Author: Ben Lorica
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AI Is Speeding Up the Teams Building AI
Between August and October 2026, a small team from METR spent 11 weeks examining whether AI was accelerating research and development at Anthropic. They reviewed internal performance data for released and unreleased models, training compute, staffing…
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Your AI Passed the Test. Did It Do the Job?
At the recent AI Conference, Ion Stoica described a coding agent that made a key-value store, a simple database, roughly six times faster. It passed the tests, but there was a catch: the agent had stopped…
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One question I’d ask every team building agents
Your AI Passed the Test. Did It Do the Job? At the recent AI Conference, Ion Stoica described a coding agent that made a key-value store, a simple database, roughly six times faster. It passed the…
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Previewing the Debate Over Frontier AI Regulation
If Democrats take control of at least one chamber of Congress and pick up a few governorships in the midterms, proposals to regulate frontier AI labs could get a more serious hearing. So I wanted to…
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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 general-purpose robot brain. More recently, I argued that models are getting easier to buy, while the…
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Anthropic’s IPO: The Business Is Real. The Hard Part Comes Next
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…
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I changed my mind about world models
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 general-purpose robot brain. More recently, I…
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China’s Export Strength Is Only Half the Story
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,…
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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 their own work. I recently spoke with Joel Hron, CTO of Thomson Reuters,…
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What I learned from companies training their own models
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 their own work. I recently…