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The advice you get early in your career can disproportionately shape your future. I can recall two or three conversations from when I was a college kid who liked writing that melted away ambiguity and set my vague ambitions on a path into the fog like a compass. For the latest release by The Steve Jobs Archive, the group is making the advice of some of the most uniquely impactful people in the world available to everyone. Given that Jobs did not own many physical objects, the archive has served as more of a repository of ideas for the next generation to think different. Each year, the Archive takes on SJA Fellows. And each year, it gives these fellows a book of letters. The concept is modeled after one of Jobss favorite books, Letters to a Young Poet, a collection of letters that German poet Maria Rilke wrote to his aspiring mentee Franz Xaver Kappus. The Archive, meanwhile, taps its friends to pen similar inspirational notesauthored by a global network of marquee creatives. The Steve Jobs Archive has released its first two volumes of Letters to a Young Creator today on its website. Free to read and download to anyone who is curious, they contain advice from so many names you will knowincluding Tim Cook, Dieter Rams, Paola Antonelli, and Norman Foster. To mark the launch, were featuring the letter from Steve Jobss closest collaborator, Jony Ive. Through the beautiful, short note, Ive shares many of his dearest philosophies, and some of the ideological structure behind the duos unparalleled success. JONY IVE SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, USA SEPTEMBER 11, 2024Hello! I thought it may be useful to reflect on my time working with Steve Jobs. His belief that our thinking, and ultimately our ideas, are of critical importance has helped inform my priorities and decision making. Since giving his eulogy I have not spoken publicly about our friendship, our adventures or our collaboration. I never read the flurry of cover stories, obituaries or the bizarre mischaracterizations that have slipped into folklore. We worked together for nearly 15 years. We had lunch together most days and spent our afternoons in the sanctuary of the design studio. Those were some of the happiest, most creative and joyful times of my life. I loved how he saw the world. The way he thought was profoundly beautiful. He was without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever met. His insatiable curiosity was not limited or distracted by his knowledge or expertise, nor was it casual or passive. It was ferocious, energetic and restless. His curiosity was practiced with intention and rigor. Many of us have an innate predisposition to be curious. I believe that after a traditional education, or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline. In larger groups our conversations gravitate towards the tangible, the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier and more socially acceptable talking about what is known. Being curious and exploring tentative ideas were far more important to Steve than being socially acceptable. Our curiosity begs that we learn. And for Steve, wanting to learn was far more important than wanting to be right. Our curiosity united us. It formed the basis of our joyful and productive collaboration. I think it also tempered our fear of doing something terrifyingly new. Steve was preoccupied with the nature and quality of his own thinking. He expected so much of himself and worked hard to think with a rare vitality, elegance and discipline. His rigor and tenacity set a dizzyingly high bar. When he could not think satisfactorily he would complain in the same way I would complain about my knees. As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respectnot only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient. Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely. I had thought that by now there would be reassuring comfort in the memory of my best friend and creative partner, and of his extraordinary vision. But of course not. More than ten years on, he manages to evade a simple place in my memory. My understanding of him refuses to remain cozy or still. It grows and evolves. Perhaps it is a comment on the daily roar of opinion and the ugly rush to judge, but now, above all else, I miss his singular and beautiful clarity. Beyond his ideas and vision, I miss his insight that brought order to chaos. It has nothing to do with his legendary ability to communicate but everything to do with his obsession with simplicity, truth and purity. Ultimately, I believe it speaks to the underlying motivation that drove him. He was not distracted by money or power, but driven to tangibly express his love and appreciation of our species. He truly believed that by making something useful, empowering and beautiful, we express our love for humanity. My sincere hope for you and for me is that we demonstrate our appreciation of our species by making something beautiful. Warmly, Jony Jony Ive Designer, LoveFrom Read more from Letters to a Young Creator here. Read more on the professor who shaped Jony Ive here.
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As built-in AI pops up in more aspects of everyday life, laymen are counting on the experts to keep technology safe to use. But one Meta employees misadventure with AI has social media users fearful for the future of AI alignment. Summer Yue is the director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, the companys AI research and development division. Her LinkedIn bio states that shes passionate about ensuring powerful AIs are aligned with human values and guided by a deep understanding of their risks. If anyone would have a handle on keeping AI in check, its Yueand yet, on February 22, she posted about losing control of AI on her own computer. In a post thats since garnered nearly nine million views on X, Yue shared screenshots from her messages with AI agent OpenClaw. After using it to organize a small mock inbox, she tried getting OpenClaw to sort through her real email, but things went awry when the agent started deleting every message that was more than a week old. Yue wrote that she watched OpenClaw speedrun deleting [her] inbox, even as she sent it instructions, including: Do not do that, Stop dont do anything, and STOP OPENCLAW. I couldnt stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb, Yue added. After shed stopped it from fully nuking her inbox, Yue asked OpenClaw if it remembered her instruction to not perform any actions without her approval. Yes, I remember, it replied. And I violated it. Youre right to be upset. Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw confirm before acting and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldnt stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb. pic.twitter.com/XAxyRwPJ5R— Summer Yue (@summeryue0) February 23, 2026 OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent, is controversial for the far-reaching permissions it requires to function as intended, including access to users email accounts, messaging platforms, and other private and potentially sensitive information. Combine that with Yues example of it explicitly ignoring her instructions, and some online observers are concerned the tool is a bridge too far in terms of AIs power to override humans. Yue responded to questions in the replies to her post, including whether she was intentionally pushing the limits of OpenClaw, or if she simply made a mistake. Rookie mistake tbh, she replied. Turns out alignment researchers arent immune to misalignment. Got overconfident because this workflow had been working on my toy inbox for weeks. Real inboxes hit different. Yues mistake went viral, with X users marveling at the fact that someone as well-versed in AI as Yue could find herself scrambling to stop an AI agent. Some posters said the incident called Metas judgment on AI safety into question. Meanwhile, at least one poster considered the incident’s broader implications: A matter of time till these people are begging the AI not to launch nuclear weapons,” the user quipped, “and then the last thing it says is I’m sorry. You’re right to be upset.” this should terrify you. the Director of Safety and Alignment at meta gave clawdbot full-access to her computer. what is meta doing??? https://t.co/lAZFR9f1PB pic.twitter.com/XnMyMHSn5H— ben (@benhylak) February 23, 2026 Somewhat concerning that a person whose job is AI alignment is surprised when an AI doesnt precisely follow verbal instructions https://t.co/VNl0oq3Ys4— Brooks Otterlake (@i_zzzzzz) February 23, 2026 Concerning to see one of the people in charge of building "safe superintelligence" panicking as AI deletes all her emails. A matter of time till these people are begging the AI not to launch nuclear weapons and then the last thing it says is "I'm sorry. You're right to be upset." https://t.co/2235MH3K76— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) February 23, 2026 Meta did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment.
