Good day . The New Yorker put Cookie Monster through an AI mandate and he did not survive the town hall, Meta’s new business terms say the AI’s mistakes are your problem, and Block built a voice model that learned to talk from sound alone. Also: ducks.
Cookie Monster Tries to Meet His AI Mandate The New Yorker
What happened: In the New Yorker’s October 5 issue, Ysabel Yates wrote a Shouts & Murmurs humor piece in Cookie Monster’s voice. A new boss named Matt arrives to “implement technological solutions that improve productivity,” which Big Bird translates as: use AI for your cookie work now, or you’re fired. Cookie Monster tries it. The AI writes that cookies are “not about the taste,” then, told to be passionate, produces a line that makes him sound “like Matt on LinkedIn.” A recipe tells him to set the oven to 475 degrees, and when he points it out, the AI replies, “You’re right for calling that out.”
Why it matters: It is satire, but the beats are the ones people report from real workplaces: a manager who can’t say what AI is for, a course and a free e-book of “50 A.I. Prompts” as the answer to everything, and a town hall about an “exciting A.I. revolution.” The joke about productivity is the sharpest one: Cookie Monster ends up spending more time fixing the AI’s cookie recipe, which is the cost a mandate never puts on the slide.
What everyone’s saying: Anyone who has been told to get better “A.I. skills” by someone who has never done their job will recognize the whole piece, and the ending lands for the same reason: Cookie Monster is laid off along with his team, while Oscar the Grouch, who spent the town hall flattering the boss, becomes “Vice President of A.I. Integration.” His closing line is that he would never fire anyone himself, because he is “Cookie Monster, not actual monster.”
My read between the lines: The piece never says AI is useless. Its target is a mandate with no measurement behind it: nobody checks whether the cookie content got better, only whether Cookie Monster used the tool. That is how real mandates work, and the person who adopts the language fastest, not the one who knows cookies, ends up with the title. If your company’s AI plan is a usage target and a prompt e-book, update your LinkedIn bio before Oscar does.
📖 Further reading: The Tools That Just Replaced 40% of Block's Workforce Are Free in Your Browser — my March piece, written in the middle of the layoff panic, on how the same AI tools companies use to cut headcount are the ones you can sign up for yourself.
Your boss wants you using AI. Fine. Viktor is an AI agent that lives in your Slack and connects to 3,000+ tools, so the reports, dashboards, code and campaigns land where your team already works, with no 475-degree surprises and no extra prompt e-book. Not a chatbot. A coworker. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →
Meta’s New Contract Makes Its AI’s Mistakes Yours CIO
What happened: CIO reports that Meta’s new commercial terms, set to take effect Friday, October 30, say that “AI features may make mistakes” and that customers “are solely responsible for and assume any and all risks associated with such AI features and any resulting content.” The terms also make business customers responsible for what their partners or contractors do, and they expand Meta’s rights to crawl pages associated with a customer’s products. The language is still a proposal Meta could change before it takes effect, and a Meta spokesperson told CIO the crawling terms apply only to its ads and business products and “do not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”
Why it matters: If you run ads or a Page on Meta, you are the customer here, and a mistake in AI-generated content could be yours to pay for. Yesterday we covered Meta’s Muse shopping agent, so this is the same company pushing AI hard, and this is the paperwork that says who pays when it goes wrong.
What everyone’s saying: Analysts quoted by CIO were not subtle. Frank Dickson of Dickson Research said the clause “turns accountability upside down,” and Aikido Security’s Mike Wilkes said it “makes no sense” that a charity asking for a picture of a dog would be liable for the model’s unsuitable result, since only Meta controls the model.
My read between the lines: Meta’s defense on training is a word swap: the revised text dropped “train” and now says collection is for “developing and maintaining” products. Infotech’s Thomas Randall called the difference “a matter of how you pronounce tomato.” If you buy ads on Meta, have someone read the terms before the 30th, because the company wants the upside of shipping AI without the liability of having shipped it.
The Brief is free and always will be. If you want what sits behind the headline, members get the paywalled deep-dives plus the full archive, including the pieces on how to use these tools before somebody’s contract uses them on you. Become a member →
Block’s Dessa Learned to Talk by Listening The Verge
What happened: Jack Dorsey’s Block announced Dessa, a speech-to-speech AI model that its team says was trained “from scratch on nothing but human conversation,” with no text and no pretrained models. According to Block, it is full-duplex, meaning it listens and talks at the same time, and it can run locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better. Block says that, as far as it knows, this makes Dessa the first realistic live-conversation AI trained only from human speech.
