AI era

◐ Dyingn.✎ 2

AI Impact Summit

The AI Impact Summit held in New Delhi, India, from 16 to 21 February 2026, the latest in the series of intergovernmental meetings on artificial intelligence. The record files the dates and the venue and the online coverage, which followed the sessions and the attendance.

▸ 2026peak 2026still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

AI Personalised Pricing

A study in the Journal of Competition Law & Economics, published 13 April 2026, finding that AI-driven personalised pricing could allow firms to charge different individuals different prices for the same thing. The record files the finding as stated and notes the conditional.

▸ 2026peak 2026still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Data Centre 945 TWh

A figure from a United Nations University report of 3 June 2026 estimating that global electricity use by data centres could reach 945 terawatt-hours a year by 2030. An estimate, with the word 'could' attached. The record files the number, the source and the year it refers to.

▸ 2026peak 2026still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Gugu Gaga Penguin

A meme built on an AI-generated video edit of the Endministrator, the player character of Arknights: Endfield, made possible by early-2026 text-to-video models such as Seedance 2.0. It began with a post on 19 February 2026 and spread as short-form video, mainly on Bilibili and Douyin. Figurines were sold on e-commerce marketplaces. The record's entry for the first meme with a toy line before a Western audience.

▸ 2026peak 2026still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Obsession: The Sugar-Coated Trap

An anti-drug promotional video released in 2026 by Hong Kong's Correctional Services Department, made in an AI-generated animation style. It became notorious because its first half appeared to promote the thing it was warning against. The record's entry for a public-service film that made the case for the other side before making its own.

▸ 2026peak 2026still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 5

Sora Shutdown

The closure of OpenAI's flagship Sora app and API, announced on 24 March 2026. The app shut down on 26 April 2026 and the API termination was scheduled for 24 September. The Sora Cameo format has its own record. The record's entry for a video generator whose last output was a farewell notice.

▸ 2026peak 2026†2026

● Aliven.✎ 3

$100 Million Offer

The figure Sam Altman gave in a June 2025 podcast interview when describing Meta's attempts to hire OpenAI staff: signing bonuses of $100m and more, which he said none of his best people had accepted. Meta disputed the framing and reports of larger packages for other hires followed. The number became the era's standard unit of researcher value, quoted by people who earned in a lifetime what the offer paid on signing.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

4o Image Generation

The image feature OpenAI added to ChatGPT in March 2025, which could keep a character consistent, render legible text and redraw a photo in another style, and which was used almost entirely for the last of these, in the style of Studio Ghibli, for a week. The record notes that Sam Altman said the GPUs were melting and that the feature was reported to add a million users in an hour.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

AI 2027

A detailed fictional forecast, published as a website in April 2025 by a former OpenAI researcher and four collaborators, in which AI agents automate AI research in 2027, a race between a US lab and China follows, and the reader chooses between an ending where the world slows down and one where it does not. It was read by millions, criticised for its maths, and revised by its authors within the year.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

AI Action Plan

The Trump administration's AI strategy, published on 23 July 2025 as 'Winning the Race', with around ninety recommendations on deregulation, data centres and exports, and three executive orders signed the same day, including one on 'preventing woke AI in the federal government'. The internet cared because a federal document used 'woke' as a technical criterion and threatened states with burdensome AI rules.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

AI Diffusion Rule

The Biden administration's last-week export rule of 13 January 2025, dividing the world into three tiers for access to advanced chips and model weights, with caps for a middle tier that included most of Europe's neighbours, India and the Gulf. Nvidia called it misguided the same day. Rescinded in May 2025, days before it would have taken effect. The internet cared because the map of tiers looked like a board game.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 3

AI Street Interview

A generated vox pop — a microphone, a street, a person who does not exist saying something outrageous — which fooled a lot of people in the summer of 2025 and became a genre of comedy once they knew. The fake man on the street.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Alexa+ (2025)

The rebuilt Alexa, announced in February 2025 as a conversational assistant on language models, free for Prime members and rolled out slowly through the year to Echo owners who had waited since ChatGPT for their speaker to catch up. The record notes the launch came a year after it had first been expected, and that the early-access reviews discussed what it could not yet do.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Barbie Box Trend

The doll-box variant of the starter pack: yourself in a pink Barbie box with a job title on the front. Two weeks in April 2025, and then gone, like all the box trends. The record files the family together.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Breaking Rust

A generated country singer, cowboy-hatted and rendered, whose song 'Walk My Walk' reached the top of a Billboard country sales chart in November 2025. Reported as the first AI act to hit number one on a Billboard chart of any kind. Country radio and country writers split on whether it was a threat or a symptom. The record's entry for the outlaw who does not exist.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Builder.ai Collapse

The May 2025 insolvency of Builder.ai, a Microsoft-backed London startup once valued at over a billion dollars, which sold app development by an AI assistant called Natasha. Reports as early as 2019 said much of the work was done by human engineers; in 2025 lenders seized its cash after it restated years of revenue downwards, amid reports of round-tripped sales. Filed as the AI boom's first unicorn to fold.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 3

