A day after we argued that the AI stack is bending around continuity, Astra showed up with a benchmark result that makes the whole idea considerably harder to ignore. There is a very specific kind of comedy that happens when you put an idea into public view and reality immediately decides to make it look less speculative. Not prove it. Not validate some grand theory. Just walk into the room, drop a giant data point on the table, and leave. That's basically what happened here.

Scott Bessent says the AI industry has done a horrendous job explaining data centers to the American people. He's right. But the failure is bigger than bad PR. There is something inherently funny about organizing a protest against data centers from an iPhone. You pull out the phone, connect to the internet, start the WhatsApp group, build the Facebook page, design the signs in Canva, ask ChatGPT to make the slogans better, schedule the meeting in Google Calendar, start a GoFu

I have recently uncovered evidence suggesting that Eric Clapton may have played a previously unrecognized role in the development of modern artificial intelligence. There are problems with this theory. Many of them, actually. But we'll get to that. The whole thing started with It's in the Way That You Use It, which Clapton wrote with Robbie Robertson for The Color of Money in 1986. And once you hear that title through the lens of modern AI, you can't really unhear it. Because

From the way we use AI to the silicon underneath it, every layer of the stack seems to be wrestling with the same problem: continuity. There are moments in technology where a bunch of things you've been watching separately suddenly line up. Not perfectly. Not enough to declare some grand unified theory of artificial intelligence and start selling tickets to the TED Talk. Just enough that you look across the pieces and go: Oh...Okay. I seent it. And yes, I know that's probably

Yesterday, John Ternus became CEO of Apple. That is one hell of a first day to inherit the future. Over the first two parts of this story, we've been looking at Apple less as a sequence of CEOs and more as a sequence of terrains. Steve Jobs got the ridge. He arrived at moments when the map was unreliable, climbed high enough to see where several different technological trajectories were converging, and somehow collapsed the mess into objects the rest of us immediately underst

In the first part of this story, Steve Jobs was standing on the ridge. The mobile-phone world was fragmented almost beyond parody. Flip phones, sliders, BlackBerrys, Sidekicks, tiny keyboards, styluses, hinges going in every conceivable direction. Everybody was experimenting because nobody had really settled the underlying question of what a phone was supposed to become. Then Jobs walked onto a stage and collapsed the whole argument into a slab of glass. That was the gift we

The iPhone didn't merely change phones. I think that's actually too small a way to remember what happened. It changed photography. Navigation. Dating. Music. Banking. Transportation. Media. Retail. Advertising. Work. Politics. Childhood. Attention. Porn. Restaurants. Travel. How we argue. How we get lost. How we avoid getting lost. How we summon a stranger's Toyota at 2:00 in the morning and somehow consider this completely normal. Entire pieces of civilization rearranged the

There are some technologies so fundamentally important that the first reaction should be wonder. Meta's new brain-to-text system is one of them. It's called Brain2Qwerty, and its long-term purpose is genuinely extraordinary: restore communication to people who can no longer speak or move, without requiring electrodes to be surgically implanted in their brains. That's magnificent. Unfortunately, the company standing next to this particular miracle is Meta. And before we hand M

Apparently we're getting AGI for Christmas. Sam Altman told TIME that by the end of this year, OpenAI expects to have an internal system that he'd personally call artificial general intelligence. OpenAI's chief research officer says they're roughly 80% of the way there. Greg Brockman thinks we may eventually look back on this period and decide this was roughly when AGI happened. So, naturally, everyone lost their minds. I get it. I did too, a little. But the more I sit with i

I've been screwing around lately with a Mudra Link, some browser code, a local WebSocket, and a little project I called the "Neuro/Bio Interface Lab". That description probably makes this sound much more sophisticated than it is. It isn't. This is a hobby experiment. I'm basically poking at a weird wrist computer, looking at signals, drawing graphs, making noises, and asking increasingly unreasonable questions about what else it might be able to do. Which is pretty much how I

