ii. writing
Writing.
Long-form on multilingual AI, alignment, language-learning, and the strange shape products take when they grow.
Published here first. The Loop on LinkedIn mirrors it.
2026
Aug 2026 Aug 2026 Jul 2026 Jun 2026 Jun 2026 Feb 2026 Feb 2026 Jan 2026
The Cost of 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.
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.
LLM Grooming: Aiming Propaganda at the Machine
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.
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.
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.
How AI killed the soul of the world's favorite language-learning app
A look at Duolingo's user-(retention)-centered approach.
Why AI thinks in English and forgets in Arabic
An audit of the architectural friction and reasoning bottlenecks across Semitic languages.
The sanitization of intelligence: how the alignment tax is killing the LLM frontier
On the alignment tax, corporate risk-aversion, and what "safe" AI gives up on its way to being safe.
2025
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