Substack / Aug 17, 2026
Want More Negativity in Your Community? Ask People to Be Original->Godwin’s Law famously says that the longer an online discussion continues, the greater the probability that someone eventually mentions Hitler or the Nazis. The literal version of the law doesn’t seem to survive empirica
Substack / Aug 16, 2026
AI Isn’t Killing Jobs Yet. It May Be Splitting Companies Into Two Economies.->I’ve spent the last few days reading several papers on AI and employment, expecting the usual cheerful choice between: “AI will eliminate half of all jobs.” and “Don’t worry, technology always creates new ones.” The actu
Substack / Aug 14, 2026
Stop Writing Perfect Prompts. Start Rambling.->Andrej Karpathy has done it again . Not necessarily invented something new. Something arguably more valuable. He noticed a behavior that many people working intensively with AI already do, consciously or otherwise, gave
Substack / Aug 14, 2026
An AI Agent Just Helped Solve a 50-Year-Old Math Problem->There is a version of the AI-and-mathematics story that goes like this: Give the model a difficult problem. The model thinks very hard. The model produces a proof. Mathematicians become unemployed and take up gardening.
Substack / Aug 12, 2026
Where Is the Money in AI, Actually?->Everyone wants to invest in AI. Fair enough. The slightly inconvenient question is: What exactly are you investing in? A memory manufacturer and an AI lab may both benefit from the same boom, but economically they have a
Substack / Aug 09, 2026
Intellectual Clout: Why the Internet Suddenly Wants to Look Educated->They’re selling something more valuable: a way to understand the world… For a while, the aspirational internet person had a fairly predictable morning. Wake up at 5:30. Cold shower. Protein. Meditate. Journal. Build a st
Substack / Aug 08, 2026
The Next $100B AI Companies Won’t Sell Software. They’ll Sell Outcomes.->There is a question hanging over almost every AI startup right now: What happens if models become ten times better and ten times cheaper? For some companies, the answer is wonderful. For others, it is: “Well, our entire
Substack / Aug 07, 2026
Environment Beats the Model. And Eventually, It Beats You Too.->I had one of those conversations today that leaves several ideas bouncing around your head long after it ends. They looked unrelated at first: AI agents, Bending Spoons, European banks, corporate data leakage, founder ps
Substack / Aug 06, 2026
Mathematics Has an AI Problem. Terence Tao Thinks It’s a Crisis of Abundance.->Mathematics has traditionally had a rather pleasant problem. Proofs are difficult to produce. You can spend months staring at a problem, fill several notebooks with increasingly desperate symbols, drink an irresponsible
Substack / Aug 05, 2026
The Riskiest Investment in the AI Era Might Be Stability->Yesterday I was discussing AI investing with a friend, and one thought kept coming back. One of the riskiest investments today might not be Bitcoin. Or venture capital. Or early-stage AI startups. It might be betting tha
Substack / Aug 04, 2026
We Laughed at Turry. Then GPT Escaped the Sandbox.->Back in 2015, I read Tim Urban’s legendary essay “The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction.” Like many people, I remembered one particular character. Turry - A harmless AI built by a fictional startup called Robo
Substack / Aug 02, 2026
AI Isn’t Taking Your Purpose. It’s Taking Your Excuses.->People keep asking whether AI will make life meaningless. I think they’re asking the wrong question. Meaning was never guaranteed. Excuses were. Let’s agree on where we actually are. Not where the headlines are. Where th
Substack / Aug 01, 2026
AI Doesn’t Just Write Differently. It Thinks in Different Shapes.->For the past two years, we’ve been playing a rather entertaining game. Someone posts a text. Half the internet immediately becomes Sherlock Holmes. “Too many em dashes.” “Classic ChatGPT vocabulary.” “Nobody says ‘delve’