As economists speculate whether the stock market is in an AI bubble that could soon burst, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has just admitted to believing we’re in one. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?” Altman said during a lengthy interview with The Verge and other reporters last night. “My opinion is yes.” — Read More

#strategy

There’s something happening in our IDEs that nobody’s talking about.

Not the obvious stuff—everyone sees the autocomplete getting smarter, the boilerplate evaporating, the bugs caught before they hatch. I’m talking about something deeper. Something that makes my Moroccan grandmother’s warnings about djinn possession feel less like folklore and more like… documentation.

We’re witnessing the first large-scale cognitive handoff between human and artificial intelligence. And it’s not just changing how we build software—it’s rewiring how our entire civilization processes information. — Read More

…. Current AIs aren’t AGI. But I don’t know why.

I mean, I have thoughts. I talk about missing functions like “memory” and “continuous learning”, and possibly “judgement” and “insight”. But these are all debatable; for instance, ChatGPT has a form of memory. The honest answer is: I dunno what’s missing, but something is, because there are a lot of things AI still can’t do. Even if it’s getting harder and harder to articulate exactly what those things are. — Read More

This essay dissects the widening gap between AI hype and reality, arguing that large language models have hit a plateau – the “S-curve” – despite industry claims of imminent superintelligence. It contrasts bold predictions and massive investments with underwhelming flagship releases, framing today’s AI era as less about building godlike intelligence and more about integrating imperfect tools into real-world products. The piece suggests that the true future of AI lies not in transcendence, but in the messy, necessary work of making these systems actually useful.

GPT-5 has sealed the deal. It is one in a line of underachieving flagship models from major AI labs. …At the same time, we have major manifests of the world entering an age of superintelligence, in which we either all go extinct like ants getting exterminated by superintelligent “pest control” or we ride a benevolent superintelligence that provides us with a post-scarcity paradise.

… We seem to have both bullish and bearish signals. When push comes to shove, I like to rely on the technological signals over the signals from philosophers or Wall Street.

I believe that AGI is not possible with the current regime of LLMs. The GPT-style autoregressive language transformer that was published in 2018 by OpenAI as GPT-1 – this style of AI, we shall call them LLMs from now – lacks the capabilities needed for AGI. — Read More

OpenAI just released GPT-5—to great fanfare and mixed reviews around the internet. According to benchmarks and subjective personal testing, GPT-5 is better than GPT-4 and o3.

It’s certainly a better default than GPT-4o, which is what most people used on ChatGPT’s interface. The model dominates across the board in LMArena.XXXXI don’t feel it as much. But I also used OpenAI’s research previews of o3-mini-high, GPT-4.5, and other models for specific tasks. As such, I don’t really see it as revolutionary. That makes sense though. Today, if you try to select other models in the Plus subscription, all you get is GPT-5 and GPT-5 Thinking (the latter being the “high effort” version of the first).

The function of those research previews all got rolled into the 5-series. — Read More

The complexity and scale of modern infrastructure requires an equally intelligent set of observability tools to effectively monitor it.

Remember when scaling meant ordering new servers and racking them in a data center? Remember when cloud providers first offered access to seemingly infinite virtual machines at the click of a button? Remember when Kubernetes made it trivial for infrastructure to automatically scale itself based on demand? Artificial intelligence (AI) is now fostering faster software development and more intelligent orchestration, once again exponentially increasing the scale of IT infrastructure.

Welcome to the brave new world of modern observability and infrastructure! If you’re feeling like the ground is shifting beneath your feet as an SRE or IT Operations professional, you’re not alone. The way we build and run systems has undergone a dramatic transformation, and the tools we use to observe these systems need modernization to keep up. This isn’t just an evolution; it’s an “everything changed” moment. — Read More

Google’s search results have undergone a seismic shift over the past year as AI fever has continued to escalate among the tech giants. Nowhere is this change more apparent than right at the top of Google’s storied results page, which is now home to AI Overviews. Google contends these Gemini-based answers don’t take traffic away from websites, but a new analysis from the Pew Research Center says otherwise. Its analysis shows that searches with AI summaries reduce clicks, and their prevalence is increasing.

Google began testing AI Overviews as the “search generative experience” in May 2023, and just a year later, they were an official part of the search engine results page (SERP). Many sites (including this one) have noticed changes to their traffic in the wake of this move, but Google has brushed off concerns about how this could affect the sites from which it collects all that data.

SEO experts have disagreed with Google’s stance on how AI affects web traffic, and the newly released Pew study backs them up. — Read More

I left OpenAI three weeks ago. I had joined the company back in May 2024.

I wanted to share my reflections because there’s a lot of smoke and noise around what OpenAI is doing, but not a lot of first-hand accounts of what the culture of working there actually feels like.

Nabeel Quereshi has an amazing post called Reflections on Palantir, where he ruminates on what made Palantir special. I wanted to do the same for OpenAI while it’s fresh in my mind. You won’t find any trade secrets here, more just reflections on this current iteration of one of the most fascinating organizations in history at an extremely interesting time. — Read More

Meta’s multi-hundred million dollar comp offers and Google’s multi-billion dollar Character AI and Windsurf deals signal that we are in a crazy AI talent bubble.

The talent mania could fizzle out as the winners and losers of the AI war emerge, but it represents a new normal for the foreseeable future. If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns, why shouldn’t the same apply to talent? Our natural egalitarian bias makes this unpalatable to accept, but the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough – there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact.

This inequality certainly manifests at the founder level (Founders Fund exists for a reason), but applies to employees too. Key people have driven billions of dollars in value – look at Jony Ive’s contribution to the iPhone, or Jeff Dean’s implementation of distributed systems at Google, or Andy Jassy’s incubation of AWS. — Read More