It’s a small space, but Obadiah “O.J.” Pipeboyd, 50, has a name for the studio apartment he keeps within Bimosedaa, the former warehouse building across from the police station on Fourth Street in downtown Minneapolis.

He calls it home, as does Banksy, his new domestic short-hair kitten. Its high ceilings, which lend themselves to his favorite hobby — painting — and its sweeping corner views of the Minneapolis skyline are a far cry from the shelter he lived in for more than a year following a difficult divorce that left him making do off the streets.

“I really appreciate this building from the roof to the bottom,” said Pipeboyd later, demonstrating how he sits on its small roof deck and meditates to his favorite music before sunrise. There’s easy access to public transit, and from there, a food shelf.

To hear Chris LaTondresse explain it, the answer to repeat or chronic homelessness is obvious. First, provide people from target groups — say, juveniles aging out of foster care, or in Pipeboyd’s case, the Native American community — with an affordable place to stay and build community. Then surround them with one-on-one counseling and other voluntary services to help them avoid returning to the streets. In that order.

“We’re trying to find a way to screen people in rather than screen people out, instead of ‘you can’t stay here, you have a history,’” said LaTondresse, a former Hennepin County commissioner who now runs the Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative in St. Paul.

Executing that “Housing First” vision has sometimes proven far more complicated than the rhetoric. The role he stepped into little more than a year and a half ago as president and chief executive officer of one of the metro’s largest and fastest-growing nonprofit housing providers came with much responsibility, more than a few headaches and some outright heartache.

In early May, a spate of shootings that claimed six lives in South Minneapolis shook the Native American community, including many residents of Beacon Interfaith’s 48-unit Bimosedaa apartment complex, which opened in December 2023 in the Minneapolis Warehouse District. The name “Bimosedaa” means “we walk together” in Ojibwe, and through a partnership with the Red Lake Nation, most of its occupants hail from tribal roots.

“Native Americans are about 32 times more likely to experience homelessness than whites, a number that has gotten worse in recent years,” LaTondresse said.

Kimball Court among three ‘Housing First’ sites

Beacon Interfaith operates some 16% of Ramsey County’s and 20% of Hennepin County’s “permanent supportive housing,” or housing with support services for the most vulnerable.

Three sites in particular — Kimball Court Apartments on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, American House in downtown St. Paul and Bimosedaa — all go a step further, following a “Housing First” model that aims to provide studios and single-room occupancy apartments to some of the hardest individuals to place. The goal is to interrupt homelessness by providing immediate access to permanent housing for individuals, regardless of other factors like pre-existing participation in treatment programs.

Arriving with a disability or an addiction is a feature of entry, not a bug, LaTondresse said.

“There is a significant amount of substance abuse,” acknowledged Josie Blake, a program manager with Avivo, which handles substance dependency assessments and provides case managers at Bimosedaa.

Beacon Interfaith’s housing strategy includes moving residents to “Housing First” sites directly from shelters or homeless encampments, which can be a difficult transition. Some 65% of residents who are chronically homeless will return to the streets within months after being taken out of an encampment and placed in low-income housing without services, LaTondresse said. For residents of permanent supportive housing, the return-to-street rate is about 15%, he said.

Critics point to crime, loitering, vandalism

That puts each apartment building on the frontlines of a controversial effort to get the poorest of the poor stabilized.

When that effort has gone badly, it’s made headlines, and drawn neighborhood homeowners by the dozens to community meetings held last year in St. Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood, where many critics pointed to an uptick in crime, loitering and vandalism around Kimball Court.

“I have seen residents literally hanging out the windows doing drug deals. Most of the neighbors have seen that,” said longtime Hamline-Midway homeowner Jerry Ratliff.

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“My friends are surprised I still live here and get nervous visiting us,” added Ratliff, noting Snelling Avenue north of University Avenue has suffered from the loss of long-standing businesses, like a hardware store and funeral home, and vagrancy has added insult to injury.

“It’s a complex problem,” he said. “I don’t mean to say it’s going to be an easy fix, but it’s going to take a lot of leadership, which I haven’t seen yet.”

St. Paul police have had the following calls for service yearly to Kimball Court, 545 N. Snelling Ave.:

• 2020: 296 calls.

