THE AI BRIEFING #4 · OCTOBER 16, 2026
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Hi,
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Edition 4.
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This time it's about copying: 722 maths papers, the games of your childhood in your browser and a free Photoshop.
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The copy machine |
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A quick look back. In edition 1, America treated an AI model like a weapon. In edition 2, China didn’t need to earn anything back. In edition 3, China drove its own route. Power and money, every time. Now something messier: what happens to power and money when copying and rebuilding cost nothing and become widely accessible?
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Start with maths. On 6 October, OpenAI put 722 maths papers online in one go. Solutions to open problems: questions nobody had an answer to, some for decades, that plenty of mathematicians spent their entire careers breaking their teeth on. Made by a model that hasn’t been released yet. You could say OpenAI just solved maths. You could also read it differently: those problems were solved partly thanks to the work of mathematicians the model read before.
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Take Navier-Stokes, one of the most famous open problems: the equations that describe how water and air flow. Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster was working on it with colleague Levent Alpöge, and from mid-August things suddenly moved fast, with help from Claude and OpenAI’s Codex. But on 8 September, OpenAI claimed the solution. According to Buckmaster, using the same approach he had worked out in his Codex sessions. He asked OpenAI whether the model had been trained on those sessions. He never got an answer: OpenAI neither confirms nor denies it.
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You saw the same thing with games recently. Hundreds of classics, from Halo to GTA: Vice City, now simply run in a browser tab. An AI model reconstructs the original code, which is called decompiling (Kotaku).
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With software it goes one step further. GitHub is where programmers share their code, and where you can often download and install it for free. That’s where you’ll now find REA, Reverse Engineer Anything. The GitHub repo (repository) lives up to its name. You let Claude look at how a piece of software works without having its source code, and then build it again. Not by copying, but by rebuilding how it works. A certain Brandon Thomas rebuilt the most important Adobe programs, from Photoshop to InDesign. All open source: the code is public, you can use it for free and, importantly, adapt it to your own needs (PhotoCraft on GitHub).
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What does that mean for you? Working with expensive software packages is no longer the only route. In fact, it’s probably a route that’s dying out. You have Claude build what you need, or you install an open source package and use Claude to adapt it to the way you work. Software as a tailored suit, no longer off the rack. Your budget spreadsheet. Your planning. Your CRM. Everything. I did it myself with my to-do app, Venture Tasks. A weekend of building, in between other work, because I couldn’t find a good native app. Everything goes in, typed or spoken, and Claude can add tasks to it.
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Copying, rebuilding and building something from scratch: it costs next to nothing now. Good news if you use software, bad news if you sell it. Or if you’re a mathematician. So this week, think about which piece of software you complain about most, and ask Claude whether an open source version already exists, or otherwise whether it could reproduce it with Reverse Engineer Anything.
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THE LIST · TEN THINGS HAPPENING IN AI LAND
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1. September was absolute madness in AI land. In early September every big lab shipped a new model. On 12 September, Anthropic boss Dario Amodei called for slowing down, and the bosses of OpenAI and xAI agreed with him. Two days later, Trump called the fear of AI “a hoax”. And nine days after the call came the next wave of models, from exactly the same companies. Read Amodei’s call · Trump: “it’s all a hoax”
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2. Erwin Blom built his own Werkplaats and is giving it away for free. Werkplaats is Dutch for workshop: notes, projects, tasks, contacts, invoices and bookkeeping in one place, in your browser, with no account or subscription. Your work lives in your own files. The code is open source, so you can use Claude to adapt it to the way you work. Nice detail: he had the first version in an hour, then spent a month tinkering with it. Try the Werkplaats
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3. Claude Docs, Slides and Design are now free. Standalone Claude Design shuts down on 14 December. Since 8 October they’re out of beta and on every plan, including the free one. You use them to make documents, presentations and designs. Heads up: when standalone Claude Design closes on 14 December, your chats, comments and public project links go with it. If you have work in there, get it out. See what’s changing
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4. Claude now turns your numbers into dashboards and animations. Claude Dashboards turns a plain question into a dashboard that updates with your company data, and shows where every number comes from. Claude Motion turns a report or chart into a short animation you can download as an MP4. No generated footage: Claude writes the animation as editable code. Dashboards is on the paid plans, Motion only on Team and Enterprise. See Dashboards and Motion
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5. Onepin wants your AI voice-over to pronounce prices properly. AI voices trip over “€1,299”, names and dates. Onepin normalises every line of your script first, picks the best of more than thirty voice models per line and checks the pronunciation. For ads and explainers, exactly where things go wrong. Free to try, no credit card. Try Onepin
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6. Deezer will soon let you filter out AI music. On 13 October, Deezer announced a toggle that removes fully AI-generated tracks from your search results, before the end of the year. Already free today: a detector that scans up to a hundred playlists for AI music, including ones from other streaming services. Deezer says it recognises 99.8 percent, and those are Deezer’s own numbers. If you pick music for ads, that’s not a detail. Scan your playlist
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7. Pocket FM teaches you to write an audio drama in one morning. Pocket FM is one of the biggest audio fiction platforms, a kind of Netflix for audio series. Their AI writing assistant Sherpa walks you through the craft instead of spitting out a story for you: characters, a story arc, where the twist goes, how an episode ends on a cliffhanger. I wrote a pretty decent story with it in one morning and turned it into audio. Try Sherpa · Listen to The Third Term
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8. Find the free version of your expensive software. On AlternativeTo you look up a program and set the filter to open source. For Photoshop, PhotoCraft, the rebuild from the story above, is already in third place, after GIMP and Krita. Then ask Claude to help you install it. Look up your software
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9. A director used Claude to build the call sheet app he was missing. My friend Victor Vroegindeweij, a film director, got fed up with call sheets: PDFs that are outdated the moment you send them. He learned to build software with Claude and made Callsheet Pro. You load your call sheet as a PDF, Word, Excel file or photo, and the app pulls out the call times, crew, locations, schedule and scenes. Free, with a Pro subscription at €1.99 a month, for iPhone and iPad. Download Callsheet Pro
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10. Do it yourself: the next workshop is Wednesday 28 October. In one evening you connect Claude to your email, your files and your planning, and build a task from your own week: a treatment, a quote, a production schedule or a plan. Vijf890 in Amsterdam, from 18:00 to around 21:30, pizza and drinks included. Eight to twelve participants, €150 per person excl. VAT. Bring your laptop and a Claude Pro account. The workshop is in Dutch. Sign up →
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AGENDA
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Questions, or a tip for the next edition? Just reply to this email, I read everything.
This is the quick-scan. My longer stories on music & culture live on Substack.
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Marcel Alexander Wiebenga · geen woorden maar daden
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