28% of execs skip AI, Medicare WISeR stretches waits, Lila chases $8.5B

Sources

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making simonwillison.net

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making Here’s an entertaining perspective from Nik Suresh on the AI mania that is overwhelming the large companies that he consults with. It’s crammed with spicy anecdotes from anonymous sources. In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisation with $2B+ in revenue which was entirely centered around AI. Here’s a re…

Will AI fix prior authorization—or make it worse? arstechnica.com

The government is piloting a program that uses AI for insurance-coverage decisions.

🔬 The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center — Andy Beam & Rafa Gómez-Bombarelli, Lila Sciences latent.space

Lila is betting that science, not the internet, is the last untapped source of training data. We went to find out what that actually looks like in a room full of robots.

Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’ theverge.com

Novelist Dave Eggers used a Sam Altman-arranged talk to roughly 200 OpenAI employees to argue ChatGPT is muting young writers’ voices. The McSweeney’s founder and school-builder turned the invited lecture into a critique of the product his hosts ship.

Spot birds not golf simonwillison.net

Google used 10.9 billion gallons of water in 2025, or 30 million gallons a day. Coachella Valley’s 120 golf courses each burn about 750,000 gallons daily, so buying 40 and rewilding them as birdwatching parks would cover Google’s footprint.

Kimi: Threat or menace? techcrunch.com

Chinese lab Moonshot AI shipped an updated Kimi model this week, drawing alarmed commentary from figures including David Sacks, Dean Ball, and Travis Kalanick over open Chinese frontier models pressuring US labs on price and access.

I’ve got an Inkling bensbites.com

The newsletter’s weekend edition collects longer-form AI links for readers catching up outside the news cycle. No single headline anchors the roundup — it’s a curated skim rather than a breaking story.

The apps, gadgets, and tools every reader needs theverge.com

Installer No. 136 focuses on tools for people who read — apps, devices, and accessories — alongside host David Pierce’s note that he’s recording the next season of the Version History podcast.

(AINews) not much happened today latent.space

The daily AINews digest marks an unusually slow news cycle, with no major model launches, papers, or company announcements worth leading on. A useful signal for readers deciding whether to skip the day’s feeds.

References

Time/Charter — ‘CEOs Are Betting Big on AI While Barely Using It’ time.com

Approximately 28% of CEOs, CFOs, and other senior executives report that they do not use AI at all in their professional lives, while 69% engage with it for less than one hour per week.

Forbes — Jason Snyder on MIT NANDA GenAI Divide report forbes.com

95% of AI pilots fail to achieve a measurable return on investment… more than half of AI budgets are typically funneled into sales and marketing pilots, despite these areas showing some of the lowest measurable returns.

InfoWorld on METR randomized trial infoworld.com

Developers were 19% slower when using AI… before the study, developers predicted AI would make them 24% faster; even after experiencing the measured slowdown, they still self-reported a 20% productivity gain.

InfoWorld — ‘From story points to tokenmaxxing’ infoworld.com

Meta’s internal ‘Claudeonomics’ dashboard reportedly logged 60.2 trillion tokens in a single month, ranking 85,000 employees with titles like ‘Token Legend’… Amazon ultimately shuttered its ‘KiroRank’ leaderboard in May 2026 after leadership discovered widespread ‘cheating’ and vanity usage.

Hacker News discussion of Suresh’s essay news.ycombinator.com

GitHub Copilot suggested a non-existent service was down, and the team spent hours convincing operations that the system did not exist… any time saved by AI is frequently ‘swallowed up tenfold’ by the need to debug hallucinated code.

Inc. — KUNGFU.AI executive survey inc.com

74% of executives surveyed… confessed to overstating their confidence in their current AI strategies, suggesting that board-level mandates often outpace actual executive literacy.

HMA Academy — ‘WISeR is losing in Washington but still running in six states’ hmacademy.com

Washington State Hospital Association survey found procedure completion times for covered services stretched from a historical average of two weeks to between four and eight weeks

Becker’s Payer Issues — CMS corrective action on Virtix beckerspayer.com

CMS placed Virtix Health on a corrective action plan following complaints regarding its inability to meet the mandated 72-hour turnaround time for clinical determinations

Healthcare Dive — EFF v. CMS FOIA suit healthcaredive.com

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a FOIA lawsuit against CMS seeking transparency regarding the algorithms’ training data and safeguards against bias or ‘hallucinations’

Forvis Mazars advisory — ‘CMS WISeR Model: What providers need to know’ forvismazars.us

vendors are compensated based on a percentage of the spending their reviews avert… the vendor share [is] 10% to 20% of averted expenditures

Thompson Coburn LLP — ‘Class actions highlight AI-assisted payer denials’ thompsoncoburn.com

Plaintiffs allege the [nH Predict] algorithm has a 90% error rate, citing that nine out of ten denials are overturned when patients actually pursue an appeal

The Lund Report — ‘Medicare’s new AI experiment sparks alarm’ thelundreport.org

On July 16, 2026, the U.S. Senate narrowly voted 46-50 to preserve the pilot after a Democratic-led effort to defund it failed… a ‘horrendous’ clinical review process in states like Oklahoma

Investing.com / Bloomberg investing.com

Lila Sciences in talks for $2B funding at $8.5B valuation

Startup Fortune startupfortune.com

Lila Sciences is testing how much investors will pay for automated labs — a valuation that surged from $1.3 billion to an estimated $8.5 billion in under a year reflects a market pricing an option on a hypothetical outcome rather than a proven business model.

Endpoints News (Jeff Coller commentary) endpoints.news

Coller described the ‘Move 37’ branding as a ‘reach,’ suggesting that the startup’s results likely represent ‘meaningful incremental gains on well-understood biology’ rather than an alien-like leap… beating a public baseline does not necessarily prove that Lila has outperformed the commercial-grade technology used by established pharmaceutical companies.

Shanaka Perera, ‘The Lab Without Scientists’ (Substack) shanakaanslemperera.substack.com

Berkeley’s A-Lab claimed 41 novel materials in 17 days; Palgrave and Schoop showed the AI’s automated XRD analysis failed to account for compositional disorder, mistaking known materials or mixtures for entirely new compounds — a ‘beginner-level’ understanding of solid-state chemistry.

PMC / NIH review on AI reproducibility pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Identical code can yield divergent results due to variations in hardware architecture… random initialization, stochastic gradient descent, and specific software library versions can alter outputs even when training data remains constant.

R&D World — self-driving labs feature rdworldonline.com

Emerald Cloud Lab relies on human operators — often recruited from logistics giants like Amazon — to perform non-automated tasks like moving large containers, treating them as specialized ‘pickers’ within a software-driven workflow.