Scott Aaronson: AI's "wonders and terrors" have arrived

r/SunoAI is flooded with complaints that V6 vocals sound "muddy, hollow, and suffocated" and that audio quality regressed to roughly V3.5 levels, with hissing reported in 99% of songs. One user ran 130+ generations without a usable track; another says hundreds of attempts failed to produce one finished pop song.

Microsoft published an enterprise AI playbook drawn from its internal deployments, per VentureBeat. The report highlights a "moat" businesses may already possess.

Pew Research polled 42,151 people across 37 countries from Feb 8 to May 13; in 34 of 37, more believe AI will destroy jobs than create them over 20 years. Worry is highest in Australia and South Korea (76% each) and the US (71%).

Instinct's Concierge places calls to book restaurants, join dentist cancellation lists, and fix cable bills; Meta's Muse can now call U.S. businesses, starting with users who ask it to. Instinct raised $350M at a $2.5B valuation last month and is reportedly in talks at a $10B valuation.

Anthropic released a Claude offering aimed at small businesses, packaged with 44 skills, according to a YouTube walkthrough by Ben AI.

Zapier CEO Wade Foster tells The Cognitive Revolution that effective agentic systems should reserve AI reasoning for specific steps rather than automating everything. He cites data from Zapier's AutomationBench and describes Zapier MCP bringing workflows and context into users' existing tools.