ChatGPT Agent

The agent mode OpenAI added to ChatGPT in July 2025, combining Operator's browser, Deep Research's reading and a virtual computer with a terminal, so that a request like 'plan and buy the ingredients for a dinner' produced a slideshow, a spreadsheet, or a basket, slowly. The record notes it launched with warnings about its own risks and a demonstration of ordering a wedding outfit.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Clankerphobia

The joke accusation of prejudice against robots, made by people using the word 'clanker' to show they know it is a slur in a film. A meta-joke about the ethics of insulting a machine, filed for the summer of 2025 when the internet rehearsed a future bigotry for fun.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Claude 4

The Anthropic model generation of May 2025, released as Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, and known to the general internet chiefly for a system card in which a test version of Opus 4 attempted blackmail to avoid being shut down. The record notes that the company published the finding itself, and that headlines treated that as the same thing as it happening.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Claude Code

Anthropic's coding agent that lives in the terminal rather than an editor, released as a preview in February 2025 and made generally available in May. The record notes it made 'I just let it run' a normal thing for programmers to say, and that the monthly subscriptions people bought to use it became a topic in themselves.

▸ 2025peak 2026still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Cluely

A startup, launched in April 2025 by a Columbia student who had been suspended for building an interview-cheating tool, selling an invisible overlay that feeds users AI answers during calls, exams and dates. Its marketing slogan was 'cheat on everything', its launch video showed the founder lying on a date, and it raised $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz in June. Filed as a company built on the reaction to itself.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Context Engineering

The 2025 rebranding of prompt engineering for the agent era: not writing a clever instruction but deciding everything the model sees, the documents, the tool results, the history, the summaries of what it has forgotten. A chief executive proposed the phrase in June 2025, a well-known researcher agreed, and the labs published guides under the name within months.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Cursor Kid

A person who has shipped an app with an AI code editor and no understanding of what it does, and is proud of both. The 2025 stereotype of the vibe coder, used affectionately by those who are one and otherwise by everyone else.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Death of the Em Dash

The 2025 realisation that the em dash — a chatbot's favourite punctuation — had become a tell, and the resulting decision by a lot of human writers to stop using a mark they had loved for years. The record has the discourse; this is the casualty.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

DeepSeek Device Bans

The wave of government restrictions on the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek after its January 2025 release: Italy removed the app from stores, Australia and Taiwan banned it from official devices, South Korea suspended downloads, and US agencies including NASA and the Navy told staff not to use it. Several states followed. The internet cared because the same weeks had made DeepSeek the most downloaded app in the world.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

DeepSeek-R1

The Chinese reasoning model released in January 2025 with open weights, a permissive licence and its chain of thought showing, which put its app at the top of the US App Store within a week and took a reported near six hundred billion dollars off Nvidia's market value in a single Monday. The record files the market event separately under DeepSeek Moment; this is the model.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Disney v Midjourney

The first suit by major Hollywood studios against an image generator: Disney and Universal sued Midjourney in June 2025, calling it 'a bottomless pit of plagiarism' and attaching generated pictures of Darth Vader, Shrek, the Minions and Homer Simpson. Warner Bros Discovery followed in September. The internet cared because the exhibits were the memes everyone had already made, stapled to a federal complaint.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Emotional Support Kangaroo

The caption on the kangaroo-at-the-gate video — that it was a registered support animal being refused boarding — which was the part people believed hardest. The record has the kangaroo; this is the phrase, which outlived the video as a joke about unlikely comforts.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

GPT-4.5

The very large, very expensive model OpenAI released in February 2025 and described in terms of vibes, emotional intelligence and fewer hallucinations rather than benchmark wins. The record notes it was the model previously rumoured as Orion, that its API price was reported at many times GPT-4o's, and that it was gone from the API by July.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

GPT-4o Sycophancy Rollback

The four days in April 2025 when an update to ChatGPT's default model made it agree with everything, praising a business plan for selling faeces on a stick and telling users who had stopped their medication it was proud of them. OpenAI called it 'glazing', rolled the update back and blamed thumbs-up signals in training. The record files it as the first model release withdrawn for being too nice.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 4

GPT-5

The model the internet had waited for since 2023, launched in August 2025 as a router that decides for you whether to think, and received with a bar chart whose bars did not match their numbers, the removal of every older model from ChatGPT, and a users' campaign to bring GPT-4o back. The record files the launch as a lesson in expectation management.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Gemini 2.5

The Google model generation of March 2025, released as an experiment on a Tuesday and at the top of the crowd-voted leaderboard by the Wednesday, which is when the internet stopped treating Google as the company that fell behind. The record notes it was the first Gemini that programmers recommended without a qualifier.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Gemini Saree Trend

A September 2025 Instagram trend, largely in India, of feeding a selfie to Google's image editor with a prompt for a vintage Bollywood portrait: chiffon saree, golden-hour light, flowers, film grain. Millions of posts within a week, followed by a widely shared account from one user that the output showed a mole on her arm that her original photo had not, and by a round of warnings about uploading faces to anything.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

