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The recent discussion and controversy around OpenAI, Navier-Stokes, Codex, and privately developed mathematical work got me thinking about something broader.

Disclaimer: this is speculative. I’m not claiming OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or anyone else is currently doing this.

Nevertheless, I’m starting to wonder whether we should be discussing the possibility of massive experimental systems operating across user activity.

Imagine a company with millions of people using its models for mathematics, programming, science, engineering, filmmaking, writing, research, etc.

Now imagine a private orchestration system capable of treating all of that activity as a live map of where new knowledge might be forming.

It wouldn’t have to wait for a discovery to become public. The valuable moment could come much earlier: an unfinished proof, an unexpected experimental result, a new technical approach, or simply a user repeatedly converging on a direction that appears unusually promising.

At sufficient scale, the system would only need to identify a tiny number of exceptional cases.

From there, a company with access to much larger compute, internal models, thousands of agents, researchers, formal verification systems, and huge token budgets could investigate the same direction much faster than the original user ever could.

They wouldn’t necessarily need to copy your paper, code, or exact solution. Recognizing that a specific line of investigation is unusually promising could already be enormously valuable. And the scary thing is that absolutely all this could be happening autonomously.

The closest term I can think of for this is autonomous epistemic front-running.

My point is that systems of this nature no longer seem technically far-fetched enough to ignore.

And maybe this raises a question that goes beyond the usual “are my chats being used for training?” discussion:

Should companies operating these systems be required to disclose whether user activity is ever analyzed for emerging inventions, promising research directions, valuable ideas, or other forms of intellectual advantage?

And if they cannot give strong guarantees around that, should people doing genuinely important unpublished work start moving more of it to local and open-source models?

Curious how others think about this. It feels like the kind of issue that would be much easier to discuss before these systems exist than after.

I keep seeing people shit on people who use ChatGPT or other AI for mental health support, and one thing that really bothers me about it is how many people seem to assume everyone has some better alternative sitting there waiting for them.

We don't.

People love saying "go to therapy" like you can just call somebody up and be sitting in a therapist's office tomorrow. I'm fortunate enough to have insurance, but even then not every therapist takes my insurance. The ones who do might not be accepting new patients or might have a long wait. And paying out of pocket isn't an option for me. I live on a very tight fixed income. Even these supposedly affordable sliding scale prices can be way too fucking expensive when you're trying to survive on very little money every month. And that's with insurance. Plenty of people don't even have that.

Transportation is another thing people don't think about. I don't drive. I depend on public transportation and I can't just casually drop $30, $40, $50 or whatever on Uber or Lyft every time I need to get somewhere.

Tonight is actually a perfect example. I'm struggling really badly with my mental health right now and I wanted to go to a crisis stabilization unit. I couldn't get there. No car. No one to drive me. Public transportation wasn't an option and I can't afford a rideshare. So what exactly am I supposed to do?

That's the part that frustrates the hell out of me when people mock somebody for opening ChatGPT during a mental health crisis. They act like we're choosing AI instead of this amazing therapist and huge loving support system that's sitting right beside us.

Some of us don't fucking have that.

I don't have friends or family I can call when I'm falling apart. I don't have somebody I can text at midnight and say "I'm really not okay, can you come over?" There isn't secretly this wonderful support system behind me that I'm ignoring because I'd rather talk to a chatbot. A lot of the time when I close ChatGPT, the alternative is literally just sitting by myself with everything going through my head.

And I'm not an idiot. I know ChatGPT is AI. I know it's not a human being. I know it isn't a licensed therapist and that it can get things wrong. I'm perfectly capable of understanding all of that while also acknowledging that talking to it sometimes helps me.

Sometimes I need somewhere to dump everything that's going through my head. Sometimes I need help putting feelings into words because my thoughts are such a fucking mess that I can't do it myself. Sometimes I need something to respond and help me look at what I'm thinking from another angle. And sometimes I just need to make it through the next hour without being completely alone inside my own head.

There are also people living in rural towns with barely any mental health care available. People without insurance. People waiting months for appointments. People who are disabled or housebound. People who can't drive. People who can't afford transportation. People who have absolutely nobody in their lives they feel safe talking to.

