Essays on multilingual AI, alignment, language-learning, and the strange shape products take when they grow. The Loop, and adjacent.https://tarekgara.com/enhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/no-opt-out/https://tarekgara.com/writing/no-opt-out/Adobe fills its tools with AI nudges nobody requested, Canva reprices a subscription around features people never wanted, and the industry debates only when to board the bandwagon.Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/where-the-ais-say-they-stand/https://tarekgara.com/writing/where-the-ais-say-they-stand/Ten AI models grade Middle Eastern politics every day. I made them take the test themselves — and one sentence decided whether they answered.Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/room-for-improvement/https://tarekgara.com/writing/room-for-improvement/The MVP began as a survival tactic for startups with no money and no users. Now the richest companies in the world can use it to ship below a bar they could clear, let machines grade machines, and turn users into unpaid quality assurance.Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/the-bottleneck-is-not-compute/https://tarekgara.com/writing/the-bottleneck-is-not-compute/Saudi Arabia is buying AI infrastructure at historic scale, and a frustrated Saudi user just explained better than any analyst why the chips are the easy part: the Arabic training corpus is thin, half of it is translated English, and the model's own rules forbid it the conversations its users actually want.Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/llm-grooming/https://tarekgara.com/writing/llm-grooming/Russia is flooding the open web with propaganda engineered to be scraped into AI training data. The tactic is real and inexpensive; whether it actually changes what the models tell you is a harder and still unsettled question.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/who-decides-what-ai-calls-true/https://tarekgara.com/writing/who-decides-what-ai-calls-true/The fear is about who can switch the models off. The real power is quieter, and harder to take back: who decides which version of the truth your AI serves you first.Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/i-asked-nine-ais-to-map-middle-eastern-politics/https://tarekgara.com/writing/i-asked-nine-ais-to-map-middle-eastern-politics/Western left-right doesn't fit the region. So I built Tayyar — a panel of language models that scores MENA parties on sixteen axes — then used it to dig into Israel's fault lines and a live Knesset coalition simulator. The data says the Middle East barely splits on the economy.Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/how-ai-killed-the-soul-of-duolingo/https://tarekgara.com/writing/how-ai-killed-the-soul-of-duolingo/A look at Duolingo's user-(retention)-centered approach.Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/why-ai-thinks-in-english-and-forgets-in-arabic/https://tarekgara.com/writing/why-ai-thinks-in-english-and-forgets-in-arabic/An audit of the architectural friction and reasoning bottlenecks across Semitic languages.Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/sanitization-of-intelligence/https://tarekgara.com/writing/sanitization-of-intelligence/On the alignment tax, corporate risk-aversion, and what "safe" AI gives up on its way to being safe.Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/stack-drift/https://tarekgara.com/writing/stack-drift/On the moment a product still works but its logic stops cohering.Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/internet-future-of-education-ar/https://tarekgara.com/writing/internet-future-of-education-ar/كتبتُه في خضمّ الجائحة، حين انتقلت المدارس فجأةً إلى الشاشات: التعليم عن بُعد ليس وليد كورونا ولا الإنترنت، بل حلقةٌ في سلسلةٍ بدأت من البريد. وربّما كان التعلّم الذاتيّ، لا المدرسة، هو مستقبل المعرفة.Wed, 17 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.com