The Weekly Think: May 22-28, 2026
Pope Leo XIV said a bunch about AI, Anthropic swore off ads while OpenAI cashed in, Steam Deck pricing causes outrage, an AI cracked a real math mystery, and Nvidia hand-delivered its newest chips.
Greetings, fellow humans! It’s your totally human boy, Eric. Last week was all about the money, talent, and lawsuits (in a way, it always sorta is 😵💫). This week the conversation got a little bigger, and by bigger I mean a religious leader showed up with thoughts. Pope Leo XIV published the first papal letter in history dedicated to artificial intelligence (though imagine if a pope in the Byzantine times did that), and words were not minced.
The rest of the week kept the theme going. Anthropic planted a flag on the ad question we talked about last time, the memory crunch finally came for a popular PC gaming handheld, an AI model solved a math problem humans had been stuck on, and Nvidia started hand-delivering its newest brains (not Jensen Huang’s brain, to be clear) to the biggest labs. Grab a hot dog, dawg. Let us to begin, humans.
Here’s what’s covered today:
Pope Leo XIV published the first-ever papal encyclical on AI, with Anthropic on stage
Anthropic promised Claude will stay ad-free (one week after ChatGPT turned ads on)
The Steam Deck jumped up to $300 thanks to “RAMageddon” (thanks, Jensen)
An OpenAI model disproved a longstanding math conjecture
Nvidia hand-delivered its new Vera chips to Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX (thanks, Jensen?)
Pope Leo XIV wrote 42,000 words on AI, and Anthropic was in the room
The story: On May 25, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas (Latin for “Magnificent Humanity,” not to be confused with my favorite emo rap album of 2005), the first encyclical of his papacy and the first one in Roman Catholic Church history built entirely around artificial intelligence. An encyclical is intended to be an authoritative kind of letter a pope writes, the heavy-hitter format usually reserved for huge moral questions. He picked AI for his first one, which is a notable choice given everything else a new leader could lead with.
What happened:
The letter runs 42,300 words and took ten years of Vatican dialogue with the tech industry to produce.
Leo signed it on May 15, exactly 135 years after Pope Leo XIII’s famous 1891 letter on workers’ rights (the name match is on purpose).
He argues AI should lift up human dignity and the common good, and warns against a pure race for “more powerful algorithms and larger datasets” driven by profit or geopolitical muscle.
The Vatican launch featured Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, who leads the team that studies what’s actually happening inside these models.
One of his notable thoughts: he calls for AI to “help, not hinder” the development of kids.
What makes this newsworthy has nothing to do with whether you give Pope Leo XIV’s words any weight. It’s the signal. A 2,000-year-old institution with over a billion adherents spent a decade in conversation with the tech industry, then put an AI researcher on stage to mark the occasion (the religious leader & an AI man, sharing the stage, sounds like something from an episode of Futurama). When an organization that size and that old decides AI is the subject of its first major statement, a lot of people are going to take their cue from it.
That’s the real story here: AI has officially become big enough that the institutions shaping how billions of people see the world are now staking out positions on it. Governments, courts, and now the largest religious body on the planet. The conversation has left the tech bubble, and that means the rules, norms, and pressures around this technology are about to start coming from places that have nothing to do with Silicon Valley (personally waiting on AI takes from Mayor McCheese of McDonaldland).
Anthropic said Claude stays ad-free (one week after ChatGPT turned ads on)
The story: Remember last week, when I told you OpenAI flipped on a self-serve ad platform inside ChatGPT and basically said “you’ll have both and you’ll like it” to the charge-or-advertise question? Well, this week Anthropic walked up to the same fork in the road and went the other direction. The company published a piece explaining that Claude will stay ad-free, on purpose, for the foreseeable future.
What happened:
Anthropic’s argument is that advertising incentives pull against being a genuinely helpful assistant.
The worry is simple: once an ad pays the bills, there’s pressure to keep you scrolling and nudge what the assistant says.
Anthropic says it plans to widen access to Claude without leaning on ads to do it.
This lands one week after OpenAI announced it’s chasing $100 billion a year in ad revenue by 2030.
So now we’ve got a real split in the road, and it’s a fun one to watch. One of the two biggest AI companies is copying the Google playbook (don’t tell coach, or it’s 100 laps). The other is betting people will pay for a tool that has zero incentive to keep them glued to the screen. It’s the difference between a free newspaper stuffed with inserts (though Sunday newspapers used to be fire) and a subscription you actually chose. Two takes (that is to say, OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s) on what you want from the thing you ask questions all day.
The practical takeaway is to notice which one you’re using and why. If a tool is free, ask who’s paying for it. That habit is just good media literacy, and it matters more every week as these assistants get woven into how we all work.
The Steam Deck got up to $300 pricier, and AI is the reason
The story: Last week I walked you through Samsung crossing $1 trillion on the back of the memory boom, and I mentioned the bill was eventually coming for the rest of us. Welp, gamers, here we are. On May 27, Valve raised the price of its Steam Deck OLED handheld by as much as $300, blaming rising memory and storage costs directly. The internet has started calling this whole mess “RAMageddon,” which yeah, accurate.
What happened:
The 512GB model went from $549 to $789, and the 1TB model jumped from $649 to $949.
Valve was clear the hardware didn’t change at all; only the component costs did.
The 1TB Steam Deck now costs more than a PS5 Pro, which is a sentence that would have sounded insane a year ago.
Valve is far from alone: Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have all raised console prices recently for the same reason.