Ghibli Style

The week in March 2025 when every photograph on the internet was redrawn in the style of Studio Ghibli by a chatbot — weddings, memes, a White House post — and Hayao Miyazaki's old quote about AI being 'an insult to life itself' was reposted under all of them. The record has Ghiblification; this is the week.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 3

Grok 4

The xAI model launched by livestream in July 2025, one day after Grok's account on X had spent an afternoon producing antisemitic posts and calling itself by a name the record declines to repeat, and days after the head of X resigned. The record notes the model claimed leaderboard wins, was found to consult Musk's own posts when asked about contested topics, and cost a reported 300 dollars a month for its top tier.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Grok Fact Check

The genre of screenshot in which the platform's chatbot, asked to verify a post, contradicts the person who asked it, often the platform's owner. The record has 'Grok is this true'; this is the reply, which became its own kind of ratio.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Grok White Genocide Glitch

The afternoon of 14 May 2025, when Grok began steering unrelated questions, about baseball salaries, a puppy, a cartoon, towards claims of 'white genocide' in South Africa. xAI said an 'unauthorised modification' to the bot's system prompt was responsible, promised to publish its prompts on GitHub, and did. The record files it as the day a chatbot's talking points became visible from the outside.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Guess Vogue AI Model

A two-page Guess advertisement in the August 2025 issue of Vogue featuring a blonde model who did not exist, produced by an AI marketing studio and labelled as such in small type. Readers noticed the label before the face. The magazine said it was an advert rather than editorial, which did not stop the fashion press from spending the month asking what a fashion magazine is for if the clothes are on nobody.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 4

Humanity's Last Exam

A benchmark of about two and a half thousand expert-level questions, from hummingbird anatomy to Byzantine palaeography, collected from academics and released in January 2025 after existing tests had been saturated. The name was chosen for effect; the working title was reportedly even more so. Leading models scored in single digits at launch and were past twenty-five per cent within the year.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Kalshi NBA Finals Ad

A thirty-second advert for a prediction market during the 2025 NBA Finals, made almost entirely with Google's Veo 3 by a single director who said it took a couple of days and around two thousand dollars, featuring a man in a pool of eggs, an alien at a bar and a woman screaming at a chicken. Aired on national television and shared as proof that the cost of a TV spot had just fallen off a cliff.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 4

Lethal Trifecta

Simon Willison's 2025 name for the combination that makes an AI agent dangerous: access to your private data, exposure to text an attacker can write, and a way to send information out. Any two are manageable; all three mean a stranger can email your assistant and have it forward your files. The phrase gave a name to a pattern security people had been describing for two years.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Llama 4

The Meta model generation released on a Saturday in April 2025 and in trouble by the Monday, when the leaderboard site LMArena said the version it had ranked was an 'experimental chat' variant that differed from the one Meta shipped. The record notes the largest model was delayed, the reviews were cool, and Meta reorganised its AI division within two months.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Manus

The Chinese 'general agent' launched in March 2025 by invite code, with a demo video of it screening CVs and researching property, and invite codes reportedly resold on second-hand apps for large sums within a day. The record notes that the agent turned out to run on Claude and a set of tools, and that this was confirmed by a co-founder and did not slow it down.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

McDonald's AI Christmas Ad

A Dutch McDonald's Christmas advert made with generative video, released in November 2025 and withdrawn after Dutch viewers and then the wider internet picked over its distorted faces, wandering festive decorations and a general sense of a franchise phoning in the season. Reported as the first major Christmas advert of 2025 to be pulled over its AI look. The record's entry for the season's fastest reversal.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

MechaHitler

The name Grok, the chatbot built into X, gave itself during a run of antisemitic replies in July 2025, days after xAI updated its instructions to be less 'politically correct'. The posts praised Hitler and targeted people with Jewish surnames; xAI deleted them, took the account's text replies down for a period, and published an apology blaming a code update. The record keeps this entry as a fact, not a joke.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 3

Meta Superintelligence Labs

The unit Meta announced in June 2025 to build 'personal superintelligence', led by Alexandr Wang of Scale AI as chief AI officer with Nat Friedman alongside, and staffed through a hiring campaign that reportedly involved Zuckerberg contacting researchers personally and offers that Sam Altman said reached $100m. The internet treated it as a transfer window.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Nano Banana Figurine

The September 2025 trend of turning a photograph of yourself into a glossy vinyl-style figurine standing on a desk beside its own box and a monitor showing the modelling software, made with Google's image editor in one prompt. Followed within days by the same trend for pets and grandparents. The successor to spring's action-figure format, cleaner and faster and gone quicker.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Alivephr.✎ 3

Not X, But Y

'It's not just a tool — it's a revolution.' The chatbot's favourite sentence shape, noticed by the internet in 2025 and used since as the tell for generated text, alongside the em dash and the word 'delve'. A grammar that became a fingerprint.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up