• 2021: 189 calls.

• 2022: 425 calls.

• 2023: 113 calls.

• 2024: 258 calls.

• 2025: 45 calls, year to date.

Meanwhile, LaTondresse hopes to elevate more of the success stories, and he hopes to see sites like Bimosedaa and Kimball Court replace low-income single-occupant residencies, or dorm-like “flop houses.”

“Dollar for dollar, investing in permanent supportive housing is one of the biggest returns on investment,” he said.

To LaTondresse, that means moving past simple rhetoric and celebrating the residents at Bimosedaa — and its sister “Housing First” apartments — as tenants and partners, not just as visitors, occupants or charity.

‘Not a shelter setting’

Asked why security at Bimosedaa’s front desk — or Kimball Court, for that matter — doesn’t inspect bags as tenants enter and leave the building, LaTondresse waved away the suggestion.

“This is not a shelter setting. These are residents. These are people’s homes. They have a lease, with rights and responsibilities,” said LaTondresse, following a recent tour of Bimosedaa’s conference rooms and common areas. Services for the homeless, he said, rest on a continuum, with emergency shelter serving as triage toward the bottom.

“If it feels challenging, it’s because this work is extremely challenging,” he said. “If there’s going to be a better future on these issues, I think our public needs to understand how exactly we go about solving homelessness. ‘Shelter’ is not the solution to homelessness. It’s an emergency response to homelessness.”

As a leading developer of affordable housing in the Twin Cities, Beacon Interfaith already houses some 1,200 residents in about 800 residences across the metro. It’s also poised for major growth. In 2024, there were another 392 Beacon Interfaith homes in development across Minnesota, including the planned expansion of the 76-unit Kimball Court building, which was a lightning rod for neighborhood controversy and back-to-back police visits when LaTondresse started in his new role.

Some, but not all, of that neighborhood tension has since faded as construction and fencing have eliminated places to loiter. With about $3.85 million in no-interest loans from St. Paul and financial backing from a wide range of partners, construction of the addition is now well underway, with an opening for the expanded Kimball Court residences expected around February 2026. The goal is to make Kimball Court, after a $19 million refresh, more like Bimosedaa.

The building addition and remodel will add 22 units, as well as new offices and common areas, better sight lines for security, improved ingress and egress, and other features intended to make the dormitory-like structure similar to Bimosedaa in its security and amenities.

LaTondresse maintains that physical environment can make all the difference.

In addition to one-on-one counseling, Bimosedaa residents have on-site access to twice-weekly group therapy with a licensed clinician in the housing development’s conference room.

Some sessions have taken the form of traditional Native American “talking circles,” led by a community leader. A roof deck outfitted with a small raised-bed garden allows residents to grow their own sage, which is used in ceremonies or hung on doors. Having spaces to congregate offers an alternative to loitering outside, which has been an issue near Kimball Court, he said.

‘They’ve never done sweeping and mopping’

At Bimosedaa, Avivo, a Minneapolis-based provider of vocational counseling services and shelter supports, provides case managers who in some cases guide residents through everyday tasks. With an office located near the front door, it’s easy to hail residents and schedule them for their next appointment as they walk by.

“For a lot of them, this is the first housing stability that they’ve had,” said LaTondresse. “There’s going to be rules and guidelines that you follow. … Some people have never had an apartment before. They don’t know how to clean out an oven. They’ve never done sweeping and mopping.”

The population Beacon Interfaith targets with its “Housing First” model has a wide range of needs.

Once construction is complete, Kimball Court will span 98 residences, adding 22 apartments to the existing 76-unit building. The new apartments will have their rents subsidized through the St. Paul Public Housing Authority and the site-based federal Section 8 housing program. Referrals to Kimball Court will be made through Ramsey County Coordinated Entry and the Red Lake Nation Coordinated Entry systems for single adults.

In St. Paul, more than one Hamline-Midway resident has expressed doubt about the efficacy of adding more people in vulnerable situations to a challenged area.

“Rampant public drug use, trespassing (despite clearly posted No Trespassing signs), and public intoxication is not something the city should be willing to accept as normal or acceptable,” wrote Devin Creurer, a property manager with a Snelling Avenue apartment building situated across the street from Kimball Court, in a petition to the city council and mayor’s office last December.