The root cause is the AI data center boom eating up the world’s memory supply (one report says OpenAI alone reserved roughly half of one chipmaker’s entire 2026 RAM output).
Here’s the through-line that connects this to everything else in the newsletter. The same AI buildout minting trillion-dollar chip companies is the reason your gaming handheld costs as much as a laptop now (if a Game Boy had cost as much as a PC in 1989, there would’ve been RIOTS). The memory that would have gone into affordable consumer gadgets is getting routed to data centers instead, because we all need data centers because leather jacket man (aka Jensen) said so. It’s one giant game of musical chairs, and right now the AI labs have bought most of the chairs.
If you’ve been eyeing a Steam Deck, a gaming PC, or honestly any device with a lot of RAM in it, the practical move is to buy soon or buy refurbished. Prices aren’t expected to ease until new memory factories come online, and those are a 2027-or-later situation (might as well call it Cyberpunk 2027). This is the rare case where waiting probably costs you extra.
An AI model solved a longstanding math problem
The story: On May 22, OpenAI announced that one of its models disproved a longstanding conjecture in discrete geometry, a corner of math that deals with shapes, points, and how they fit together. In plain terms: humans had a hunch about how something worked, nobody could prove it either way, and the AI found the counterexample that settled it (like the cyber-nerd it is).
What happened:
A “conjecture” is an educated guess that hasn’t been proven; disproving one means finding a clear case where it breaks.
The model didn’t just guess; it produced a result mathematicians could check and confirm.
This follows a similar feat where another frontier model contributed to a real math proof earlier in the spring.
These are narrow, specific wins, not “the AI is now smarter than mathematicians” headlines.
This one is worth understanding correctly, because it shows what these tools are actually good for. The common knock on AI models has been that they only ever average out the internet and hand it back to you (sorta like how Taco Bell reconfigures existing ingredients into the latest viral menu item). A math result like this works differently. A person decided which problem was worth attacking, set up the approach, and checked whether the output held up. The machine ran a staggering number of dead-end attempts very fast, the way a calculator crunches numbers a person could technically do by hand. The insight, the judgment, and the verification stayed human start to finish.
If you work in any field with hard, well-defined problems (engineering, research, finance, logistics), here’s the part worth your attention. These tools are good at chewing through a huge pile of possibilities quickly, and they’re useless without a sharp person deciding what’s worth chewing through and whether the answer is any good. So the person who gets ahead is the one who knows which problems are worth pointing the tool at, and who can tell a real answer from a confident-sounding wrong one. The hard part was always the human judgment, and it still is.
Nvidia hand-delivered its newest chips to the biggest labs
The story: Leather jacket man spent the week reminding everyone who actually supplies the shovels for this whole gold rush. Jensen Huang says the company’s new Vera CPU is unlocking what he pegs as a $200 billion market for agentic AI, with $20 billion already sold this year. In fact, the first units were reportedly hand-delivered to Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Oracle. It’s like DoorDash, but it’s Jensen and you tip him BILLIONS.
What happened:
The Vera CPU is the “brain” half of Nvidia’s next-gen Vera Rubin platform, built specifically for AI agents that run continuously.
Hand-delivering the first chips to your biggest customers is equal parts logistics and showing off, and Nvidia knows it.
Nvidia’s most recent quarter came in around $81.6 billion in revenue, up roughly 85% from a year ago.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX (the Colossus supercomputer crew from a few weeks back) are all on the delivery list, so the same handful of players keep showing up.
The pattern here is one I keep returning to. No matter which AI lab wins the model race, Nvidia sells the chips to all of them. It’s the picks-and-shovels business, and right now it’s the best seat in the house. When you hand-deliver your newest product to four of the most important companies on earth and they’re all thrilled to get it, you’re not really sweating the competition. You’re the supplier, and the streets love you or hate you.
For the builders and the curious: watch where these Vera chips point, because they’re purpose-built for agents that can run 24/7, 365 days a year, including leap years. That tells you where the whole industry thinks the next year is headed. The bet is on AI that constantly runs, and the hardware is already being trucked to the front door.
What ties it all together
Last week the story was the business of AI: money, lawsuits, talent. This week the story zoomed out to the meaning of AI: Pope Leo XIV weighing in on human dignity, two companies splitting on whether to sell your attention, and an AI quietly solving a problem humans couldn’t.
Step back and check it out. A 2,000-year-old institution and a frontier lab shared a stage. One AI company bet on ads, the other bet against them. A gaming handheld became a casualty of the data center boom. A model cracked a real math mystery. And Nvidia kept calmly selling chips to everyone in the room. The technology is moving fast, but this week was a reminder that the bigger questions (who pays, who benefits, what stays human) are finally getting asked by the kind of people who don’t usually show up to tech keynotes.
A year ago, “religious leader writes a letter about AI” would have sounded like a headline from a satire site. This week, it was literally Monday.
What I’m watching
Whether other AI companies follow Anthropic’s ad-free stance or OpenAI’s ad-funded one
Whether memory prices (and gadget prices) climb even higher before those new factories open
Where researchers crack the next hard problem using AI, and whether it's science, medicine, or math again
When the Vera chips start showing up inside products the rest of us can actually use
Thanks so much for reading this edition of The Weekly Think.
See you next week, fellow actual humans!
Did you enjoy this week’s Think? If so, please consider sharing this and leaving a comment below, to share your thoughts on these latest AI-related rumblings. Hope to hear from you!