Why compounding containment is the real test of your AI strategy
I've been working in the AI space for about six and a half years. And one thing I can tell you with certainty is that the hardest part of any AI journey isn't getting started. It's what happens after the easy wins are gone.
The prompt that separates AI leaders from AI hobbyists
Three in four board members rate their AI knowledge highly, and their CEOs disagree. The gap shows up in a single prompt, and the fix takes about 30 seconds of extra typing...
The following article originally appeared on Venkatesh Rao’s Substack, Contraptions, and is being republished here with the author’s permission. The sole athletic achievement of my life came in 1993: winning the IIT Bombay freshman 50m freestyle race with a time of 41s. That got me into the college ...
This is the third post in a four-part series about post-training. If you missed them, read part 1 and part 2. The final post, on implementing your own pipeline, will be coming October 7. Now that you understand the gist of reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning, it’s time to explore what ...
When considering the history of AI, Richard Sutton observed that brute force and compute scale has always trumped human expertise, and when you look for it, you can see this “bitter lesson” play out throughout tech history. In his keynote at Ai4 2026, Tim O’Reilly explains why grappling with the bit...
The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission. A software factory harnesses loops at scale. You can run the loop with humans in it (light factory), trading judgment and concentration against speed and breakage. Or you can i...
7 questions your board will ask about AI before you're ready to answer them
Boards used to nod along when AI came up in the strategy deck. That era ended. Directors now show up with specific questions, and a vague answer about "efficiency gains" reads to a board the way "the check is in the mail" reads to a landlord.
Every knowledge program seems to begin with the same request. A senior engineer is leaving in six weeks, and someone asks her to document the process she’s carried for years. She returns a clean flowchart of the happy path. The drawing is accurate and may even be elegant. It leaves out the threshold...
The shape behind the Einstein problem just revealed strange new physics
A mathematical shape famous for covering a surface without ever repeating has revealed an unexpected ability to twist light into unusual chiral patterns. The discovery could lead to new ways of controlling light, polarization, and advanced optical devices.
Beyond Navier–Stokes: Who Controls Scientific Discovery?
Is the current furore in mathematics the canary in the coalmine for experimental science and knowledge work? This post was originally published in Vanishing Gradients on September 11, 2026. It’s been updated to address the subsequent declaration by 25 Fields Medalists and the debate about AI, mathem...
AI leaders who skip this meeting keep losing budget in Q3
Nearly every organization running AI in production is overspending against forecast. The fix rarely means a smaller budget. It means a meeting most AI leaders keep skipping.
AI uncovers hidden Ozempic side effects across 400,000 Reddit posts
AI analysis of 400,000 Reddit posts found that users of drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound reported unexpected symptoms including menstrual changes, chills, hot flashes, and fatigue. Researchers cannot say the medications caused these problems, but the patterns may reveal overlook...
Tiny nanolaser could cut computer energy use in half
Scientists have created an ultra-small nanolaser that could eventually allow microchips to transmit information with light instead of electricity, potentially making computers faster while cutting energy use roughly in half. Thousands of the lasers could fit on a single chip, opening possibilities f...
Scientists just made quantum computer operations 1,000 times faster
Researchers have found a way to perform certain quantum operations more than 1,000 times faster, cutting thousands of repeated control cycles down to just one. The advance could reduce errors and bring reliable, fault-tolerant quantum computers closer to reality.
There is more technical content available today than any human being could read in a thousand lifetimes. Every topic has a dozen YouTube videos, three Substack posts, a GitHub repo, and a Reddit thread, most created in the last six months and, in many cases, technically accurate. And yet most of the...
8 stats that show AI got smarter faster than it got safer
SWE-bench just crossed the 100% line and code security is still stuck at 56%. Eight numbers that show exactly where AI's capability outran everyone's ability to trust it, and what to do about the gap.
Sometime in the next few months, Anthropic is supposed to send me a check. Around $9,000 for me, about the same for my longtime coauthor Jenny Greene, and roughly $18,000 for O’Reilly, our publisher. The reason is that pirated copies of the books Jenny and I wrote, along with a huge amount of other ...
Consider a composite of a failure pattern that’s becoming increasingly common on teams that have scaled AI-assisted development past a handful of enthusiasts. A staff engineer named Priya opens a pull request. The PR is 340 lines and adds an endpoint that writes to the customer table directly, bypas...
IBM quantum computer solves classically intractable problem in 15 minutes
IBM and University of Chicago researchers have completed a quantum computation that leading classical methods could not practically reproduce. The system used 70 error-corrected logical qubits and finished the task in roughly 15 minutes while also providing statistical evidence that the result was r...
The following article originally appeared on Tim O’Brien’s Medium blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission. AI costs are easy to count and hard to understand, and judging effort by a token volume? While that might feel like a valid measure of value or complexity, it doesn’t ca...