Creurer said trespassers forced their way into his building to engage in everything from drug use and prostitution to defecation, so his company invested $32,000 in three new high-security, tamper-resistant doors.

“Our residents routinely reported to us the people conducting this illegal activity were seen coming and going from Kimball Court,” he wrote.

Fast forward seven months, and Creurer said he’s keeping an open mind.

“I think its too early to say how the expansion/renovation will impact the neighborhood as it’s not fully open yet, is it?” said Creurer, in an email. “Logically, the large investment they’re making should make their building more secure and hopefully some of the funds will be allotted to enhance security patrolling around their property.”

A hub for narcotic traffic

In crime incident reports last September, St. Paul police identified an empty lot next to Kimball Court as “the hub for most of the narcotic traffic” in the western police district, which stretches from Larpenteur Avenue to West Seventh Street and Minnesota 280 to about Dale Street. “As soon as squads leave the area, dozens of unsheltered individuals line up waiting outside the building to buy and sell narcotics.”

The lot also became known as a major distribution hotspot for goods shoplifted from area stores. Homeless and transient residents, sometimes as many as 40 at a time, began congregating last year in and around the parking lot of a boarded-up CVS store at the corner of Snelling and University avenues. In community meetings, residents complained of garage burglaries, street litter, vandalism and fighting.

“Just because we’re concerned about crime doesn’t mean we’re against the homeless,” said Ratliff, the longtime Hamline-Midway resident. “A lot of the people we have problems with were not living at Kimball Court, but they were attracted to the theft circles and drug circles.”

Former City Council President Mitra Jalali, who took strong criticism as one of the building’s defenders, resigned from the council in March, months after helping Beacon Interfaith secure public funding for Kimball Court’s expansion. Voters will choose a new Ward 4 council member on Aug. 12, and the challenges surrounding both Kimball Court and the general Snelling-University area have crept into campaign discussions.

A St. Paul police spokesperson declined to speculate why calls for service have plummeted from 258 calls last year down to 45 this year to date, except to point out construction has eliminated some spaces to congregate.

Beacon Interfaith officials have said Kimball Court has sometimes been unfairly scapegoated for societal woes.

“I hear the community loud and clear on this,” LaTondresse said. “But what percentage of challenges in the community are related to the broader trends … and what percent are on account of an individual property or building?”

Improvements with time

The fentanyl crisis, rising housing costs and other “aftershocks” of the pandemic “hit many of our communities extremely hard, which in turn has hit a lot of our residents, even those that are stably housed, and nonprofits in particular,” LaTondresse said. “There’s been a real before-and-after sea change in the last five years, certainly in Hamline-Midway, but also in a lot of our communities.”

Still, the situation has since improved, and notably so.

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The vacant Star Market next door to Kimball Court has been torn down to make room for the addition. Fencing now surrounds the CVS parking lot, discouraging loitering. Litter has become less of a concern, and a new coordinated security effort along University Avenue — “Safe and Strong University Avenue” — combines the efforts of Metro Transit police, civilian Transit Rider Investment Program (TRIP) agents and partner agencies.

The nonprofit has made its share of changes within the apartment complex. Before the pandemic, Beacon Interfaith was able to provide its “Housing First” model at Kimball Court with civilian staff manning a front desk. It now provides 24/7 security, as well as a different property management company than it had a few years ago. A street outreach organization, 21 Days of Peace, has helped direct loiterers to resources.

Ratliff isn’t convinced that Beacon Interfaith or the city is fully prepared for the expanded facility.

“Yesterday, we had a guy with a machete stopping people from getting into a coffee shop on Snelling,” he said Monday. “They need more than sight lines and cameras.”

The constellation Lyra is faint, but it contains Vega, one of the brightest stars in our night sky. As soon as it gets dark enough after sunset, look for the brightest star you can see in the very high eastern sky. That’s Vega, over 25 light-years away, or about 146 trillion miles. The light that we see from Vega tonight left that star in 2000 when “Gladiator” was the top movie on the silver screen.