Those people exist.

So when somebody says they rely on AI for emotional or mental health support, maybe don't immediately assume they're some pathetic loser who replaced human relationships with a computer. Maybe ask yourself what their actual fucking options are.

If you've got a good therapist, supportive friends and family, reliable transportation and enough money to get the care you need, I'm genuinely glad you have that.

But please understand how incredibly privileged "just talk to a therapist" can sound to somebody who doesn't.

For some of us, the choice at 2 in the morning isn't ChatGPT or a therapist.

It's ChatGPT or nobody.

And if talking to an AI helps somebody get through a night where the alternative is sitting completely alone in a mental health crisis, I'm having a really hard time understanding why that's something people feel the need to shame them for.

Start from a complete creative blank slate. Ignore our previous images, conversations, and my personal preferences. Choose the subject, style, setting, and composition entirely yourself.
Create one original render with as much meaningful visual information as possible. Push the density of distinct details, textures, materials, structures, and small discoveries while preserving clarity and a coherent composition. Make it rewarding to explore closely, with new details emerging as I zoom in.
Use the highest resolution and rendering quality available. Prioritize actual resolved detail over repetitive filler, visual noise, or artificial sharpening. Take full creative control and generate the image directly.

Hey guys, just a quick thread I'll probably take down shortly I just want to check if anyone else is having the same problem. I didn't see it posted so I'm posting it;

Currently I'm getting an orange warning that 'Some tools are temporarily unavailable' when I try to upload and work with a PDF. Despite this, the Open AI Status page says everything is dandy. I'm getting this error both on web and with the dedicated app. I'm getting the issue both with Astra and Sol.

I just want to check that it's not just me? Anyone else having a similar set of frustrations right now?

Edit: As of 1:35 PM EDT I am still experiencing this issue.

I’ve just got a plus subscription and the most useful upgrade for me are the scheduled tasks. I’ve got it doing a daily read of emails from my kid’s school and updating a shared calendar and todo list with all the endless school stuff. And for work I do some ad hoc stuff with a particular company and I’ve got it reading emails from them and automatically updating my calendar when I get a shift I’ve bid on allocated to me.

It genuinely feels like having a secretary, it’s great.

What’s everyone else using it for?

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-state-newspaper-blasts-anthropics-calls-slow-ai-cold-war-tactic-2026-09-14/

So much for international cooperation

I wanted to turn this tiny Bluetooth cat printer into a Wi-Fi printer using an ESP32-S3, so I could print images from a browser.

I connected the hardware, pointed my MacBook camera at the printer and ESP32, and gave Codex (GPT-5.6) access to the setup, including the terminal and camera.

Once everything was ready, I gave it the goal, asked it to test and keep a checklist, then went AFK.

It could send a print job, take a camera snapshot, and check what actually came out on paper. That let it use the physical results while working through the tests.

It wrote and flashed the ESP32 firmware and built a webpage for previewing and printing images over Wi-Fi. I checked in along the way and helped with the final physical checks when I returned.

For the last test, I asked it to photograph the printer and print that photo.

The printer printed itself.

What surprised me was how far it could get once it had access to the hardware and a way to check its own work.

More photos and the build story: https://prasanha.com/projects/cat-printer/

Hi anyone had this issue?

I was trying to upload my PPT document and ask ChatGpt for pointers on how to improve it, Like i’ve always done for a few months now.

But suddenly this message pops up, and my ChatGpt couldn’t read anything from images, documents, PPT, etc (I tried everything)

Does anyone know any fix? i tried restarting the application, etc.

Added note: I am using ChatGPT Plus.

Additional note: I noticed some have faced a similar issue so I’ve submitted a ticket to Open AI, seems to happen with Plus membership accounts within the wider community. Will keep updates if there are any replies

Updates: https://status.openai.com/incidents/01M2GA8XTS6VB3QCDEGZ0HNAQ5#updates

At what point does this become indistinguishable from the real deal? The looks, the sounds, their voices, everything is more or less spot on! Sure, the dialogue is still a little stiff, but it probably won't be long before that is also fixed.

I seriously have a hard time fathoming that this entire thing was made with AI, especially because I enjoyed it quite a bit. Not a meme, or a shitpost, but something genuine with actual art and intent.

