The brain-computer interface lets those with cervical spinal cord injuries or ALS control a computer with their thoughts. This year, Neuralink has more than doubled the number of patients.
Neuralink has been quietly increasing the number of patients with its N1 brain implant. According to the Barrow Neurological Institute, seven people have now received one. — Read More
Monthly Archives: June 2025
It’s Known as ‘The List’—and It’s a Secret File of AI Geniuses
The leader of Meta’s Superintelligence lab, Alexandr Wang, 28, is one of the priciest hires anywhere.
Meta has made offers to dozens of researchers at OpenAI. The startup has responded to Zuckerberg’s blitz with impressive packages of its own.
Not everyone on Meta’s list gets $100 million, though they’re still fetching astronomical sums. — Read More
AI’s Trillion-Dollar Opportunity: Sequoia AI Ascent 2025 Keynote
Checking In on AI and the Big Five
This is how I opened January 2023’s AI and the Big Five:
The story of 2022 was the emergence of AI, first with image generation models, including DALL-E, MidJourney, and the open source Stable Diffusion, and then ChatGPT, the first text-generation model to break through in a major way. It seems clear to me that this is a new epoch in technology.
Sometimes the accuracy of a statement is measured by its banality, and that certainly seems to be the case here: AI is the new epoch, consuming the mindshare of not just Stratechery but also the companies I cover. To that end, two-and-a-half years on, I thought it would be useful to revisit that 2023 analysis and re-evaluate the state of AI’s biggest players, primarily through the lens of the Big Five: Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.
The proximate cause for this reevaluation is the apparent five alarm fire that is happening at Meta: the company’s latest Llama 4 release was disappointing — and in at least one case, deceptive — pushing founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to go on a major spending spree for talent. — Read More
Microsoft and OpenAI at Odds Over Future of AGI: A Tech Titans’ Tug-of-War
Microsoft and OpenAI are embroiled in a heated debate over the future of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, is optimistic about nearing AGI, while Microsoft’s Satya Nadella remains doubtful, suspecting potential manipulation. This disagreement could disrupt their exclusive partnership and reshape the AI landscape. With big stakes in AGI’s advent, the two companies are grappling over contracts, ownership, and tech access, while OpenAI eyes new alliances with rivals like Oracle and Google. — Read More
2025 State of Foundation Models
How far can reasoning models scale?
Reasoning models like OpenAI’s o3 are less than a year old, but they’ve already seen rapid improvements on capabilities, and OpenAI researchers are very optimistic that this progress will continue. But it’s not clear how much further the techniques used to train reasoning models can scale.
After looking into the question, I think there is room to scale reasoning training further, but it’s unlikely that OpenAI or other frontier AI developers can scale by many orders of magnitude.
If reasoning training continues to scale at 10× every few months, in line with the jump from o1 to o3, it will reach the frontier of total training compute before long, perhaps within a year. At that point, the scaling rate will slow and converge with the overall growth rate in training compute of ~4× per year. Progress in reasoning models may slow down after this point as well. — Read More
Leaking Secrets in the Age of AI
In a rush to adopt and experiment with AI, developers and other technology practitioners are willing to cut corners. This is evident from multiple recent security incidents, such as:
- Platform resource abuses (attackers hijack cloud infrastructure to power their own LLM applications)
- Vendors offering unsafe 3rd-party model execution (Probllama)
- Model escape vulnerabilities in hosting services (Replicate, HuggingFace and SAP-AI vulnerabilities)
Yet another side-effect of these hasty practices is the leakage of AI-related secrets in public code repositories. Secrets in public code repositories are nothing new. What’s surprising is the fact that after years of research, numerous security incidents, millions of dollars in bug bounty hunters’ pockets, and general awareness of the risk, it is still painfully easy to find valid secrets in public repositories. — Read More
Langfuse and ClickHouse: A new data stack for modern LLM applications
Building an AI demo application is easy, but making it work reliably is hard. Open-ended user inputs, model reasoning, and agentic tool use require a new workflow to iteratively measure, evaluate, and improve these systems as a team.
Langfuse helps developers solve that problem. Its open-source LLM engineering platform gives teams the tools to trace, evaluate, and improve performance, whether they’re debugging prompts, testing model responses, or analyzing billions of interactions.
For companies working with sensitive or large-scale data, part of Langfuse’s appeal lies in its flexibility: it can be self-hosted or used as a managed cloud service. his flexibility helped Langfuse gain early traction with large enterprises—but it also created a scaling challenge. By mid-2024, the simple Postgres-based architecture that powered both their cloud and self-hosted offerings was under pressure. The platform was handling billions of rows, fielding complex queries across multiple UIs, and struggling to keep up with rapidly scaling customers generating massive amounts of data. Something had to change.
At a March 2025 ClickHouse meetup in San Francisco, Langfuse co-founder Clemens Rawert shared how the team re-architected their platform with ClickHouse as the “centerpiece” of their data operations. He also explained how they rolled out that change to thousands of self-hosted users, turning a major infrastructure change into a win for the entire community. — Read More
Begun, the AI Browser Wars Have
About a week ago, I bit the bullet. Reading the writing very clearly on the wall, I abandoned the Arc browser and jumped ship over to Dia, the new AI-first web browser built by The Browser Company. It took a while, but now I think I’m sold. I’m not sure that Dia itself will be the browser of the future, but I’m more certain than ever that an AI-centric browser will be.
At first, I found Dia to be a bit too simple for my taste. Because Arc had such a plethora of power-user features, many of which took a lot of training to get used to, it was hard to “downgrade”. Of course, that’s also the exact reason why The Browser Company shifted the focus to Dia. While Arc had a dedicated fan base, it was also clearly never going to go fully mainstream. They had made a better browser for web power users, but most people were not web power users – at least not in the sense that they would take the time to learn new tricks when Chrome was likely good enough for them. It was a tricky spot for the company to be in, they had sort of painted themselves into a dreaded middle ground.
So they sort of went down a third path, letting Arc live on, but really just with underlying engine (Chromium) updates. — Read More
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