AI & The Battle for Our Digital Future

Hey Friends,

Have you ever zoomed in so far on a picture that you could practically count the strands on a goat’s head? Neither had I, until now. I’ve been poking around the bleeding edge of AI and found myself falling down a rabbit hole filled with surreal tech, billionaire drama, and philosophical curveballs.

AI Is Now Zooming Past Anything You Thought Was Possible

There's this new upscaler out there, an AI that lets you zoom into an image over and over, reconstructing new detail every step of the way. We’re talking brick textures, fish scales, the tiniest micro-leaf veins, all rendered from a low-res image. How? The model treats zooming like a narrative. Every frame it creates is context-aware, reconstructing what should be there as it digs deeper into an image’s essence. Honestly, it’s like vector art met a microscope and had an AI baby.

VO3 Gets Weirder & Funnier

We’ve already seen what tools like VO3 can do. But now people are using it to create things like “cat diving” Olympic sports and interviews with humanoid lions standing in infinite lines. It’s hilarious, ridiculous, and somehow a little profound. One guy morphs from a selfie to a podcast-hosting cow in a barn , and yes, the cow even has my mic and facial expression.

AI Drama in the Desert

Behind the scenes? Total chessboard moves. Elon Musk and Sam Altman are apparently at odds, with Elon trying to kill a Middle Eastern megadeal because it left out XAI. These tech titans are the architects of the rules this game is played by, and now they're trying to write each other out of the script.

AI Watches Us Watching

Here’s the part that is both creepy and cool: AI models are beginning to mimic how humans gaze. Not just recognize what you’re looking at, but look at it the way you do. That level of emergence , the whole “I didn’t program that but here we are” thing, still trips me out. Machines learning to observe like us? Wow.

Existential Questions & Simulation Denial

Then things got heavy. A new paper argues it’s physically impossible for us to be living in a simulation. Personally, I find that comforting and unsettling in equal measure. I’ve always thought we were pixels in someone’s graphics card. And I’m not the only one, Matt Wolf and others are going to have a tough time sleeping after this one.

Meanwhile, influencers are building AI characters that act, talk, and even whisper ASMR. Imagine stumbling across a virtual celebrity and realizing no one made her, instead she made herself, with VO3, LTX Studio, and a bunch of carefully orchestrated hallucinations.

Final Thought: Philosophy in a Bread Loaf

As one character in a surreal AI-generated video says, “The biggest craving right now? Sleep in a giant warm bread loaf”. I don’t know what it means, but it feels right. The machines are dreaming, and dragging us into their dreams. More soon. The rabbit hole only gets deeper.

Warmly,
Dylan Curious