market-observations
The Quiet Power to Decide What Gets Built
Somewhere right now there is an engineering team that has spent a decade building on Erlang. It is a language famous for one thing: keeping programs alive. Phone networks run on it. It was designed so that one part of a system can fall over and the rest keeps humming. That kind of resilience is…
The Day the Machine Stopped Asking and Started Buying
Mastercard spent this week wiring rails for a customer it has never had: a piece of software that can reach for your card on its own. The plumbing runs through Coinbase and Ripple, which tells you the shape of the thing. The point isn’t that an AI can now recommend a purchase. It’s that an…
The Week Scale Stopped Being the Answer
One of the people who helped invent the modern AI model just changed teams. Noam Shazeer, a co-lead on Google’s Gemini and a name on the original paper that made all of this possible, left for OpenAI. On its own that’s a transfer-window headline — a star moving from one club to another, the kind…
The Race Everyone Is Watching Is Not the Race Being Run
Amazon’s AI chief said this week that the company has fallen behind OpenAI and Anthropic, but sees a path to catch up “in the coming year.” It’s a calm sentence, and an honest one, and it tells you almost nothing about who wins. Catch up to what? The leaderboard everyone is staring at measures the…
When the Expensive Thing Gets Cheap, Watch Where the Value Goes
A coding model from a lab called Z.ai now matches the best paid system on long, complicated programming tasks — and runs at roughly a sixth of the cost. The weights are open. Anyone can download them, run them, change them. A year ago that sentence would have been a press release fantasy. Today it’s…
Eight Hours, A Hundred Pages, and the Quiet Problem of Too Much
A research agent from Sakana AI now writes a hundred-page report in eight hours. Not an outline. Not a draft for a human to finish. A finished document — sourced, structured, the kind of thing a consulting team used to bill three weeks for. The pitch is that ordinary deep research wasn’t deep enough, so…