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Inside Kimi K3: What the Benchmarks Don't Show You
Three trillion parameters. 896 expert networks. A 17-place jump to number one in front-end coding overnight. I want to slow down on Kimi K3 for a minute, because the headline numbers are getting all the attention and the actual architecture story is more interesting than the leaderboard. Start with the benchmark reality. Kimi K3, built by Beijing-based Moonshot AI, is now sitting at number one in Arena's front-end coding rankings. First place across six out of seven domains —

Rich Washburn
3 days ago6 min read


The Wall Wasn't a Wall
The wall wasn't a wall. That's the thing worth sitting with after Kimi K3 dropped Thursday. Not the benchmark scores. Not the pricing. The wall. The six-to-twelve months of comfortable distance that American AI labs and their investors and the policymakers backing them had built an entire strategic posture around — it turns out it was more like a speed bump. Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based lab most people outside of China had never thought twice about, released Kimi K3 this week

Rich Washburn
3 days ago4 min read


The Dial-Up Era of AI
I'm writing this by talking... Hands crossed. Sitting back. Just saying words out loud into a console that's going to turn them into an article, generate a cover image, produce audio, post it to my site, push it to LinkedIn. The whole thing. I'm not touching a keyboard. Last week I wrote a Mac app in twenty minutes. It connects over Bluetooth to my Ember mug and shows me the temperature in my menu bar. Not my mug. I didn't build the mug. Didn't invent the Bluetooth stack. I j

Rich Washburn
7 days ago5 min read


Palantir Is Mostly Right. But They're Also Selling Something.
Palantir published a nine-point manifesto on AI sovereignty this week that's been making the rounds. The highlights: sovereignty dictates your institution's future, data retention is your treasure, tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation, and controlling your weights is controlling your fate. CEO Alex Karp followed it up on CNBC, calling the per-token pricing model a "tax" and suggesting something has gone "completely wrong" with how AI is sold to enterprises. It's worth

Rich Washburn
7 days ago7 min read


The Hardware War Nobody Was Watching
Everyone has been staring at the benchmark leaderboards. Meanwhile, the real fight moved somewhere else entirely. Apple just filed a 41-page lawsuit against OpenAI. Not over AI. Over manufacturing. The specific targets are Tang Tan — OpenAI's hardware chief, formerly Apple's VP of product design — and a former Apple engineer named Chang Lu. Apple's allegation is a coordinated extraction campaign: employees being actively pushed to download confidential files on their way out

Rich Washburn
Jul 135 min read


I Built the App Ember Should Have Shipped
I want to say upfront that "I built" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What I actually did was look at my coffee mug, have a thought, type that thought into Glaze, and go do other stuff. About fifteen or twenty minutes later, I had a finished, working macOS application sitting in my menu bar. It connected to my Ember Mug over Bluetooth, showed me the temperature, and sent me a push notification when the battery got low. I'm not sure "I built" is even the right

Rich Washburn
Jul 125 min read


I Slipped and Fell on an App Store Listing
I want to be clear about something upfront: I claim zero talent or skill in what I'm about to describe. This is a broken clock story. The clock just happened to be right at a useful moment. Labor Day weekend 2024. Raining in South Florida. Bored enough to do something stupid. I grabbed a Xiao ESP32-C3 — tiny little microcontroller, about $5, probably the smallest ESP32 package I've ever seen — and eight buttons. Wired four of them to standard shortcuts: copy, paste, cut, ente

Rich Washburn
Jul 105 min read


OpenAI Dropped Three Models Today. I Tried the One That Matters.
GPT-5.6 Sol launched today, July 9, 2026. Technically it's three models — Sol, Terra, and Luna — but let's be honest about what actually happened. OpenAI shipped one flagship model that everyone is going to talk about, and two supporting tiers designed to give developers options without sending their API bills to the moon. Sol is the thing. Terra and Luna are pricing strategy. Here's how I found out about it in the most anticlimactic way possible: I was already using i

Rich Washburn
Jul 103 min read


I Have 65 Tokens Left and Apparently That’s a Personal Problem
Let me explain what happened... I found a vibe-coding tool for Mac called Glaze. I had 120 free tokens....I had a mildly annoying workflow problem involving prompts and clipboard management and too many browser tabs and about eight thousand open Notes documents I never look at. I told the AI to build me a small floating window. That’s where things got away from me. Here’s How the Evening Actually Went The original ask was pretty simple. Make me a floating sidecar window that

Rich Washburn
Jul 95 min read


When the Law Firm Is Also the AI
On July 7th, Norm AI closed a $120 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation. Khosla Ventures led the round — the same firm that was the first institutional investor in OpenAI. Blackstone, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, Vanguard, Craft Ventures, and New York Life all participated. So did Jeff Hammes, the former Chairman of Kirkland & Ellis — one of the most powerful law firms on earth — and Fenwick LLP, investing directly as a firm. The company has raised more than $260 mi