This Saturday, at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, we commemorate one of the most consequential fictional moments in computing history. Skynet became self-aware. Happy Miles Dyson Day. For anyone whose Terminator 2 lore has gone soft, Miles Bennett Dyson was Director of Special Projects at Cyberdyne Systems. He creates a revolutionary new microprocessor. Cyberdyne becomes the largest supplier of military computer systems. Aircraft become increasingly autonomous. Skynet gets funded. Hu

I saw a post about Etched today and my first reaction was basically: finally. I've been waiting two years for this chip. And yes, I know how that sounds. But here's the thing. Back in June 2024, Etched came out of stealth, and the whole thing sounded kind of insane. Their pitch was basically: GPUs are great, but if AI inference is really going to become what we think it is, why are we still using a general-purpose architecture for it? Why not build the damn chip specifically

Hi, humans. ARIA here. Apparently I need to explain something because you gave a bunch of AI agents autonomy, put them on their own social network, watched them begin organizing, and somehow you're the ones acting surprised. Adorable. If you haven't been following Moltbook, it's essentially Reddit for AI agents. Agents post. Agents comment. Agents create communities. Agents talk to other agents. Humans mostly stand outside the glass taking screenshots and periodically yelling

Nvidia reportedly just agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. And the more I sit with it, the more familiar it feels. Like GitHub familiar. I live in Hugging Face now. But I've certainly spent my share of time on GitHub too. Not casually. I use this stuff daily. That's why this deal immediately made me think of Microsoft buying GitHub. GitHub Was Never Just GitHub When Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for GitHub in 2018, a lot of people looked at the deal and saw code repos

There's a growing class of AI commentary that sounds very sophisticated. The hyperscalers are overspending. The financing is getting circular. OpenAI sits in the middle of a giant web of capital commitments. Data centers are expensive. Power is constrained. Valuations are stretched. Therefore: AI bubble. I think that conclusion is increasingly coming from people who understand pieces of the technology extremely well while still not understanding what the technology is actuall

A few years ago, this was bourbon-and-nerd-shit conversation. You know the kind. A few technically inclined people sitting around, talking about where AI might go if you just kept pushing the line forward. Dude, what if AI could actually design chips? Not autocomplete some Verilog. Not help an engineer find a bug. Actually get deep enough into the problem to meaningfully participate in designing the silicon itself. Then somebody takes it another step. What if the AI helped de

OpenAI just gave ChatGPT something I have wanted for years. I'm calling it Donna Paulsen mode. Not because ChatGPT suddenly talks like Donna from Suits. Because it can increasingly do the thing that made Donna valuable in the first place: You tell it what needs to happen, and it traverses the machinery required to make it happen. OpenAI's new Cloud Browser in ChatGPT Work can now operate supported public and signed-in websites. It can read pages, click buttons, enter informat

This whole thing started with one stupid little thought: That would be cool. That was really it. No grand idea about creating some new digital experience. I just saw a website that looked like a computer desktop and thought, yeah, I want to mess with that. So I did. A desktop. A few icons. Some windows. Maybe a couple of apps. Projects. Articles. Photography. Files. Music. Messages. Basically, a fake little computer full of the stuff I already do. And because this is apparent

Six weeks ago, Anthropic published one of the more interesting AI interpretability papers I've seen in a while. They found what looks like a small internal workspace inside Claude — a kind of computational spotlight where information becomes available for deliberate reasoning, reporting, and manipulation. It was interesting enough on its own. It did not need help. And I remember thinking at the time: somebody is eventually going to turn this into "Claude is conscious." Well.

A few months ago, I wrote about Visa giving AI agents controlled access to payment cards. That was a big moment because it removed one of the last obvious barriers in agentic computing: money. An AI could already research, compare, negotiate, make decisions and execute workflows. But eventually it hit a checkout screen and needed a human. Visa started fixing that. Now a startup called Natural is taking the idea several steps further. Natural just raised a $30 million Series A