… I happen to have a bit of time these days, so I decided to write down a question I’ve been repeatedly thinking about lately.
The main reason is that I’ve been seeing one trend with increasing clarity: the primary users of infrastructure software are rapidly shifting from developers (humans) to AI agents.
… Because of this, I’ve started to rethink the problem from a more ontological perspective: when the core users of foundational software are no longer humans but AI, what essential characteristics should such software have? — Read More
Recent Updates
AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos
Kapwing’s new research shows that 21-33% of YouTube’s feed may consist of AI slop or brainrot videos. But which countries and channels are achieving the greatest reach — and how much money might they make? We analyzed social data to find out.
As the debate over the creative and ethical value of using AI to generate video rages on, users are getting interesting results out of the machine, and artist-led AI content is gaining respect in some areas. Top film schools now offer courses on the use and ethics of AI in film production, and the world’s best-known brands are utilizing AI in their creative process — albeit with mixed results.
Sadly, others are gaming the novelty of AI’s prompt-and-go content, using these engines to churn out vast quantities of AI “slop” — the “spam” of the video-first age. — Read More
What changes did AI actually bring to scientists this year?
In this wave of artificial intelligence, it’s easy to be swept up in grand narratives: computing power, models, the scale of parameters, disruption, and replacement. But the changes truly worth documenting often happen out of sight: how AI is used, how it enters daily life, and how it changes the way people work.
Last week, The Intellectual and Doubao jointly launched: “A Story Collection | How Were You ‘Amazed’ by AI This Year?”, not asking “how powerful is AI,” but a more specific question: When AI enters your work and life, what exactly does it change?
…Perhaps what is truly worth documenting is not what AI can do, but how researchers, after its intervention, re-understand their work, judgments, and responsibilities—what tasks can be automated, and what problems must still be decided by humans.
These scattered and specific experiences constitute the first batch of “field notes” of AI entering the scientific field. They may not be complete, but they are sufficiently honest. — Read More
How to Land a $500K AI PM Job at OpenAI (The 2026 Playbook)
… The talent shortage is brutal. Every company needs AI PMs. Few people have the skills.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta all have open AI PM roles. They can’t fill them fast enough.
The hiring bar is high. You need product sense, technical depth, and hands-on AI experience. Most PMs have one or two. You need all three.
… The gap between supply and demand means comp packages keep climbing. Base salary plus equity plus signing bonuses. $500K is common. $700K+ for senior roles.
The AI PM job market dynamics show why this won’t change soon. — Read More
When AI Loses the Plot: How to Reset and Refocus Your Conversations
We’ve all been there. You’re deep in a conversation with your AI assistant, working through a complex problem, when suddenly it starts giving you responses that make no sense. The more you try to correct it, the worse it gets. Each new prompt seems to push the AI further from understanding what you actually need.
This frustrating phenomenon happens because AI models can lose track of context in lengthy conversations, especially when there have been multiple corrections or clarifications. The good news? There’s a simple yet powerful technique to get things back on track.
Full disclosure: I’ve been using a form of this forever, but I didn’t see it so succinctly explained and put together until I visited this Reddit thread from another user having the same problem. The idea and ensuing discussion are the basis for this post. Check out the full thread here. — Read More
AI Took My Friend’s Job — But Tripled His Salary 6 Months Later (Here’s What Nobody’s Telling You)
Last month, my college roommate Jake sent me a panicked text at 2 AM.
“Dude. ChatGPT just wrote better code than me in 30 seconds. Am I screwed?”
Jake’s a software engineer at a mid-sized tech company. Makes $140K. Has a mortgage. Two kids. He’d just spent three weeks on a feature that Claude finished in minutes.
I get it. The headlines are terrifying. Every week there’s a new story about AI “coming for your job.” Anthropic’s CEO warned that AI could replace half of all entry-level office jobs within five years. Goldman Sachs economists predict 6–7% of the US workforce could be displaced.
But here’s what nobody’s talking about: I just spent 40 hours analyzing over 2 billion job postings, academic studies, and labor market data from 2022–2025.
The truth? It’s the exact opposite of what you think. — Read More
The Shape of Artificial Intelligence
The shape of things only becomes legible at a distance. For instance, history demands temporal distance.
… Although AI is nearing its 70th birthday, it’s been only five years since ChatGPT was launched, eight since the transformer paper was published, and thirteen since AlexNet’s victory on the ImageNet challenge, which implies the deep learning revolution is barely a wayward teenager. I think, however, that we must try to give a clearer shape to the current manifestation of AI (chatbots, large language models, etc.). We are the earliest historians of this weird, elusive technology, and as such, it’s our duty to begin a conversation that’s likely to take decades (or centuries, if we remain alive by then) to be fully fleshed out, once spatial and temporal distance reveal what we’re looking at. — Read More
Evaluating Context Compression for AI Agents
We built an evaluation framework to measure how much context different compression strategies preserve. After testing three approaches on real-world, long-running agent sessions spanning debugging, code review, and feature implementation, we found that structured summarization retains more useful information than alternatives from OpenAI and Anthropic. — Read More
The changing drivers of LLM adoption
In the world of AI, half a year is a very long time. Back in July, we saw LLMs being adopted faster than almost any other technology in history. Five months later we’re still seeing rapid growth, but we’re also seeing early winds of change — both in who uses AI and how they do so.
Using the latest public data,1 and a poll of US adults we conducted with Blue Rose Research, this post shares an updated picture of the state of LLM adoption. — Read More
Exclusive: Connectome Pioneer Sebastian Seung Is Building A Digital Brain
On a Sunday evening earlier this month, a Stanford professor held a salon at her home near the university’s campus. The main topic for the event was “synthesizing consciousness through neuroscience,” and the home filled with dozens of people, including artificial intelligence researchers, doctors, neuroscientists, philosophers and a former monk, eager to discuss the current collision between new AI and biological tools and how we might identify the arrival of a digital consciousness.
The opening speaker for the salon was Sebastian Seung, and this made a lot of sense. Seung, a neuroscience and computer science professor at Princeton University, has spent much of the last year enjoying the afterglow of his (and others’) breakthrough research describing the inner workings of the fly brain. Seung, you see, helped create the first complete wiring diagram of a fly brain and its 140,000 neurons and 55 million synapses. (Nature put out a special issue last October to document the achievement and its implications.) This diagram, known as a connectome, took more than a decade to finish and stands as the most detailed look at the most complex whole brain ever produced.
… What Seung did not reveal to the audience is that the fly connectome has given rise to his own new neuroscience journey. This week, he’s unveiling a start-up called Memazing, as we can exclusively report. The new company seeks to create the technology needed to reverse engineer the fly brain (and eventually even more complex brains) and create full recreations – or emulations, as Seung calls them – of the brain in software. — Read More
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