Why it matters: Most voice assistants turn your speech into text, think in text and then speak, which throws away tone, laughter and timing. Block’s argument is that a model built on sound can hear a sigh or a cracking voice, and it frames that as a safety issue: a voice AI that cannot hear that you’re in pain just keeps talking. For now, only “a small group of AI safety researchers” gets early access.
What everyone’s saying: The Verge says the shared conversations are mostly natural but “occasionally a little awkward and uncanny,” such as the model initially mistaking the speaker for someone named “Ronaldo,” or a movie chat that wandered into Bryan Singer’s Superman films. In Block’s own clip of Dessa talking with OpenAI’s GPT-Live-1, the Verge says Dessa comes across as more natural.
My read between the lines: Notice who picked the clips: Block, on its own project page, which also claims Dessa learned language from “hundreds of times fewer words” than LLMs. It shows no benchmarks, and its launch links say “coming soon,” so treat this as a very good demo. The lab calls itself “(very) small” and says it reports directly to Dorsey.
Nvidia’s Microduck Demo Sold 20,000 Robots TechCrunch
What happened: During his GTC Berlin keynote, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang played with a flock of Microducks, small waddling robots that sat, “napped” and somersaulted on voice command. The video went viral, and by the next day Hugging Face’s Clem Delangue said preorders had passed 20,000 units. The Microducks are open source, made by Pollen Robotics, which Hugging Face bought in 2025, and they are expected to arrive by Christmas.
Why it matters: TechCrunch says the Microducks were trained with Nvidia’s technology stack, with their basic tricks taught in simulation, and owners can teach new tricks and share them with the community. Earlier this week we covered Nvidia’s German pact, and this is the part of that push a regular person can put under a tree.
What everyone’s saying: Delangue thinks they could be the best-selling robot of the year, and TechCrunch notes the promo videos show adults playing with them too. TechCrunch also called the video a palate cleanser after “the scary black eye the AI industry gave itself this week,” as AI was blamed for one cyberattack after another.
My read between the lines: The detail to notice is ownership: TechCrunch says Nvidia bought Hugging Face in September, so the company selling the chips now also owns the maker of the toy, and the robots were trained on its own software stack. A keynote demo that doubles as a 20,000-unit sales funnel is the cheapest advertising in tech right now.
A $75,000 Idea for the iPhone Duo Greg Isenberg on X
What happened: After Marques Brownlee posted a video on the current state of apps on iPhone Duo, entrepreneur Greg Isenberg wrote that 99.9% of Duo apps “look like trash now” and pitched a business: a Duo app agency. His plan is to pick categories where the bigger screen matters, such as recipes, reading, trading, design and music, record a video of a cramped app next to an AI mockup of what it could look like, then charge $40,000 to $75,000 for a redesign in a few weeks plus a monthly retainer.
Why it matters: Every new device creates a gap between what apps do on day one and what the hardware can do, and AI is making that gap cheaper to show and cheaper to fill. Isenberg’s point is that anyone paying $2,000 or more for a phone in launch week is a customer most app companies badly want.
What everyone’s saying: The replies were mostly about price. One person said “the dev will just spend 2 hours in Claude to widen the format to fit the new device,” so it is “not a $40,000 service,” and another doubted any company would hand a cold-emailing agency its codebase. A third reply was kinder: the first clients are probably the apps already collecting one-star reviews about how they look on the Duo.
My read between the lines: Both sides are right, and that is the opportunity. If an in-house developer with an AI coding tool can do the resize in an afternoon, the agency isn’t selling code, it is selling the part where somebody owns the problem and ships it. A sales video of the ugly app beside the better one is the cheapest cold email anyone has written all year.
📖 Further reading: What Is AI Workflow and Operations Consulting? (And Why It's a Full-Time Job) — my August piece on the new kind of work where somebody gets paid to look at how a business actually runs and rebuild it around AI, and how to tell a real operator from a prompt tourist.
That’s your AI Brief for Saturday.
—Nicholas from Artificially Intimidating
