Editor of Gradient Flow; former chief data scientist and program chair of major AI conferences.
Last year I wrote about robotics moving from bespoke machines toward reusable foundation models, essentially an attempt to build a general-purpose robot brain. More recently, I argued that models are getting easier to...
If you had asked me a year ago which frontier AI lab would go public first, I would have said OpenAI. Instead, Anthropic has filed for one of the most anticipated technology IPOs in years. The numbers deserve a closer...
Subscribe • Previous Issues What If AI Builds the Robot Instead of Controlling It? Last year I wrote about robotics moving from bespoke machines toward reusable foundation models, essentially an attempt to build a...
Most media coverage of China focuses on its export and manufacturing prowess. Yet when I talk with visitors and friends just back from the country, what they most want to discuss is the bleak job market, especially for...
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the growing post-training stack that lets teams turn general-purpose models into something better suited to their own work. I recently spoke with Joel Hron, CTO of Thomson Reuters,...
Subscribe • Previous Issues The Model Factory Matters More Than the Model A couple of months ago, I wrote about the growing post-training stack that lets teams turn general-purpose models into something better suited to...
I’ve had a longstanding interest in local AI for a simple reason. I would rather not send proprietary code, unpublished plans, or knowledge about how a business operates to an outside model provider when I have a viable...
Subscribe • Previous Issues Local AI Is a Routing Problem, Not a Privacy Feature I’ve had a longstanding interest in local AI for a simple reason. I would rather not send proprietary code, unpublished plans, or...
If you check Ethics.Dev regularly, you may have noticed how often AI agents and cybersecurity have been colliding lately. Some of the stories sound straight out of movies: agents escaping test environments,...
Subscribe • Previous Issues Eight Security Assumptions AI Agents Quietly Break If you check Ethics.Dev regularly, you may have noticed how often AI agents and cybersecurity have been colliding lately. Some of the...
Last year I wrote that robotics had a data problem language models were lucky enough to avoid. Text, images, and code had accumulated for decades before anyone decided to train models on them. Robots had no comparable...
Subscribe • Previous Issues The AI Data Problem Moved Downstream Last year I wrote that robotics had a data problem language models were lucky enough to avoid. Text, images, and code had accumulated for decades before...
In my conversations with developers and AI teams, I’m struck by how many are exploring moving more of their inference workloads to open models. I’ve touched on some of their reasons before , but here I want...
LLMs are built to generate text, but a surprising amount of AI automation does not need text at all. It needs a small decision: Is this spam? Which team should get this ticket? How urgent is it? We can force an LLM to...
Imagine a procurement agent checking inventory and deciding that stock has fallen below the reorder threshold. It places another order. The problem is that a large delivery was recorded a few minutes earlier, and the...
Subscribe • Previous Issues Stale Data Used to Be Annoying Imagine a procurement agent checking inventory and deciding that stock has fallen below the reorder threshold. It places another order. The problem is that a...
Google recently agreed to pay $10 million for the internal business data of Spirit Airlines. The airline is bankrupt, but its emails, Teams messages, software, spreadsheets, and operating records apparently still have...
Subscribe • Previous Issues When Work History Becomes an AI Asset Google recently agreed to pay $10 million for the internal business data of Spirit Airlines. The airline is bankrupt, but its emails, Teams messages,...
I expect AI data centers to become a major issue in the 2028 presidential primaries, particularly on the Democratic side. I recently argued that the case for building more data centers and compute is getting lost amid...
A few weeks ago I wrote about AI systems that keep learning after deployment instead of treating every interaction as a fresh start. That prompted a few readers to ask about recursive self-improvement (RSI). The...