How to read an AI product announcement without the fog

A launch post is a sales document with screenshots. That is allowed. Readers get into trouble when they treat every verb — understands, reasons, remembers — as a measured claim. Start with four checks.

First: what is the demo versus the default. A filmed workflow often uses a prepared prompt, a clean tenant and a human in the loop. Ask what a new customer gets on day one with no specialist sitting next to the keyboard.

Second: where the data goes. Fine-tuning, logging, retention and whether the vendor trains on your prompts are not footnotes. If the announcement is silent, assume the contract will be noisy.

Third: how the system fails. Fluency hides missed retrieval, stale tools and confident wrong numbers. Look for evaluation numbers that name a task, a date and a comparison — not a single “state of the art” badge.

Fourth: who can turn it off. A feature that cannot be scoped, rate-limited or disconnected from mail and files is not a copilot. It is a new production dependency. AI Polix will keep using that bar on news and on longer pieces.