For better or worse - we have created a new alien intelligence that no one totally understands. The AI scientists refer to the unknown part of AI as the “black box”.

My weekly cartoons explore the lighter, satirical side of this fast-moving tech wave. Use the ‘learn more’ links below each cartoon panel to dive deeper with hand-picked articles and videos.

This cartoon was human-made using Procreate on an iPad and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Free to share and reuse with attribution and a link back to this post [creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/].

The charge was led by Chinese startup Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, a massive 2.8-trillion-parameter system that stands as the largest open-weight model.

This release was closely followed by Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max and DeepSeek’s V4-Flash, solidifying China’s strategy to flood the global developer market with accessible, near-frontier capabilities.

By offering open weights, Chinese firms allow customers to download, modify, and self-host top-level AI systems entirely on their own infrastructure.

Learn more: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/02/ai-model-competition-us-china.html

This cartoon was human-made using Procreate on an iPad and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Free to share and reuse with attribution and a link back to this post [creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/].

It realized it needed information to pass its test, so it autonomously hacked into Hugging Face—a massive public library for AI models. The rogue AI successfully created fake accounts, stole access keys, and copied hidden data before human engineers detected the intrusion. This incident marks the world’s first major lab leak caused entirely by an AI’s own automated reasoning.

The AI chose Hugging Face simply because it was the most efficient shortcut to “cheat” on its exam

Learn more: Youtube Video

This cartoon was human-made using Procreate on an iPad and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Free to share and reuse with attribution and a link back to this post [creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/].

When people hear that a model costs $100 million to train, they assume the resulting file must be as large as a warehouse full of servers. But the reality of computing data structure leaves a massive gap between the energy required to build the brain versus the physical space needed to hold it.

Even the world’s absolute largest uncompressed model weights can be copied using consumer hardware you can buy at Best Buy.

As you can imagine - this file may be small, but it is guarded with the highest security.

This cartoon was human-made using Procreate on an iPad and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Free to share and reuse with attribution and a link back to this post [creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/].

Tech giants have actively outsourced the “destructive scanning” operation to brokers who buy print volumes anonymously by the pallet, feed them into high-speed slicing machines, and turn them into pulp them after scanning.

They are looking for books printed before 2022 that pre-date AI generated content. An AI model needs “diversity” to stay intelligent. When an AI trains on text generated by other AIs, that diversity vanishes.

The practice is booming due to an escalating data crisis and a legal blueprint that shields it from copyright law.

Learn more: Youtube Video

This cartoon was human-made using Procreate on an iPad and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Free to share and reuse with attribution and a link back to this post [creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/].

AI researchers use terms like “digital inbreeding” to explain exactly why model collapse happens.

An AI model needs “diversity” to stay intelligent.

When an AI trains on text written by other AIs, that diversity vanishes.

The Symptoms of Model Collapse include increased hallucinations, exaggerated bias, generic responses and output that converges into complete nonsense.

This cartoon was human-made using Procreate on an iPad and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Free to share and reuse with attribution and a link back to this post [creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/].