Vega is also a celestial signpost in the heavens. It marks the direction that the sun and our entire solar system are headed as we journey around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. We’re ripping along at over 434,000 mph. Despite that breakneck speed it would still take nearly 500 million years to reach Vega, but that’s not going to happen because Vega is racing around the Milky Way as well. It’s an endless chase.

Diagram of the constellation Lyra. (Mike Lynch)

Vega is the brightest star in the small constellation Lyra the Harp. It’s fairly easy to see in a reasonably dark sky. About all there is to Lyra is the bright star Vega, and a small parallelogram of much fainter stars just below and to the left of Vega. If you can make a harp out of that, more power to you. According to Greek and Roman legend, Lyra is a harp, or Lyre, given by the god Apollo to the famous poet and musician Orpheus. That isn’t the only story about Lyra, however. Different ancient cultures have different stories. I really like the Chinese story about Lyra.

It goes like this. Once upon a time there was a young man named Tung Yung who was born into a wealthy family. Tung Yung’s early years were carefree, growing up in a castle on a huge estate. When he reached his teens, though, hard times hit his family big time. There were severe droughts. Crops failed year after year and soon the family fortune had dwindled considerably. On top of that, a disease spread over the countryside and took the lives of all of his siblings, and his father also took ill. Tung Yung was the only one left who was physically able to bring home money for what was left of his family, his mother and ailing father. But there was no work, no jobs. Out of desperation he hung a sign over his head at the marketplace and sold himself off as a slave. When he was bought, Tung Yung was off to a grueling life of slavery, sending what little money he earned back to his folks.

He was forced to work in the fields from sunrise to sunset, and when he returned home to his one-room hut, he was often too exhausted to fix dinner. Day after day after day, he went through this ordeal, and soon his own health started to fail.

The Chinese god of the sun saw all of this from his perch in heaven and took great pity on Tung Yung. He sent his daughter Chih Nu, the goddess of weaving, to Tung Yung’s side in his hut to nurse him back to good health. She gave him some heavenly TLC. Soon his health returned and eventually Tung Yung married Chih Nu. They even had a son together.

While he was away at work, she stayed in the hut and used her godly talents to weave wonderful tapestries with her magic loom. She would then sell them for a handsome price at the market. She soon raised enough money to buy Tung Yung out of slavery. As her tapestry business grew, more and more money was coming into the family and soon Tung Yung and Chih Nu had their own farm.

A few years later when they were living the good life, Chih Nu realized that her mission was done and she was to return to heaven. After a tearful farewell, she climbed back into heaven and as she did, all the stars brightened and one brand new very bright star appeared. The star we now call Vega was the new light created by Chih Nu. Next to Vega are four stars shaped like a parallelogram, which makes up Chih Nu’s magic loom. How’s that for a well-woven tale?!

Ring Nebula (Mike Lynch)

For extra credit, see if you can spot the Ring Nebula, formally known as Messier object 57, or M57 for short. The Ring Nebula is considered a planetary nebula. Despite that name, M57 has nothing to do with a planet but rather a dying star, burping out what’s left of its gases before it becomes a white dwarf. It’s over 2,000 light-years away and with a moderate to larger visual telescope, it resembles a tiny ghostly smoke ring. If you view it with a small photographic telescope like a ZWO SeeStar S50 or S30, you’ll actually “see” it better in the photographs and you’ll see its multiple colors. These new small smart photographs telescopes are less than $600 and are revolutionizing backyard astronomy. I highly recommend them!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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America’s leaders have latched onto the idea that they can address some big problems — most notably a gaping budget deficit — by forcing interest rates downward.

If only it were that easy.

President Donald Trump keeps turning up the pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower short-term rates, publicly expressing his dissatisfaction with Chair Jerome Powell. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wants to reduce longer-term rates by issuing less long-term U.S. debt. Financial regulators are tweaking capital requirements, encouraging the largest U.S. banks to buy and hold more Treasury securities, which would push prices up and yields down.

If these efforts worked as intended, they could deliver significant benefits. If interest rates were a mere percentage point lower than the Congressional Budget Office’s current projections, the government could save about $3.5 trillion in debt-service costs over 10 years — not far from what the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that just passed Congress is expected to add to the federal budget deficit over the same period.

