The following article originally appeared on Robert Englander’s blog site and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. The software industry has become deeply focused on autonomous AI systems. Agents that can replace workers. Agents that can write software. Agents that can operate applications on our behalf. Entire startups are now built around the […]
The following article originally appeared on Vanishing Gradients and is being republished here with the authors’ permission When an AI agent can explore a dataset, choose a modeling approach, run the analysis, and explain its findings, what should the data scientist do? Traditionally, data scientists chose each step and implemented much of the analysis themselves. […]
AI can now generate a surprising amount of frontend code from a short description. A developer can ask for a form, a table, a modal, a settings page, or a dashboard view and get something that looks usable almost immediately. It may compile, render, and even arrive with a few tests. That is useful, but […]
I’ve known Jesse Vincent for more than 20 years, since the days when I was still editing and publishing Perl books and organizing the Perl Conference and he was the chief maintainer of Perl 5 and the project manager for Perl 6. We’d lost touch, but he rocketed back into my consciousness last October when […]
This post isn’t about OpenAI’s use of AI to solve the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the Millennium Prize problems, at least not directly. I’m not a mathematician; I have a vague understanding of the problem and certainly no understanding of the proof. But the discussion surrounding the solution crystallized some of my own thoughts about […]
The buildings and physical infrastructure for a new hyperscale data-center region are complete. Power is live and redundant, the cooling loops are balanced, the network fabric is up, and tens of thousands of machines are racked, cabled, and reporting healthy. Every milestone on the construction schedule is closed. The region will not carry production traffic […]
I’ve been thinking about a gap in the way we discuss graphs in AI. Most of the conversation starts after the graph already exists. We talk about graph neural networks, GraphRAG, graph agents, and graph foundation models. We spend much less time on the step that determines what all of them can do: turning raw […]
The following article originally appeared on Elevate and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. A software factory is a repeatable loop around software work. If you’re building a software factory, code good enough to ship still needs human taste and ownership. We’ll discuss this including whether you need a factory just yet. If […]
The following article originally appeared on Arize’s blog and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. This week the AI community was in uproar about Jev from TypeSafe, not just a new model but a new kind of model: one that classifies, scores, and routes but can’t write a sentence. The reason for the […]
Ask most engineers what MCP is and you’ll get the same answer: a way to plug tools into an LLM. Fair enough, as far as it goes. But that description treats MCP like plumbing, and after months building MCP-based integrations for large enterprise platforms, I don’t think plumbing is the right metaphor. Plumbing moves water […]
The following article originally appeared on Venkatesh Rao’s Substack, Contraptions, and is being republished here with the author’s permission. The sole athletic achievement of my life came in 1993: winning the IIT Bombay freshman 50m freestyle race with a time of 41s. That got me into the college swim team (it was a bad recruitment […]
The early rapid expansion of AI capabilities that focused on frontier models was largely ushered into the world by a few powerful, US-based AI labs. Open-weight models released from labs in China, early on from DeepSeek, and later from Moonshot, Z.ai, and others, have in part disrupted that dominance. But growing concerns about the concentration […]
This is the third post in a four-part series about post-training. If you missed them, read part 1 and part 2. The final post, on implementing your own pipeline, will be coming October 7. Now that you understand the gist of reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning, it’s time to explore what post-training has actually accomplished […]
This is the third post in a four-part series about post-training. If you missed them, read part 1 and part 2. The final post, on implementing your own pipeline, will be coming October 7. Now that you understand the gist of reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning, it’s time to explore what post-training has actually accomplished […]
When considering the history of AI, Richard Sutton observed that brute force and compute scale has always trumped human expertise, and when you look for it, you can see this “bitter lesson” play out throughout tech history. In his keynote at Ai4 2026, Tim O’Reilly explains why grappling with the bitter lesson is the forge […]