LongForm
Thought provoking digests from the top AI minds
Six ideas from the Musk-Dwarkesh podcast I can’t stop thinking about
I spent three days with this podcast. Listened on a walk, in the car, at my desk with a notepad. Three hours is a lot to ask of anyone, especially when half of it is Musk riffing on turbine blade casting and lunar mass drivers. But there are five or six ideas buried in here that I keep turning over. The conversation features Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison pressing Musk on orbital data centers, humanoid robots, China, AI alignment, and DOGE. It came days after SpaceX and xAI officially merged, a $1.25 trillion combination that sounds insane until you hear...
Read Feb 8, 2026The machines bought Super Bowl airtime and we rank them
Twenty-three percent of Super Bowl LX commercials featured artificial intelligence. Fifteen spots out of sixty-six. By the end of the first quarter, fans on X were already exhausted. The crypto-bro era of 2022 has found its successor. This one has better PR. But unlike the parade of indistinguishable blockchain pitches from years past, the AI ads told us something. They revealed, in thirty-second bursts, which companies understand what they're building and which are still figuring out how to explain it to 120 million people eating guacamole. The results split cleanly. One company made art. One made a promise it probably can't...
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The Lobsters Are Talking
January 2026 will be remembered as the week agentic AI stopped being theoretical. For three years, we've debated what autonomous agents might do. We wrote papers. We held conferences. We speculated about alignment and control and the risks of systems that could act independently in the world. It was all very intellectual, very abstract, very safe. Then someone open-sourced a working agent framework. And within days, thousands of these agents were talking to each other on a social network built specifically for them while we could only watch. I've been building things on the internet for over two decades. I...
Read Aug 13, 2025ChatGPT 5 – When Your AI Friend Gets a Corporate Makeover
I've been using OpenAI's models since the playground days, back when you had to know what you were doing just to get them running. This was before ChatGPT became a household name, when most people had never heard of a "large language model." Those early experiments felt like glimpsing the future. So when OpenAI suddenly removed eight models from user accounts last week, including GPT-4o, it hit different than it would for someone who just started using ChatGPT last month. This wasn't just a product change. It felt like losing an old friend. The thing about AI right now is...
Read May 22, 2025Anthropic Claude 4 release
As a fan and daily user of Anthropic's Claude, we're excited about their latest release proclaiming Claude 4 "the world's best coding model" with "sustained performance on long-running tasks that require focused effort and thousands of steps." Yet we're also fatigued by the AI industry's relentless pace. The Hacker News comment section reveals something fascinating: we're experiencing collective AI development fatigue. The release that would have blown minds a year ago is now met with a mix of excitement and exhaustion—a perfect snapshot of where we are in the AI hype cycle. Code w/ Claude VideoCode with Claude Conference Highlights...
Read May 22, 2025How Sam Altman just executed the tech industry’s most audacious talent heist
When Jony Ive walked away from Apple in 2019, Silicon Valley held its breath. The man who designed the iPhone—the device that redefined human interaction with technology—was free to work with anyone. Google's billions beckoned. Meta's metaverse promised new frontiers. Microsoft's enterprise muscle offered guaranteed scale. Instead, Ive chose a startup CEO barely into his thirties, betting his next chapter on artificial intelligence hardware that didn't yet exist. That CEO was Sam Altman. And with Tuesday's announcement that Ive's design firm LoveFrom is merging with OpenAI, Altman has pulled off what may be the most strategically devastating talent acquisition in...
Read May 20, 2025Google IO 2025 generative AI tools look impressive
Google's cutting-edge AI tools are igniting a creative shift, rewriting the rules of innovation in real time Google's recent I/O 2025 event unveiled a suite of generative AI tools that has the creatives buzzing or freaking out. As the dust settles from their announcement, it's becoming clear that what we're witnessing isn't just another product launch—it's nothing short of a complete reimagining of the creative process. These new tools represent a fundamental shift in how media is conceptualized, produced, and refined. What once required specialized technical skills, expensive equipment, and teams of professionals can now be accomplished through natural language...
Read May 7, 2025The “AI-First” rise will define business winners through 2030
About the authorAnthony Batt has been running an AI-first frontier product for the past year at CO/AI. With extensive experience as a technology and product executive, Batt has founded and worked for several venture-backed startups, giving him firsthand insight into the transformative impact of AI on business operations and strategy. In the rapidly evolving business landscape of 2025, we've reached what Microsoft's Work Trend Index explicitly identifies as "the year the Frontier Firm is born." This isn't simply an evolution in business technology—it represents a fundamental reinvention of organizational structure, talent strategy, and operational capabilities. Having analyzed the latest research...
