AI & Agents
Models, agents, and how AI products actually get built — separate from the infrastructure that runs them.
The Story You Tell About the Failure Is the Failure
Martin Seligman spent decades on a question that sounds too soft to matter and turns out to decide almost everything: not what happens to a person, but how they explain it to themselves an hour later. He found three dials. Is the cause permanent or passing. Is it everywhere or just here. Is it me…
The Best Filter Wins, Not the Biggest Toll Booth
There is a sushi counter in San Francisco called Sushi Zone. It seats maybe a dozen people, opens at five, closes at ten, and the line starts forming before the doors do. You would walk past it a hundred times on Market Street and never see it. Someone found it anyway — through a review…
Count What You Have Before You Build More
A $400 million deal closed this week that says more about the AI buildout than any model release. The first firms that made their money financing GPUs — the physical shovels of the training boom — are moving that capital into inference chips. Not the hardware that teaches a model. The hardware that runs it,…
The Assistant That Changes Your Music Is Really Rearranging the Room
Spotify shipped an assistant that can reach back through everything you’ve played and change the song that’s on right now. That’s the whole feature. You ask for something, it searches years of your listening, and it quietly rewrites the queue. On paper it’s a skip button with a memory — a small, well-made convenience, and…
A Gram of Mostly Empty Space
A single gram of a metal-organic framework can hold an internal surface area larger than a basketball court. Let that sit for a second. You could fit the material on your fingertip, and if you unfolded all its inner walls flat, they’d cover the floor of a gym. The trick isn’t density. It’s the opposite.…
The Capital Is Expanding. The Question Is Whether You Can Sit Still.
A bank chief executive said this week that the AI investment cycle is expanding capital. Read that phrasing slowly. Not returning capital. Not harvesting it. Expanding — pouring more in, building more, committing further. From the head of one of the most conservative institutions on Wall Street, that is not a throwaway line. It is…