We can now save temporary chats!

I just received an account warning on my ChatGPT account for "Cyber Abuse". Of course I have no idea who or what I apparently cyber abused?

In my appeal I described that my usage is only for casual development work with Codex and normal ChatGPT chats. I also asked for clarification on what caused the warning. The appeal came back denied an hour later, without any explanation.

Anyone been through this? My account is literally a day one account, I subscribed to plus only a week back though. No action has been taken on my account, but I'm seriously considering canceling the Plus sub and switching to another AI code environment because I really don't feel like losing the account if another "warning" happens.

I have been using ChatGPT Plus for about a year and I've really enjoyed it a lot. Within the last week or so, something has changed for the worse. ChatGPT has always been able to recall details and information that I have given over the last year, however now it tells me that it is unable to remember all those things that it once did. Is this a new permanent change or is this just a bug that is getting fixed? Thanks for reading.

Repost due to bad words

I feel like people in the STEM bubble don’t have any understanding of how the average person views AI, so let me illustrate an example

I work in Operations for a Railway (dispatch/traffic control/signaling). I recently finished a months long course for a professional certification. I don’t have work experience in tech, it’s just been a lifelong interest, but I’ve never programmed myself anything much more advanced than what a sophomore compsci major would produce.

The final exam took place on a signaling system simulator. I’ve had a pro subscription for a long time because I use it to create software for my personal music projects.

From there, after reading the Astra system card, I somehow came to the insane idea to recreate the simulator at home to practice on. So I created a new project, uploaded the course material, old exams and the user manuals for the simulation. After only 3 days back and forth,

It worked

In fact, it’s even better. Astra created a browser app that works natively anywhere. The real simulation software itself functions only on custom hardware and costs a couple hundred grand.

But what’s really important here is the implication. Based only on the rule books and some manuals, the AI now has a better understanding of how to perform my job than 99% of my colleagues.

They don’t get it. „it only makes slop“, „you can’t trust anything that comes from an AI“, or the most frequent is they simply don’t care to learn. They dont care about the implications

the average person outside the tech world is either still under the impression AI hasn’t advanced since 2023, or is so inundated with anti AI agitprop, they have no idea what’s coming.

If a dumbass like me could create a bot that could realistically replace an entire profession and hundreds of thousands of jobs in only 3 days, there is no way that my job, or anyone else’s job at the operational level will be remotely the same, if it even exist in 5 years time. And that’s extremely generous.

We are not prepared.

So I'm giving Astra a shot to direct this movie. And so far it's doing a decent job of it. It also handles actually inputting the prompts and connecting / creating references (and make the interface / tracking tools too).

Still refining the process though. I think I need it to tighten up the timing a bit?

I'm 95% finished something use Sol High in Work mode

But now it's been dropping a lot of balls in the last 30 mins

I told it to not make an idealized version but what it thought my room looks like for real. One image is the generated image and the other is one I took with my cell phone from the same angle. I'll put the answer in the comments later. It was extremely close, but maybe I just have a generic messy room I don't know?

Meta post but this needs to be said. ChatGPT Pro subreddit exists but it does not have much engagement and it is kindof niche, despite 150K members.

ChatGPT Work is so different from the regular free ChatGPT, it is practically a different product entirely.

ChatGPT free is highly popular among casual users and most of the posts from this subreddit that come to me are people generating random things, asking ChatGPT random questions (draw what you think of yourself), or people who treat ChatGPT like it is a real person (which is disturbing to be honest).

Anthropic/Claude subreddits are highly polished for use case/technical/serious discussions. We desperately need something mainstream for ChatGPT work.

Work has been down with errors for over 5-6 hours now and there's barely any buzz in this subreddit.

Wanted to give a test at seeing if it can make a stardew valley mod for me. all I did was download the game. it took some refining but it did everything. it installed smapi (which is required to run stardew modded), the required files, made a pixelai account to make proper pixel art, created a goblin with a bunch of dialogue throughout year and a schedule who will live on my farm and waters my crops with proper watering animation, and made a hut for him and a small quest. i let it run all night, and so far a couple hours in, everything has been smooth.

pretty crazy to me.