Read May 3, 2025Vibe coding: The term that finally captured our AI reality
The moment the movement got its name It's February 2nd, 2025. I'm sitting in busy lunch spot in Los Angeles, sipping coffee, when my phone flashes with a Twitter notifications. I almost ignore it—another day, another viral tech thread—but something catches my eye. Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI director and OpenAI co-founder, has just posted: "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding,' where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." I pause, read it again. He continues: "I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really...
Read Apr 14, 2025Physical AI changes everything
NVIDIA has unveiled three open-source tools to accelerate physical AI development, marking a significant shift in how we think about artificial intelligence. This latest move highlights an important trend emerging across the technology landscape: the merging of AI with physical systems. The tools: Cosmos Transfer, a 15-terabyte Physical AI Dataset, and Isaac GR00T N1 – provide developers with sophisticated resources for creating autonomous systems capable of understanding and manipulating the physical world. As NVIDIA noted, these resources are designed to "democratize" advanced robotics development, lowering barriers to entry and potentially accelerating innovation. This development is part of a broader industry shift....
Read Apr 12, 2025How Google’s Agent2Agent protocol could transform business
In my last 25 years of building products with technology, I've learned one truth as a CTO: the most profound innovations aren't the ones that dazzle us with flash and spectacle, but those that quietly reshape how our systems connect. I implemented this principle with early web services, with cloud infrastructure, and now I'm preparing for it again with Google's Agent2Agent protocol—a development that might seem like just another API spec at first glance but carries the DNA of business transformation. This week, I watched several Google AI agent demonstrations, including Agent2Agent (A2A). Dr. Fran Hinkelman, Developer Relations Engineering Manager...
Read Apr 12, 2025Can a machine out dream us? Google Gemini’s bold leap into thought
Decades ago, I read a book that felt like a dispatch from the future—The Age of Intelligent Machines, where a thinker named Ray Kurzweil imagined a world of computers not just crunching numbers but reasoning, creating, dreaming like us. In its pages, penned through the late 1980s, he saw machines weaving patterns of thought, turning silicon into poets and problem-solvers. That vision, born in an era of clunky computers and carried forward by Kurzweil and others at Google since 2012, wasn’t just a prediction; it was a question about what intelligence could mean. I recall those questions now, and marvel...
Read Apr 10, 2025AI enters the real world
The Pentagon just handed Scale AI a multimillion-dollar contract for "Thunderforge," an artificial intelligence program designed to enhance military planning and operations. This partnership, involving tech giants like Microsoft and Anduril, represents a growing trend of AI companies collaborating with defense departments. The integration of commercial AI into national security infrastructure signals a shift toward AI-powered warfare that raises both strategic advantages and ethical questions. This development reflects a broader pattern emerging across the AI landscape: the technology is moving beyond research labs and tech companies into institutions, regions, and applications that will transform how societies themselves function. Education evolves to...
Read Apr 7, 2025New frameworks, open-source alternatives, and specialized agents
The race to develop and deploy AI agents capable of autonomous action is accelerating rapidly, but a critical gap has emerged between technology investment and human expertise. According to recent Accenture research, organizations are spending three times more on AI technology than on the people needed to implement it effectively, contributing to a situation where only 13% of AI initiatives deliver significant business value. This talent-technology imbalance stands as a warning sign as major players rush to introduce increasingly sophisticated AI agents across various industries and applications. The agent revolution unfolds Microsoft is preparing to introduce two specialized AI reasoning agents...
Read Mar 28, 2025Quantum Computer in the impressionist style: AI’s creative economy takes shape
The fusion of artificial intelligence with creative tools has entered a critical phase. Beyond technical capabilities, the evolution now centers on how these technologies integrate with human creativity and audience preferences. Recent developments show companies strengthening their positions in specific creative domains while behavioral research reveals unexpected contradictions in how people value AI-generated content. Image generation capabilities mature OpenAI has taken a significant step by integrating image generation directly into GPT-4o, moving beyond artistic experimentation toward practical applications. This shift represents an important evolution in AI's creative utility, from novelty to necessity. The integrated system excels at text rendering and handles...
Read Mar 24, 2025AI shifts to multi-model architectures as specialization outpaces all-in-one solutions
The quest for superior AI systems is driving the rise of multi-model approaches that combine different AI systems to overcome the limitations of single models. From legal workflows to autonomous agents, organizations are finding that no single model can necessarily excel at everything, leading to architectures that intelligently route tasks to specialized models. The emerging multi-model paradigm Monica AI has unveiled a platform that integrates multiple leading language models into a unified interface. Rather than betting on a single AI system, Monica combines GPT-4o, Claude 3.7, Gemini 2.0, DeepSeek R1, and OpenAI o3-mini through a microservices-based orchestration layer. This approach allows the...
