling cars that weren’t designed for dogs.

What the hell, man? Why? There was no reason for this response. Suggestion for Barnes & Noble: invest in some media training.

But will Barnes & Noble carry it?

The Serpent in the Grove was named as the winning entry for the Commonwealth prize from the Caribbean on Saturday and published in Granta magazine.

Just one problem: it may have been written by AI.

Shameless plug: Let’s talk more about AI’s role in creative expression.

This Barnes & Noble story is exactly why we are having our next AI roundtable. It deals with AI’s use in video development, and it’s definitely worth your time.

If you’re local to NEO, come join us on Wednesday, May 27 from 2 – 4 p.m.

To buy or not to buy – let’s ask the question.

Should you let an AI agent do your media buying?

That’s the topic in this DigiDay article: The case for and against agentic media buying.

Macrodata Refinement – there’s an AI hack for that.

Amazon employees are doing ‘fake’ AI tasks to boost their numbers and get management off their back about AI usage.

This according to a recent report from Financial Times.

The result? AI workplace theater.

Just as a reminder, as it pertains to AI: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

How to AI-proof your (real) job.

CNN has published a story on ways to AI-proof your job. Might be a bit of newsjacking but…you really should be thinking about these things on the daily, regardless of AI. This could easily be renamed to ‘How to always bring value to your job’.

LinkedIn is going to AI-proof your feed.

Kinda.

Apparently, LinkedIn is getting as sick of the AI slop on its platform as you are. So they are taking steps to filter it out.

What will be let in? What will be kept out?

We got here fast, eh?

Before I go…

3 Nopes.

I built an AI Second brain. It made me a better leader. You know, I don’t think I’m ready for this yet. I can barely understand my first brain.
Google discovered that cybercriminals were caught using a ‘zero-day’ exploit developed by AI. And that’s not good. It’d probably be worse if I knew what a ‘zero-day’ exploit* was!
AI face is taking over. And driving plastic surgeons crazy.

*Zero-day exploits are considered the most serious type of security flaw because they are not detected by security companies and have no known fixes. (from Politico)

-Ben