Thoughts
On tech, AI, business, and what actually works.
July 17, 2026
AI made execution nearly free, and the slop flood is what losing the price filter looks like. For seventy years, cost silently decided what got built, what came first, and when building stopped — now every builder has to make those three declarations on purpose, or not at all.
July 17, 2026
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab shipped its first model, Inkling, and admitted in writing that it isn't the best one available. That confession is the first coherent AI business strategy built on the premise that the frontier is a loss-leader — and that the real economics live in making a good-enough model yours.
July 15, 2026
In June 2024 Google forced its biggest advertisers off credit cards with a no-exceptions ultimatum, calling it a better billing experience. The payments math tells the real story: roughly $300 per $10,000 in card fees versus a dime by bank transfer — plus tighter control, verified identities, and a bet that advertisers had nowhere else to go.
July 13, 2026
AI's binding constraint is no longer chips — it's electricity. A map of the companies selling the electrons: the dominant incumbents with decades of contracted hyperscaler revenue, and the wild cards that could pay off like lottery tickets over the next ten years.
July 5, 2026
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 didn't ship one model — it shipped three (Sol, Terra, Luna) priced in a clean 2x ladder. The real story isn't the 91.9% benchmark crown; it's that 'which model' is now a budget decision. A clear-eyed read of the tiers, the honest benchmark picture (Terra actually scores below GPT-5.5), and which tier a business should actually buy.
June 28, 2026
AI agents save real hours, yet only 41% of rollouts hit positive ROI within a year and 19% never pay back. The 2026 data on why most agent deployments stall — and the four moves that separate the winners. The dividing line isn't the model; it's measurement.
June 27, 2026
How Google turned itself from a search company into an agentic-AI company across two keynotes — I/O 2025 and I/O 2026 — and what its agents, open protocols, and quadrillion-token scale mean for business decision-makers planning their own AI bets.
June 26, 2026
In late June 2026 the most capable AI models stopped being something you could simply buy. OpenAI began releasing GPT-5.6 only to a government-vetted list of partners, days after Washington suspended foreign access to Anthropic's top models. It isn't a kill switch — it's a permission layer, and it changes who controls the frontier.
June 24, 2026
SpaceX's $60 billion all-stock purchase of Cursor isn't a coding-tools story — it's Elon Musk buying the surface where software gets written, turning millions of developers' keystrokes into training fuel for his AI, and opening a second front against GitHub with a platform called Origin. What the largest startup acquisition in history means for the tools your business runs on.