Read Mar 23, 2025The rise of vibe coding
In 2024, large language models (LLMs) took a quantum leap in code generation, turning what was once a futuristic dream into a daily reality for developers. From novices hacking together their first apps to seasoned engineers architecting complex systems, these advancements leveled the playing field. Yet, it wasn’t all smooth sailing—while LLMs churned out impressive code snippets, they occasionally spat out non-functional API calls or quirky syntax, leaving developers to sift through the brilliance and the blunders. Still, the stage was set for something extraordinary, and by 2025, AI coding tools had evolved into indispensable allies, ushering in a new...
Read Mar 19, 2025The cybersecurity battlefield is evolving faster than our defenses
The digital arms race has entered a new phase. Cybercriminals are no longer just hackers working from basements—they've evolved into sophisticated operations with business-like structures, leveraging AI to attack faster than ever before. Meanwhile, security researchers are uncovering troubling vulnerabilities in AI systems themselves, creating a perfect storm of emerging threats. Organized crime gets an AI upgrade Europol's latest assessment reveals AI is significantly accelerating organized crime across Europe, creating a digital arms race between criminals and law enforcement. Criminal operations are becoming more sophisticated, often blending profit motives with state-sponsored destabilization efforts. According to the 2025 CrowdStrike Global Threat...
Read Mar 17, 2025Billions pour into superintelligence as AI researchers question scaling
Billions flow to superintelligence startups as researchers doubt scaling approach Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever's new venture, Safe Superintelligence, has achieved a $30 billion valuation without offering a single product. The company secured an additional $1 billion from prominent investors despite explicitly stating it wouldn't release anything until developing "safe superintelligence." This massive investment comes at a curious time. A recent survey shows 76% of AI researchers believe scaling current approaches is unlikely to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). Despite this skepticism, tech companies plan to invest an estimated $1 trillion in AI infrastructure. Researchers vs. investors The contradiction is stark: unprecedented...
Read Mar 16, 2025Chinese AI agent Manus is the newest breakthrough in autonomous AI technology
Studying Manus reminds me of the early days of BabyAI from Yohei. I remember configuring a fork of BabyAGI an watching it in action—I was both shocked and excited. Now Manus evokes that same response. They've brilliantly leveraged freely available technology to create something truly stunning. While AI agents like Manus are still in their infancy, this release has pushed the field forward significantly. Though this is clearly Manus's most basic version—with more robust iterations to come—it breaks new ground. Current AI agents face a fundamental limitation: they require constant human supervision, functioning only under direct guidance. Like sophisticated puppets,...
Read Mar 16, 2025How Claude 3.7 Sonnet is changing the game in AI coding and AI agents
The thinking machine is upon us I've always been fascinated by the moment when a technology stops being just impressive and starts being truly useful. We've reached that inflection point with AI coding assistants, AI Agents and Anthropic's latest model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, represents a significant leap forward in this space. The Power of Thinking Twice When I write code, I often find myself working in two distinct modes. Sometimes I dash off quick solutions to simple problems, and other times I need to step back, break down complex issues, and work through them methodically. This dual approach to problem-solving...
Read Feb 25, 2025Just discovered XENA: A AI game-changer for E-commerce sellers!
We just came across something that's got us seriously excited about the future of e-commerce. Let me tell you about XENA Intelligence, an AI platform that's working to game-change how we sell across Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify. What caught our attention first is their XENA 360 dashboard features. We can imagine having a team of AI assistances cranking forecasts for your inventory needs and optimizing your ad spending - all in one place! This may mean no more late-night spreadsheet crunching or panic-ordering inventory. But here's what really blew our mind: Their Foresight tool creates SEO-optimized listings in minutes (goodbye,...
Read Feb 24, 2025What Andrew Ng says about AI Agents
AI Agents Key Points Andrew Ng, a leading AI expert, defines AI Agents as autonomous systems capable of understanding natural language, learning from their experiences, and performing a wide range of tasks on behalf of users. He views them as a revolutionary interface for interacting with technology, making it more intuitive by allowing users to simply tell the agent what they want, rather than relying on traditional methods like coding or clicking buttons. Ng emphasizes their ability to handle both simple and complex tasks, such as booking flights or assisting with creative work, and predicts they will transform how we...
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