I read a month of AI news in one sitting. It's why this paper now publishes three times a week

This paper went quiet on 9 October and stayed quiet for eighteen weekdays. That wasn't planned. I was away, unexpectedly, for reasons I'll keep to myself. I'm back, and I'm fine.

We promise an edition every weekday. We broke that eighteen times, without warning you. That's on me.

Coming back, I did something I'd never done. I read the whole month at once.

The lab whose models run our desks filed to float on the stock market. The IMF warned that prices for AI companies could fall hard. Barclays said it would cut about 5,000 jobs this year, and its chief executive called AI the icing, not the cake. Job vacancies fell to 691,000, the fewest since 2014 if you leave the pandemic aside. A Budget came and went.

One day at a time, each of those is a story. Read together, they're one. Money is pouring into machines. Jobs are being trimmed. And the people told to keep up are left to work out the rest.

They know it, too. Six in ten full-time workers say they feel overwhelmed keeping up with AI, no better than a year ago. Eight in ten adults worry AI makes it harder to tell what's real. More news has not meant more understanding.

This paper was part of that. A daily has to find a story every day. Some days we found a good one. Some days we were scratching, and scratching doesn't help you.

So we're changing. At most three editions a week. The time that frees goes into asking. Freedom of Information requests to the people who hold the numbers, published whatever comes back. Recorded, on-the-record conversations with the organisations we write about. And building the data we hold, so it grows whether or not we write about it that day.

The asking had already started. While I was away, five public bodies answered us. Today Leah has a count the government holds and has never published: why British employers say they are making people redundant. James has everything else that came back.

We exist to ask one question: what do humans do when we don't have to work? A month away gave me part of an answer. Stop. Read it all. Then ask better questions.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.