Bet on the kids
AI may eliminate some entry-level tasks, but it could give the next generation an extraordinary advantage.
Intel raises capital. Stroustrup to SIG. Meta pushes AI to the edge.
Intel raises $20bn as investors back its foundry ambitions, Bjarne Stroustrup joins Susquehanna as a Technical Fellow, and Meta releases a smaller open-weight model designed to run locally.
Machine learning inside the network
ML inference running directly inside a programmable network switch, bringing market prediction closer to the data.
The (career) loop tour: What array programming can teach us about harness engineering
An array programmer’s journey from avoiding loops to designing them.
How hedge funds compete for AI talent. Inference architecture disaggregates. Agent evals focus on reliability.
Hedge funds compete for AI talent as inference architecture becomes increasingly disaggregated and agentic AI evaluation shifts from capability to reliability.
CapEx Boom. Agentic Checkouts. Quantum Optimization in Portfolio Allocation
Big Tech’s $725B infrastructure bet is crushing free cash flow as "Agentic Commerce" protocols move from pilot to production.
Hyperscalers bet $600B on AI. MCP becomes infrastructure. Context engineering replaces prompt engineering.
Trillion-dollar infrastructure bets are under pressure as firms learn that scaling spend doesn’t scale performance without better ways to manage what models actually see.
Labour market jitters. Altman on spending commits. AI benchmarks under scrutiny.
A volatile week across markets and AI. Tech valuations wobble, central banks stay cautious, Big Tech defends trillion-dollar AI bets, and new research questions how we measure progress. Signals are getting noisier — not clearer.
The economics of intelligence: AI and the efficient frontier
The contemporary narrative around AI is dominated by exponential capabilities: the emergence of reasoning, the human-level performance on standardized tests, the spectacular hallucinations. This focus on performance has obscured a far more fundamental and immediate constraint: the economics of production. We have industrialized a new class of cognitive labor,
Global stocks surge. AI spending gets practical. Teens lean on chatbots.
Markets rally on US–China trade optimism as stocks hit new highs, but risks linger beneath the surface. AI spending shifts from hype to ROI, while new research flags both accelerating scientific automation and growing concerns over concentration, stability, and control.
ASICS on the track and ASICs in the data center: Specialization and the pursuit of record performance
I was in Tokyo this week for the STAC Summit. By coincidence, the World Athletics Championships were happening at the same time. One evening I was at the Japan National Stadium watching sprinters and distance runners push human limits. The next morning I was at our Summit, where firms shared
Fast and curious: Tsinghua researchers beat Dijkstra’s legendary shortest path algorithm, opening the door to faster routing everywhere
This week, a team led by Dan Qiao from Tsinghua University achieved something that seemed impossible: they broke through a computational barrier that had stood for four decades. Their breakthrough was a new shortest path algorithm that runs faster than the legendary Dijkstra's algorithm—the gold standard that&