Speaking of free time, I-and presumably many others-am experiencing what can only be described as information overload. It has become increasingly difficult to stay on top of everything. Despite the supposed “post-literacy age,” the past few months, especially, have brought a deluge of content. There is a lot more content being produced now than there was even one or two years ago. This means I’ll need to rethink my time management strategies.
Right now there are three major pillars of news: AI, domestic politics, and economics/finance. There are also smaller ones, such as health, geopolitics, cultural trends, and “general internet drama.” AI has become so dominant that not only does most of the news now pertain to AI in some form–e.g. the latest Claude update–but a growing share of the content itself is created by, or with the help of, AI.
Every day there is some major story, whether it’s an AI math breakthrough, new regulation, AI misbehaving (Open AI-Hugging Face containment breach), AI being used in another field (e.g. math), or the release of new models seemingly daily now. Then there is also AI and cheating, AI in school, or college professors having to deal with AI. The societal implications of AI are as newsworthy as the technology itself.
As a proxy for “quantity of content produced” the aggregator, Don’t Worry About the Vase, averages a 1.2 posts/day, a large increase from 2023:
Each post has around 50 links, mostly related to AI, but also there are link-roundups unrelated to AI, such as education, economics, and dating. There are also “monthly roundups,” which have far more content than the typical daily post. This also includes tweets and discussions, and Zvi’s own commentary.
One option is to space things out, but the problem is that there are often long stretches–sometimes several days–when nothing much happens, followed by an avalanche of news. We saw this yesterday and today with the liquidation of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s “AI hedge fund,” followed a day later by more AI news in mathematics. For example, just this morning, this story broke, going massively viral:
An internal version of Astra, @OpenAI’s next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science.
We believe it will be a major step for scientific reasoning. https://t.co/iP6cyheZ7i https://t.co/DfBOvi5O8F pic.twitter.com/jHuulDwV46
— Noam Brown (@polynoamial) August 1, 2026
The biggest stories almost always break in the morning Pacific Time. That makes sense: news is released when it will have the greatest impact, and when everyone is timing their press releases for this specific window when human attention is maximized, it means a huge flood of content all at once. Dealing with this will require a new content consumption strategy.
Between the AI-led math boom and content boom, we’re in something of a “human capital boom,” because rather than replacing experts, as was wildly and wrongly predicted, AI has magnified the abilities of experts in domains as diverse as writing, math, and coding.
For the above tweet, in each of the breakthroughs, mathematicians created the prompts and evaluated the results. There was considerable trial and error and token burn to produce these results. It’s not doable by a “layperson” whatsoever. Mathematicians are now plugging their problems into the latest models to take a stab at it. Hence, mathematicians don’t have to fear losing their jobs.
This is unlike past economic booms, such as during the eighties and nineties, when the technology such as personal computers, although important, was secondary to consumer spending and corporate profits expansion. Today, it’s the opposite as companies are sacrificing profits to “build out” AI, as seen by hundred-billion-dollar AI initiatives by the leading tech companies.
When personal electronics became ubiquitous and affordable during the ’80s, there was still a clear divide between creators and consumers. It didn’t lead to appreciably more people producing music, movies, or television shows; rather, it affected how they were consumed. AI has had the opposite effect of enabling content creation. The magnification of human capital, combined with an online “meme sphere” in which stories arrive in massive waves–as exemplified by the “current thing” meme–means the content storm is likely to continue.