On May 19, Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. He co-founded OpenAI, ran AI at Tesla, and is probably the most recognizable AI researcher alive who isn't running a lab. His own explanation was simple: "the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative.
Somewhere in 2026, 'AI-first' became the default startup identity. It's on every landing page, every pitch deck, every hiring post. And I think it's quietly hurting the founders who lean on it hardest, because it describes the ingredient, not the business. Nobody in
On April 29, the House Committee on Homeland Security and the House Select Committee on China sent letters to Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, and to Airbnb. The committees want to know why American companies are running Chinese-developed AI models like Alibaba's Qwen and Moonshot's
Every week, a founder asks me some version of the same question: should we be on GPT-4o, Claude, or Gemini? They want to know which frontier model gives them the edge. It is the wrong question. And the fact that it is still the dominant question in most product
On July 9, 2026, OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 as three distinct tiers: Sol at $5 input and $30 output per million tokens, Terra at $2.50 and $15, and Luna at $1 and $6. Sol is the flagship, built for hard coding tasks, autonomous agents, and deep research. Terra
On July 9, 2026, OpenAI killed Codex. Not quietly. The standalone Codex app was shut down the same day it was merged into ChatGPT. A few weeks later, OpenAI's Atlas browser got its own death notice: shutting down August 9, also absorbed into ChatGPT. Both products were well-
I've been thinking about this for a while, and I'm going to say it plainly: the capital game in AI is over. The incumbents won. If you're a founder or a builder trying to compete at the frontier model layer with closed weights, you&
Sometime in the last eighteen months, the base model layer stopped being a competition and started being a commodity. Most people haven't adjusted their mental model yet. That lag is where a lot of bad startup bets are being made right now. The Model War Is Effectively Over
Let me say something that probably sounds wrong on the surface: I think being a senior engineer at a big tech company right now is a riskier career position than it appears. Not risky in the dramatic, "you'll lose everything" sense. Risky in the quieter, more
If you are building a product where AI inference flows directly into your cost of goods sold, you have a pricing risk that most founders are not accounting for correctly. It is not a theoretical risk. It is happening right now, and the signals are loud enough that ignoring them
Something structural happened to software in early 2026. In a span of weeks, markets wiped $285 billion from SaaS company valuations. This was not a sentiment correction or a macro reaction. It was a judgment call: investors concluded that AI agents could replace entire categories of knowledge work that SaaS
I'm going to say something that will irritate a few vendors in my LinkedIn feed: most of what is being sold as 'agentic AI' right now is not agentic AI. It is automation with a new coat of paint, a friendly chat interface, and a press