When a company delays its IPO to show investors better numbers, that’s a strategy. When the NYC pension fund publicly asks you to delay it over AI safety concerns, your chief rival’s CEO calls his own IPO “ill-advised” and postpones it until at least next year, tech stocks are sliding on open-weight model fears, and your own prospectus warns of “existential risks to humanity” from the product you’re selling, that’s not a strategy.

That’s a market sending you a message. — Read More

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis now expects artificial general intelligence within two to three years, down from the three-to-five-year window he gave earlier in 2026, according to a profile by Ben Cohen in the Wall Street Journal published October 21. — Read More

#strategy

AI spending has greatly increased at most companies this year, but has it actually changed shipping velocity and PR output? We analyse data from 27 companies – with some interesting findings.

A software engineer whose company is looking into its own spending on AI tools pinged me with a very timely question recently, asking what other companies spend on AI, per engineer. They were also keen to find out what the PR throughput was before and after the spending on AI at other places.

Spending on AI agents is ballooning at all the tech companies I talk with this year. With 2027 coming around fast, many companies are seeking to put a realistic number on how much they really spend on AI. — Read More

One fascinating thing about AI is that things seem not to change much until they do. Suddenly, AI can do something extremely effectively which it could not do at all just the day before.

And these past weeks are one of those times, and the “emergent capability” this time around is called “reverse engineering.” At least when it comes to software, “everything” is replicable now. — Read More

9th annual State of AI Report

For nearly a decade, this report has been a labor of love. My interest in AI began with my PhD in cancer research and computational biology in the early 2010s. Since 2013, I’ve invested in companies building and applying AI to accelerate technological progress. The report is my way of sharing what I’m learning and helping more people understand the research shaping our world.

Every day brings new papers, model releases, and developments in industry and politics. Much of the work goes into deciding what deserves your attention, checking what the evidence supports, debating it with researchers and builders, and explaining why it matters. — Read More

We’re not dumbing down. We’re dumbing from the middle out. Let’s talk about “doomcoding.”

I am going to uncover what I think the biggest problem is right now with “vibe coding” … or AI-assisted coding or agentic coding, basically any flavor or skill level of creating something with these fun new tools that’s going to get you ahead and make you a billionaire. 

Because the big new problem with vibe coding is big. And new. And I don’t think anyone is addressing it yet.

It’s … doomcoding. I’ll explain. — Read More

Three revolutionary products — you know the line. A wide-screen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device. That was how Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.

I’ve linked to this snippet before, usually to note how the audience didn’t really understand what an “Internet communications device” was, even though that was the iPhone’s most revolutionary capability.

The phrase I’m thinking of right now, however, is “Are you getting it?” Are you getting that messaging — chatbots now, natural interfaces later — is how we will communicate with AI? Are you getting that not only will we not program computers, we won’t use them — AI will? Are you getting that pre-built UI — write once, run everywhere, for everyone — is dead? These are not three separate predictions: this is reality, right now, in 2026. The future is here, even if it’s not widely distributed. Or is it? — Read More

AI has gotten cheaper more quickly than any other transformative technology in history. The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023, or 13× per year. That price drop is four times faster than DNA sequencing, six times faster than compute, 18 times faster than lithium batteries, and (in the century up to 1973) 54 times faster than electricity.

… It is now widely understood that the AI boom is a macroeconomic force powerful enough to raise prices for the inputs it demands: chips, power, even the labor of electricians. Less well recognized is a paradoxical flip side: the price of the output from all those data centers is falling extraordinarily rapidly. — Read More

In one of my classes I asked the question I was afraid to ask but I just needed the answer to: “Who is afraid of not getting a job after graduating?” About eighty percent of the 150 people in the room raised their hands. … The other story arrives by email. PhD students who cannot wait to graduate, because they want to join a frontier lab and they have concluded that research in academia is meaningless. They are counting the years until they can leave.

I believe both stories are wrong, and wrong for the same reason. They assume the future of research belongs to whoever has the most GPUs. I think the opposite is true. Academia is probably about to have a renaissance, and the most exciting work of the next decade will happen in university labs — not in spite of their limited resources, but because of them. — Read More

All of Silicon Valley seems to be coming together to launch a new alternative to college for teens dreaming of becoming the next big tech founder.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, announced Tuesday that applications are now open for the first class of the creatively named The Horowitz Andreessen Academy. — Read More