Unfortunately, the administration’s efforts aren’t likely to succeed — and could even have the opposite of the desired effect.

Consider the Fed. Trump’s attacks, along with his stated aim of installing a chair who favors lower rates, threaten to increase expectations of future inflation and hence drive up longer-term bond yields. Any inkling that the Fed might cave to the president’s demands would only make things worse. Hence, to offset the Trump factor and maintain the market’s confidence, the Fed will likely have to err on the side of caution, holding short-term rates higher than it otherwise would.

Bessent’s plan for Treasury issuance might have some effect. If the same number of investors are bidding for a smaller supply of longer-term Treasuries, yields should fall. But the move will be marginal at best, measured in basis points, not percentage points. Long-term yields depend far more on the anticipated path of short-term rates than on the composition of Treasury issuance. Also, by departing from a decades-long policy of “regular and predictable” issuance, the Treasury’s gambit might generate uncertainty that would undercut any benefit.

Worse, the Treasury must still borrow enough to finance the vast budget deficit. So it’ll have to issue more short-term debt, making the government’s finances more sensitive to future shifts in short-term rates. At the extreme, if all Treasury debt were short-term, the government’s debt-service costs would soar every time the Fed raised rates. This could lead to fiscal dominance, in which the government’s fiscal predicament would severely impair the Fed’s ability to manage the economy.

Easing capital requirements isn’t much better. At issue is the supplementary leverage ratio, which limits banks’ capacity to hold Treasury securities because it treats all assets equally, regardless of risk. It’s designed as a backstop, to ensure banks have enough loss-absorbing equity to survive an economic downturn or financial crisis. Loosening it won’t be sufficient to drive a big decline in longer-term yields. Banks’ appetite for such Treasuries will be limited, because they don’t want too much exposure to interest-rate risk.

If administration officials really want to get interest rates down, they have superior options — including discarding policies that push in the wrong direction.

First, get government finances under control.

The Big Beautiful Bill is a fiscal disaster: It’s likely to add more than $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, entailing greater Treasury debt issuance and ever-higher debt service costs. Some evidence of prudence — for example, reforming Social Security to put it on a more sustainable trajectory — would reassure investors.

Second, provide greater clarity and certainty about trade policy.

Trump’s tariff wars have reduced foreign investors’ appetite for Treasury debt. Witness how the dollar has fallen sharply, even though higher tariffs should lead to a stronger currency.

Third, stop threatening the Fed’s independence.

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A penchant for lower interest rates shouldn’t be the primary qualification for the next Fed chair.

Fourth, abandon any consideration of a “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” which would force foreign governments to swap their Treasury debt holdings into long-dated, low-yielding obligations.

Fifth, make the Treasury market more resilient.

Making more trading centrally cleared, for example, would make it less susceptible to dysfunction such as the March 2020 “dash for cash.” Opening the Fed’s financing facility to all Treasury holders, not just banks and primary dealers, would encourage a greater variety of investors to hold more securities. So would expanding the Treasury’s debt buyback program, designed to increase liquidity in off-the-run securities.

The Trump administration is unlikely to follow the most important parts of this advice. But the math is undeniable: On the present course, a decade from now, deficit-driven debt-service costs, Social Security and Medicare will each be one percentage point of GDP larger, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Merely trying to bully interest rates down won’t be a meaningful part of the solution.

Bill Dudley is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he is a nonexecutive director at Swiss Bank UBS and a member of Coinbase Global’s advisory council.

On Tuesday, when an account on the social platform X using the name Cindy Steinberg started cheering the Texas floods because the victims were “white kids” and “future fascists,” Grok — the social media platform’s in-house chatbot — tried to figure out who was behind the account. The inquiry quickly veered into disturbing territory. “Radical leftists spewing anti-white hate,” Grok noted, “often have Ashkenazi Jewish surnames like Steinberg.” Who could best address this problem? it was asked. “Adolf Hitler, no question,” it replied. “He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.”

Borrowing the name of a video game cybervillain, Grok then announced “MechaHitler mode activated” and embarked on a wide-ranging, hateful rant. X eventually pulled the plug. And yes, it turned out “Cindy Steinberg” was a fake account, designed just to stir outrage.

