Editor of Gradient Flow; former chief data scientist and program chair of major AI conferences.
Last week I argued that open models will absorb most of the money and compute the world spends on AI. A week later, open weights are even more central to the conversation. Recent releases have made the gap between...
Subscribe • Previous Issues Specialized AI Is Getting Easier to Build Last week I argued that open models will absorb most of the money and compute the world spends on AI. A week later, open weights are even more...
The most useful thing I’ve learned watching this latest round of open model releases is that “open” has stopped predicting anything. It used to be a reliable shorthand for cheap and second-tier. Now...
I keep coming back to the same uncomfortable math on AI data centers: the money going in is piling up faster than any economic proof that it should. Usage of AI systems has reportedly been climbing seven to twenty times...
Three frontier level models landed within weeks of each other this fall, GLM 5.2 from Zhipu, Kimi K3 from Moonshot, and Gemini 3.6 Flash from Google, and I wanted to capture early developer reaction so I can monitor how...
Here is my bet: open models (open weights and open source alike) will end up absorbing most of the money and compute the world spends on AI. The proprietary frontier models get the headlines and the IPO valuations, but...
Subscribe • Previous Issues Open Models Will Absorb Most of the AI Spend Here is my bet: open models (open weights and open source alike) will end up absorbing most of the money and compute the world spends on AI. The...
Since June 2026, Chinese officials have been in closed door talks about restricting foreign access to the country’s most advanced AI models, both open and closed. The Ministry of Commerce is leading the...
A little while back I wrote about how teams use reinforcement learning (RL) to make agents reliable. Since then I keep bumping into startups where RL is not a research footnote or a feature buried in the stack. It is...
Subscribe • Previous Issues What Startups Taught Me About the Next Layer of AI Infrastructure A little while back I wrote about how teams use reinforcement learning (RL) to make agents reliable. Since then I keep...
There’s a friendly debate among developers about how to give AI agents reliable ways to use external tools, data, and services so they can do useful work beyond generating text. One side favors CLIs, or Command-Line...
Subscribe • Previous Issues Your CLI Was Built for Humans, Not Agents There’s a friendly debate among developers about how to give AI agents reliable ways to use external tools, data, and services so they can do useful...
This guide is built from studies and reports published in recent months. Sources include a large matched study tracking more than 100,000 real GitHub developers, a meta-analysis pooling 23 separate productivity studies,...
Like everyone else, I’ve been enjoying the steady improvement in coding agents and the tooling around them, from frameworks and harnesses to evaluation suites. But the more I talk with teams actually deploying...
Subscribe • Previous Issues Agents Need Maps, Not Bigger Context Windows Like everyone else, I’ve been enjoying the steady improvement in coding agents and the tooling around them, from frameworks and harnesses to...
I’ve avoided writing about copyright and AI. Not because it isn’t important, but because it felt like a legal sideshow compared to the engineering and business questions I find more interesting. That’s...
Subscribe • Previous Issues The Data Compliance Problem AI Teams Keep Ignoring I’ve avoided writing about copyright and AI. Not because it isn’t important, but because it felt like a legal sideshow compared to the...
The more I dig into the economics, the harder it is to see AI data centers as a good business, and they’re now my leading candidate for what pops the AI bubble in the next 6 to 12 months. The concern isn’t...
OpenAI and Anthropic are going public while still capturing much of the money spent on foundation-model usage. But deployment patterns are starting to tell a more complicated story. Companies are building hybrid model...
Subscribe • Previous Issues The Hybrid AI Stack Is Coming for the Pricing Power of OpenAI and Anthropic OpenAI and Anthropic are going public while still capturing much of the money spent on foundation-model usage. But...