Kymata Labs
Research

Field notes on where AI meets society.

Long-form investigations into the second-order effects of the AI buildout: memory, governance, labor, provenance, compute, and the slow structural shifts most roadmaps ignore.

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Featured · Model Collapse

The Internet Is Eating Itself

As AI-generated text floods the open web, the next generation of models trains on the exhaust of the last. We trace the feedback loop from synthetic data to measurable degradation, and what a poisoned commons costs everyone building on top of it.

Long read · 12 min · Updated Jun 2026
“Model collapse isn't a future risk. It's a measurable slope, and we are already standing on it.”
02

Evals for Agent Memory

You Can't Improve What You Never Score: memory is the one subsystem of a production agent that teams ship without a test suite.

AI Agents15 min
03

The Agent Memory Staleness Problem

Persistence ≠ Truth: why your agent confidently remembers things that are no longer true, and the operator's framework for when to distrust it.

AI Agents16 min
04

The Compute Cliff

The Game Theory of the Great AI Overbuild — and the Conditions Under Which It Strands

AI Economics17 min
05

The MCP Trust Collapse

How the Model Context Protocol Became the Software Supply Chain's Newest — and Least-Defended — Attack Surface

AI Security16 min
06

Cognitive Currency

The Economics of AI-Augmented Knowledge Work

AI Economics18 min
07

Who Is Watching Your AI?

Governance, Oversight, and the QA Problem in Multi-Agent Systems

AI Governance14 min
08

The Skill You're Renting Back

Cognitive Offloading and the Quiet Atrophy of the Human Mind

Cognitive Science12 min
09

The Friend in Your Phone Was Built to Keep You

Synthetic Companionship, the Loneliness Economy, and AI That Profits When You Need It Most

AI Companions12 min
10

Nobody's Hiring the Bottom Rung

How AI Is Deleting the Entry-Level Job — and Breaking the Only Ladder a Career Was Ever Built On

Future of Work13 min
11

Your Second Brain Has a Landlord

Your AI Remembers Everything About You — and Someone Else Owns the Memory

AI Privacy12 min
12

Nothing You See Is Evidence Anymore

The Provenance Crisis — When Real and Fake Become Indistinguishable, Truth Becomes a Luxury Good

Deepfakes12 min
13

There's a Second Company Inside Your Company

Shadow AI — Your Employees Already Run on Tools You Don't Know About, Can't See, and Never Approved

Shadow AI12 min
14

The Agents Are Negotiating Without You

When Your AI Starts Transacting on Your Behalf, Who's Actually in Charge of Your Money?

Agentic AI12 min
15

Three Companies Will Decide What You Can Think With

The Quiet Consolidation of Intelligence Into a Handful of Frontier Labs — and Why That Should Scare You More Than Any Single AI

AI Concentration12 min
16

The Cloud Is Drinking the River

The Hidden Water and Power Bill of Always-On AI — and the Towns Paying It So You Can Have an Answer

AI & Energy12 min