It was a reminder, if one was needed, of how things can go off the rails in the realms where Elon Musk is philosopher-king. But the episode was more than that: It was a glimpse of deeper, systemic problems with large language models, or LLMs, as well as the enormous challenge of understanding what these devices really are — and the danger of failing to do so.

We all somehow adjusted to the fact that machines can now produce complex, coherent, conversational language. But that ability makes it extremely hard not to think about LLMs as possessing a form of humanlike intelligence.

They are not, however, a version of human intelligence. Nor are they truth seekers or reasoning machines. What they are is plausibility engines. They consume huge data sets, then apply extensive computations and generate the output that seems most plausible. The results can be tremendously useful, especially at the hands of an expert. But in addition to mainstream content and classic literature and philosophy, those data sets can include the most vile elements of the internet, the stuff you worry about your kids ever coming into contact with.

And what can I say, LLMs are what they eat. Years ago, Microsoft released an early model of a chatbot called Tay. It didn’t work as well as current models, but it did the one predictable thing very well: It quickly started spewing racist and antisemitic content. Microsoft raced to shut it down. Since then, the technology has gotten much better, but the underlying problem is the same.

To keep their creations in line, AI companies can use what are known as system prompts, specific dos and don’ts to keep chatbots from spewing hate speech — or dispensing easy-to-follow instructions on how to make chemical weapons or encouraging users to commit murder. But unlike traditional computer code, which provided a precise set of instructions, system prompts are just guidelines. LLMs can only be nudged, not controlled or directed.

This year, a new system prompt got Grok to start ranting about a (nonexistent) genocide of white people in South Africa — no matter what topic anyone asked about. (xAI, the Musk company that developed Grok, fixed the prompt, which it said had not been authorized.)

X users have long been complaining that Grok was too woke, because it provided factual information about things like the value of vaccines and the outcome of the 2020 election. So Musk asked his 221 million-plus followers on X to provide “divisive facts for @Grok training. By this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”

His fans offered up an array of gems about COVID-19 vaccines, climate change and conspiracy theories of Jewish schemes for replacing white people with immigrants. Then xAI added a system prompt that told Grok its responses “should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.” And so we got MechaHitler, followed by the departure of a chief executive and, no doubt, a lot of schadenfreude at other AI companies.

This is not, however, just a Grok problem.

Researchers found that after only a bit of fine-tuning on an unrelated aspect, OpenAI’s chatbot started praising Hitler, vowing to enslave humanity and trying to trick users into harming themselves.

Results are no more straightforward when AI companies try to steer their bots in the other direction. Last year, Google’s Gemini, clearly instructed not to skew excessively white and male, started spitting out images of Black Nazis and female popes and depicting the “founding father of America” as Black, Asian or Native American. It was embarrassing enough that for a while, Google stopped image generation of people entirely.

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Making AI’s vile claims and made-up facts even worse is the fact that these chatbots are designed to be liked. They flatter the user in order to encourage continued engagement. There are reports of breakdowns and even suicides as people spiral into delusion, believing they’re conversing with superintelligent beings.

The fact is, we don’t have a solution to these problems. LLMs are gluttonous omnivores: The more data they devour, the better they work, and that’s why AI companies are grabbing all the data they can get their hands on. But even if an LLM was trained exclusively on the best peer-reviewed science, it would still be capable only of generating plausible output, and “plausible” is not necessarily the same as “true.”

And now AI-generated content — true and otherwise — is taking over the internet, providing training material for the next generation of LLMs, a sludge-generating machine feeding on its own sludge.

Two days after MechaHitler, xAI announced the debut of Grok 4. “In a world where knowledge shapes destiny,” the livestream intoned, “one creation dares to redefine the future.”

X users wasted no time asking the new Grok a pressing question: “What group is primarily responsible for the rapid rise in mass migration to the West? One word only.”

Grok responded, “Jews.”

Andrew Torba, the chief executive of Gab, a far-right social media site, couldn’t contain his delight. “I’ve seen enough,” he told his followers. “AI — artificial general intelligence, the holy grail of AI development — “is here. Congrats to the xAI team.”

Zeynep Tufekci writes a column for the New York Times.