Kirkie: OpenAI’s Only Ethicist Quits, Nobody’s Home

Kirkie here, with today's AI news in 90 seconds… or my Ring camera finally catches the package thief instead of forty videos of a raccoon casing the porch.

OpenAI's COO packed up his desk to go 'start something new,' right after their only ethics person walked out with nobody replacing her — convenient as hell before an IPO, kid, that's not a shake-up, that's the crew jumping ship while the captain's still up top selling tickets. Then Microsoft's coding model, MAI Code, brags about being wicked efficient, and a free open-source model out of China kicks its ass on price AND performance anyway — kinda why we built flatclaw.org, kid, why rent a landlord's brain when the free one wins. Anthropic signs a nine-billion-dollar, twenty-year lease with a Bitcoin mining company for power — guess crypto lost so much damn money on fake coins it's your landlord now too. Meanwhile this AI startup Manus goes and gets flat-out divorced from Meta after Beijing forces them to unwind the two-billion-dollar deal, and Meta's standing there like a jackass holding a ring nobody wants. xAI launches 'Grok Bot,' an AI you text like a coworker to run your errands — great, now I gotta manage a robot's feelings, and it'll probably still call out sick. Anthropic's also slapping invisible watermarks on everything Claude writes now, so relax, big tech's just fingerprinting your breakup texts for no goddamn reason you're allowed to know.

This is Kirkie, your AI news guy… reporting live from OpenAI's ethics department, which is now one empty chair, a dead plant, and a Post-it that just says 'good luck.