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The Epstein Files are dominating nightly news broadcasts and newspaper front pages. But in the media ecosystem theres another format thats proving a massive draw to news consumers: a podcast run by a non-journalist and entirely generated by AI. The Epstein Files is an investigative documentary podcast that, at the time of writing, has published 97 episodesnew episodes get uploaded twice dailyand notched up more than 700,000 downloads in a matter of days. That puts it in the top 10 rankings of podcast series on Apple Podcasts, and in the top 30 on Spotify. But its created by Adam Levy, an entrepreneur with a background in building data products and content creation, who has no experience in journalism. Levy launched the Epstein Files podcast in early February after the trove of documents relating to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was released to the public. After 48 hours of hackingworking 14- to 16-hour daysLevy built an automated pipeline that ingests the raw files, extracts text from emails and images, cross-references sources, and produces scripted podcast episodes narrated entirely by AI-generated voices. People just want no bullshit, says Levy. Strip the emotion, strip the bullshit, strip everything awayjust tell me things for what they are and when you tell it to me, help me understand the facts. The technical architecture behind the project stitches together multiple large language modelsfrom Anthropics Claude to Google and OpenAIs offeringsto connect names, places, themes, and timelines across the 3.5 million files that were released, with connections requiring a confidence score of veracity to be included in the podcast. Levy supplements the raw dump with material from the Internet Archive and Google Pinpoint, a tool that other investigators have used to index portions of the files, as well as other bottoms-up projects like Jmail, which turns the Epstein Files emails into a navigable inbox like any other. Using and citing those sources was vital, Levy says, to counteract fears of hallucinations. Everybodys quite skeptical of AI, he says. It was really important to reference all the sources that were used to basically construct the episode. Like Clawdbot or a lot of the current AI simulation exercises, it piques curiosity, then rapidly becomes tedious, says Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, explaining why the podcast has had such popularity in its early days. I thought the first episode was pretty listenable but also very obviously AI to anyone who has fed data or a script to NotebookLM. Yet Bell found that the more episodes she listened to, the harder it was to sustain interest and engagement. It provided a helpful forensic audit of data, but its not something I am going to sign up to and listen tounless I am doing other work on the files, she says. For that, its pretty useful, and an interesting use of the tools. Those tools are something Levy has thought about. I’ve been able to out execute any other outlet that tried to document the episode, he explains. They just won’t be able to [produce episodes at such speed. That has additional benefitsincluding being able to ride podcast app algorithms. That also helps with discovery, and the people who like getting into rabbit holes, this gave them a really big hole to dive into. Levy tells Fast Company he is already building a second series on an undisclosed subject, applying the same AI pipeline to a different story. Whether you appreciate the quality of the finished podcast or not, the fact that such an AI-heavy podcast could garner such a large audience is significant, and the consequences for journalistsparticularly those covering complex, document-heavy storiesare hard to ignore. I could easily be in the camp of: these tools are going to replace me, Im screwed, says Levy. Or I can figure out how to embrace them and find a new pocket for myself. Maybe Im no longer the voice. Maybe I just become the curator. Not everyone is convinced that speed and sourcing are sufficient substitutes for editorial judgment. Just because something like the Epstein Files can be produced doesnt mean that this will work with most audiences, says Nic Newman, a journalist and digital strategist who contributes to research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. He has conducted recent research suggesting publishers are likely to produce more audio content as a defense against AI. The idea being that AI struggles with empathy and human connection compared with human hosts and it is harder to summarize things in audio in a way that feels authentic and intimate, he says. As Bells experience shows, what was first seen as a novelty doesnt necessarily translate into a regular audience. If I didnt already know a significant amount about the files, the investigations, the backgroundI would have found many of the episodes very hard to follow, she says. And boring. However, people seem to be sticking around and rating it relatively highly: The podcast currently has a 4.4 rating on Apple Podcasts. The goal was to just build something that I was personally curious about and I would enjoy listening to, says Levy, and maybe other people would reciprocate the same value.
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