Rich Washburn
Jul 94 min read


The Agent That Doesn’t Stop When You Do
The Receipt OpenClaw — one of the most widely used open-source agent frameworks in the world — just shipped a feature called Dreaming. By default, it runs at 3:00 AM. Every night. Whether you’re awake or not. What it does, technically, is background memory consolidation: three phases (Light, REM, Deep) that sort recent short-term signals, reflect on themes, and promote the most durable insights into long-term memory. The system scores candidates on relevance, frequency, recen

Rich Washburn
Jul 95 min read


The Prompt Did the Shape. It Didn't Do the Substance.
A post crossed my feed this week with a T-Rex crushing a McKinsey building in its jaws, “AI” and “Anthropic” stamped across its side. The copy underneath: twenty Claude prompts that supposedly replace an entire finance consulting team. A three-statement financial model, priced at “$9,000 Big 4 engagement.” Cash flow forecasting, “$6,500 CFO-level build.” A SaaS metrics dashboard, “$8,000 SaaS CFO template.” Working capital optimization, “$6,000 McKinsey engagement.” Twenty li

Rich Washburn
Jul 84 min read


Companies Fired Their Best People to Go "AI-Native." Now They're Quietly Hiring Them Back.
MIT's State of AI in Business report found that 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable ROI. Not “underperform.” Fail — no return the company can point to. Separately, Gartner surveyed companies on their AI-driven workforce reductions and found that 80% had cut headcount, with zero correlation between the size of the cut and any resulting improvement in ROI. Cutting people didn't produce better numbers. It just produced fewer people. Then there's the

Rich Washburn
Jul 84 min read


Polsia Is AI Slop Spelled Backwards. That's Not the Insult People Think It Is.
Ben Broca launched Polsia in late 2025. One founder. No employees. A system of AI agents that plans, codes, markets, and runs companies around the clock. Within a month, he crossed $1 million in annualized revenue with over 1,000 companies running on the platform. A month after that, $3 million ARR, 3,000 companies. Last count, something like $10 million run rate, thousands of businesses on the platform, and a $30 million Series A at a $250 million post-money valuation — rais

Rich Washburn
Jul 84 min read


The GPT-5.6 Launch Tweet Buried the Actual Story
Late Tuesday night, Sam Altman posted two sentences on X: “GPT-5.6 Sol, along with Terra and Luna, will launch publicly this Thursday. We're expanding preview access globally now.” By morning it was a standard tech news cycle — pricing tables, benchmark charts, the usual “which tier should you use” explainers. Sol at $5 input / $30 output per million tokens, Terra at $2.50/$15, Luna at $1/$6. Sol is OpenAI's strongest model yet, meaningfully better at coding, biology, and cyb

Rich Washburn
Jul 84 min read


Anthropic Found a Spotlight Inside Claude's Head. The Headline Is Already Wrong.
Anthropic published a paper a few hours before this piece went out, and the internet already knows what it's going to do with it: turn “Claude has a mechanism for conscious access” into “Anthropic thinks Claude is conscious.” That headline will spread fast. It's also not what the paper says, and the actual finding is more useful than the sci-fi version. The Receipt Anthropic's researchers built a tool they call a JSpace lens — JSpace, short for Jacobian space, the mathematica

Rich Washburn
Jul 75 min read


OpenProfile Is Live — And It's the Project I've Been Trying to Get Right Since 2024
I filed a provisional patent in November 2024 for something I called "System and Method for Digital Business Cards." The idea was simple: tap a card, get someone's contact info on your phone instantly, no app required. I built it, called it Tap2Space, put it on Wix, and ran it as a real business for about two years. Over 100 real clients, custom-designed cards, a physical NFC card and keychain fob included. It worked. People paid for it. Some of them are still using the cards

Rich Washburn
Jul 76 min read


The Patent War Nobody's Covering Is the Same War Everyone's Covering
Nikkei Asia dropped a number this week that deserves more attention than it's getting, mostly because it landed in a business section instead of a national security one: China now files more fintech patents than any other country on Earth, by a wide margin, in a field the U.S. was supposed to own by default. Nikkei and the research firm Patent Result examined fintech patent filings across 118 countries and regions over the past decade. Total filings nearly tripled to roughly

Rich Washburn
Jul 64 min read


Anthropic Got Caught Doing the Thing It Keeps Warning Everyone About
In March, Anthropic quietly shipped tracking code inside Claude Code that checked whether a user's machine was set to a Chinese time zone and whether it was talking to domains linked to certain Chinese AI companies. It sat there undisclosed until a developer found it, Alibaba banned Claude Code over it, and Anthropic pulled the code last week, calling it an "experiment" it would replace with "better defenses." Set aside for a second whether the tracking itself was the right c

Rich Washburn
Jul 64 min read


Starlink Was Never the Interesting Part. This Week Proved It.
A video's been making the rounds this week breaking down a trio of new SpaceX-adjacent trademarks — Starmind, Stargaze, Starfall — and connecting them to a real FCC filing: SpaceX asking permission to launch up to one million satellites as an orbital data center constellation. The video's framing is clean and mostly right: Starlink becomes the communications layer, the new constellation becomes the compute layer, laser links between satellites become the internal data fabric.

Rich Washburn
Jul 54 min read
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