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 evaluation suites. But the more I talk with teams actually deploying agents in enterprises, the more I circle back to plumbing. Agents need dataContinue reading “I talked to Google’s former AI head about messy data”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
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 engineering and business questions I find more interesting. That’s gotten harder to justify. There is also something mildly funny about naming my podcast The Data Exchange years ago, because I believed dataContinue reading “The Data Compliance Problem AI Teams Keep Ignoring”
What your base model doesn’t protect you from
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 engineering and business questions I find more interesting. That’s gotten harder to justify. There is also something mildly funny about naming myContinue reading “What your base model doesn’t protect you from”
The Bear Case for AI Data Centers
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 that AI stops improving or that demand vanishes. It’s that spending has racedContinue reading “The Bear Case for AI Data Centers”
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 deployment patterns are starting to tell a more complicated story. Companies are building hybrid model portfolios, using proprietary models where convenience, support, and frontier capability matter, while turning to open-weights models where cost, privacy, customization, and deploymentContinue reading “The Hybrid AI Stack Is Coming for the Pricing Power of OpenAI and Anthropic”
Your AI bill is a tax on scale
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 deployment patterns are starting to tell a more complicated story. Companies are building hybrid model portfolios, using proprietary models where convenience,Continue reading “Your AI bill is a tax on scale”
Tokenomics: AI’s New Design Constraint
The Cost Reality of Running AI at Scale Budget shock is already happening. Multiple major players have pulled back on AI features or subscriptions due to unexpectedly high token costs. Amazon removed its token leaderboard and Microsoft cancelled Claude Code subscriptions. These are early signals that the deploy-everywhere approach is hitting hard financial limits, notContinue reading “Tokenomics: AI’s New Design Constraint”
The Gap Between the Press Release and the Power Grid
Back in February, I wrote about what I called the “Data Center Rebellion,” the growing local resistance to the physical infrastructure behind AI. Since then, I have been asking tech people around the Bay Area how closely they are following the backlash. The answer is usually: they know it exists, but not much more thanContinue reading “The Gap Between the Press Release and the Power Grid”
12 GW announced. 5 GW under construction. What happens next?
Subscribe • Previous Issues The Gap Between the Press Release and the Power Grid Back in February, I wrote about what I called the “Data Center Rebellion,” the growing local resistance to the physical infrastructure behind AI. Since then, I have been asking tech people around the Bay Area how closely they are following the backlash. TheContinue reading “12 GW announced. 5 GW under construction. What happens next?”
Your Enterprise Data Deserves Better Than a Chatbot
Large language models and their multimodal variants remain the foundation models most people encounter first. That makes sense. Text, images, audio, and video cover a huge range of knowledge-work tasks, and today’s chatbots are far more capable than the text-only systems many people first tried. But enterprise AI does not run on chat alone. ItContinue reading “Your Enterprise Data Deserves Better Than a Chatbot”