May 2026: The Month AI Went Public

May 2026 was the month AI stopped being an insider story and went public — in every sense. Cerebras' IPO cracked open the window on what this buildout is actually worth. Capability stopped being a demo and started doing things in the world: AI systems surfaced roughly 10,000 real software vulnerabilities, and a model drove a genuine wet-lab discovery.

And the line item everyone had treated as a footnote — the electricity bill behind all this compute — became a public fight over who pays for the power.

This is the monthly roundup, not one of our usual deep dives: a fast, organised tour of everything that mattered in May across five lenses — big ideas and horizons, frontier labs and models, infrastructure and compute, business and markets, and governance and society — with the "so what" on each story rather than just the headline.

Stick around to the end for a quick recap of the deep dives we dropped this month, and use the index below to jump straight to any of them.

This month on the show — the deep dives we dropped, and what we learned:

• Ep 7 — Amodei: Surviving our technology adolescence: Anthropic's CEO on why the next few years are AI's most dangerous stretch — and how we get through them. — https://connectiveshift.com/shows/ai-intel/7bcf40c3-15e8-430e-9656-aa03f02c9bb4
• Ep 8 — GPT-5.5 vs Claude Mythos: The Frontier Model You Can Use vs the One You Can't: the real gap between the model that just works and the one everyone mythologises. — https://connectiveshift.com/shows/ai-intel/21058121-6492-4757-a06d-6e6a38d6cb5b
• Ep 9 — The billionaire battle for OpenAI: what the boardroom war reveals about the people actually steering AI. — https://connectiveshift.com/shows/ai-intel/d2aa8f3c-11b7-4ee8-b465-ff4dbc64a096

I'm Dan. AI moves too fast to keep up with, so I built my own stack of AI tools to research, analyse, verify and illustrate the questions I can't stop thinking about — mostly to learn it myself, and I share what I find. AI-assisted, fact-checked, worth a second look.

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