The original observation came from economist William Stanley Jevons, who noticed that as coal engines became more efficient, total coal consumption went up rather than down. Atkins applies the same logic to texts and ideas. A chatbot that can explain a complex source faster than most experts does not reduce the value of that source, it expands demand for it. What it does shrink is the value of mere consultation. Looking something up and summarizing it correctly is no longer an achievement.

The Hebrew word Atkins reaches for is chiddush, which he translates roughly as the production of new insight from inherited material. In the world he describes, chiddush stops being an elite skill held by a small number of scholars and becomes something closer to a universal expectation. If anyone can access the texts, the work shifts to what you do with them.

The cultural read carries weight for builders too. AI commoditizes one layer and pushes value up the stack. The talent question changes from who has access to the knowledge to who can do something with it. The community question changes from where do I go to learn to where do I go to think together with people. Cheap knowledge does not replace community, it raises the cost of isolation, because the next bottleneck is synthesis, and synthesis is something you do with other people.

The AI Collective is excited to join AI DevSummit 2026 on May 27–28 in San Francisco, bringing together the engineers, founders, and technical leaders building the future of AI. Focused on the real-world development and deployment of production-ready AI systems, AI DevSummit explores the latest across agents, LLMs, AI infrastructure, automation, and enterprise applications.

From applied AI and developer tooling to agentic workflows and emerging frameworks, the summit is designed for teams actively building and scaling AI products. The AI Collective is proud to be part of the conversations and community shaping the next generation of AI innovation.

General-purpose AI agents are being deployed globally, yet the benchmarks measuring them remain stubbornly English-only. GAIA-v2-LILT closes that gap with a rigorously audited multilingual extension of GAIA across five languages: Arabic, German, Hindi, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. Using a three-stage workflow that pairs machine translation with expert linguistic review, the benchmark surfaces a +20.7 percentage point average performance gain post-audit, revealing how dramatically current evaluations underestimate true model capability outside English and offering a more honest yardstick for building globally reliable agents.

The San Francisco chapter ran its monthly Demo Night this Wednesday, May 13, at the AWS Builder Loft. The team filtered more than 100 applications down to seven teams who got the stage in front of roughly 200 engineers, investors, and early adopters. The lineup spanned consumer voice, developer tooling, robotics, and energy infrastructure: Pioneer.AI, RoBrain.dev, MEGA Code, befailproof, The San Francisco Voice Company, DeepInsightLabs, and GSD Utility Solutions.

Format stayed simple. Each team demoed live, took questions from the room, and the audience voted on the winner. Full recap is on LinkedIn.

The Singapore chapter ran its seventh Claude Meet last week at the AWS campus in Singapore, organized by Max Del Vita. The session ran two tracks that do not usually share a room: a deep dive into model poisoning attacks on machine learning systems alongside Claude Code safety practices, and a second conversation on how AI is reshaping creative writing and poetry.

Attendee Hari Tharmakumar flagged that the model-poisoning discussion was the most useful new material of the night, especially the part on how training-data corruption can shift outputs in ways traditional code review will not catch. The next Claude Meet is scheduled for June 5.

This June, The AI Collective is hosting the world's largest human-centered AI gathering in history. 100+ events. One week. All of it focused on one central question "what does it mean to be human in the AI era?".

Whether you joined us yesterday or you've been with us since the very beginning — every chapter opened, every event hosted, every conversation had — it's all been leading here. We believe that everyone deserves a seat at the table in this conversation, and we want YOU to be a part of it.

Pledge now to share your voice, and keep an eye out for a Humans in AI Week event near you!

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Thank you to the thousands of volunteers around the world who make this work possible. We truly could not do this without you.