The Amped Journal

AI researchers are debating whether frontier models' increasingly dense, jargon-heavy answers signal superior intelligence or just poor communication. AI founder Flo Crivello argues it's like conversing with a much smarter mind - comparable to talking with someone who has an 80-point IQ edge. Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor who studies AI adoption, and others counter that real intelligence includes explaining clearly and reading the audience. The discussion follows other AI advances, including a Stanford genome model reported to have designed functional bacteriophages safe for humans.

swyx (Shawn Wang), an AI engineer who organizes the AI Engineer Summit, is pushing back on the trend of stacking custom "skills" onto coding agents. He says that as the timeline fills with posts like "this skill changed my life," users pile up add-ons that at best waste context window and at worst interact badly with each other - his advice is to periodically delete them.

Guillermo Rauch, CEO of the cloud platform Vercel, said that if you're not reading the code your AI agent produces - whether explicitly or through "agentic inquiry" - it's because one of a few things is true: you're a beginner, the software is throwaway, you're prototyping, you have no users or revenue, or you're knowingly taking on debt and risk. The implication for anyone shipping a real product: read the code.

Designer Meng To built an interactive three.js site that constructs towers with dynamic weather and time-of-day effects. He said the shift from mostly static sites loaded with huge images to highly textured 3D models - all packed under 1-2MB - was enabled by AI, since the 3D format lets him ask an AI assistant to adjust scenes directly rather than re-exporting flat images.

The Philippines' offshore IT and business-services sector, which accounts for 8% of the country's GDP, has grown steadily since ChatGPT's launch. Employment is up 20% to 1.9 million workers and revenue climbed 30% to $42 billion, with forecasts holding steady through 2026. Rather than shrinking headcount, AI is shifting demand toward higher-value work - training models, supervising agents, and handling complex insurance or engineering projects - letting Filipino teams deliver more for less than U.S. or European providers.

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman is publicly warning fellow Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a Michigan Senate candidate, that his embrace of far-left streamer Hasan Piker risks turning a seat Democrats need to hold into a real fight, according to Fox News. "I dare you to continue to campaign with people like Hasan Piker," Fetterman said.

Separately, the Wall Street Journal reports El-Sayed has signaled he won't back away from some of his more progressive positions even as Republicans try to paint him as too extreme.

President Trump and his allies have built a network of groups financed by wealthy donors and businesses that are advancing his priorities with little public disclosure, the Wall Street Journal reports. WSJ reporter Marianne LeVine detailed how the paper tracked the donations flowing through this network.

Elon Musk said it's possible Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet network, could end up carrying more than 90% of global IP traffic even if competitors increase their bandwidth tenfold. He tied the claim to AI: "the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink." Musk separately endorsed a forecast from internet infrastructure company Cloudflare that AI agentic internet traffic will "vastly exceed" human usage, calling it "not a close call at all."

SpaceX is targeting a Starship test flight this month that would deploy Starlink V3 satellites and attempt the first tower catch of the vehicle's upper stage, following Flight 13. Fully stacked, Starship stands 124 meters (407 feet) tall - the largest rocket ever built - with Musk noting future versions will grow even larger.

Atelier Missor, a Paris-based foundry, is on-site at SpaceX's Starbase, Texas facility assembling a 50-foot statue of Prometheus, the Greek titan who brought fire to humanity. The crew is joining the torso and head by hand, positioning the figure to hold a torch aloft as a tribute to technological progress - drawing comparisons to France's gift of the Statue of Liberty.

The Greater Wilmington Chamber of Commerce is reworking its approach to the regional Tech Talent Collaborative, according to the Greater Wilmington Business Journal. The initiative grew out of DigitalBridge Wilmington, launched in 2022 with $2.5 million in city ARPA funding alongside the Cape Fear Collective (a local nonprofit), StepUp Wilmington and the Wireless Research Center of North Carolina to train workers and connect them to tech jobs. In 2024 it partnered with Charlotte-based Stiegler EdTech on a competitive training program, but shifting headwinds in tech hiring have since altered its course. Lisa Leath, chief people officer at Wilmington software firm Vantaca and a founding co-chair, said the program was built to solve a "hiring problem" for scaling local tech firms that couldn't find enough local engineering talent.

The Pender County Planning Board voted 3-1 to recommend denial of a rezoning request for a 1,023-home development proposed by homebuilder Bill Clark Homes on 630 acres near Rocky Point, at the intersection of N.C. 210 and Pine Village Drive. Board members cited concerns about the county's infrastructure capacity to support the growth, even though county staff had recommended approval and said the project fit the county's Imagine Pender 2050 land-use plan. County commissioners will make the final call.

The Network for Entrepreneurs (NEW) will host its annual investor "Buzz In" event on September 10 at Cape Fear Community College's Union Station auditorium - what founder Jim Roberts calls "the only venture capital conference east of Raleigh." Before that, NEW hosts an AI Roundtable on August 27 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Vantaca, featuring speakers from Vantaca, Greenlight Ventures and Aster Labs. UNCW's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship also continues its weekly 1 Million Cups pitch forum and monthly Wilmington Innovation Forum sessions, per the Business Journal's tech events calendar.

When a 17-year-old asked Paul Graham what makes a good founder, his answer was short: being good at building things, and being "sufficiently fierce." That's about it, he said.