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Anthropic Just Showed You Exactly Who They Are
Anthropic cut off 135,000 OpenClaw instances, handed its biggest developer ecosystem to OpenAI, then announced $30B in revenue and a multi-gigawatt compute deal — all in the same week. The pattern has a name.

Rich Washburn
Apr 65 min read


Google Just Handed the Open Source World a Nuclear Weapon
Google dropped Gemma 4 — four open-source models, Apache 2.0, running locally on consumer hardware, ranking #3 in the world. The open source agent community wired it into OpenClaw within hours. Here's why this changes everything.

Rich Washburn
Apr 65 min read


Compute Is the Only Play
TSMC just guided to $52–56 billion in capex for 2026. McKinsey puts the global data center race at $7 trillion. The infrastructure layer is the only play that matters.

Rich Washburn
Apr 53 min read


Stop Looking for a Job. Build a Toolbox.
AI isn't replacing people. It's replacing unstructured effort. Here's the framework that changes everything — and it starts with one stupid small problem.

Rich Washburn
Apr 45 min read


The Canary Is Dead
Five signals. One conclusion. The grid hit its limit at the very beginning of the demand curve — before 84% of humanity ever typed a prompt. The canary has been dead for a while.

Rich Washburn
Apr 33 min read


$710 Billion and Nowhere to Plug It In
$710 billion committed. Grid queues running 3-5 years. Virginia is full. The bottleneck isn't compute — it's power, and permitted energized land just became a new asset class.

Rich Washburn
Apr 34 min read


When Wall Street Builds a Team, Follow the Money
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Jefferies have all stood up dedicated AI infrastructure investment banking practices in the last 90 days. When the banks build teams, the capital follows.

Rich Washburn
Apr 34 min read


Welcome to the Future
Three people. One room. Fifteen calls. Two meetings playing simultaneously in the same ear. This is what the front lines of the AI infrastructure build-out actually look like.

Rich Washburn
Apr 23 min read


The Only Play Left Is the One Nobody Wants to Hear
Oracle fired 30,000 people this morning with a 6 AM email. Not because Oracle is struggling. Because Oracle is winning — and winning now means converting human payroll into AI infrastructure as fast as the balance sheet allows. I want to zoom out from that headline. Oracle is not the story. Oracle is a symptom. The story is what's been building for two years, and what a lot of people are about to finally understand the hard way. I have been saying this since early 2024. The r

Rich Washburn
Apr 13 min read


Oracle Just Fired 30,000 People With a 6 AM Email. This Is the Automation Cliff.
This morning, tens of thousands of people woke up, checked their phones, and found out they no longer had a job. Not from their manager. Not from HR. From an email sent by 'Oracle Leadership' at 6:00 a.m. The email was brief, formal, and identical across the US, India, Canada, and Mexico. Your role has been eliminated. Today is your final working day. Sign the DocuSign to receive severance. Your system access has already been revoked. Somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 peopl

Rich Washburn
Apr 13 min read


The Algorithmic Multiplier: Why Math, Not Silicon, Is the Next Frontier of Compute
For the last decade, the technology sector has operated under a simple, brute-force paradigm: if you want faster data processing, higher-resolution simulations, or smarter AI, you buy more silicon. You build a bigger data center. You consume more power. But physical infrastructure eventually hits a wall. Today, the constraints of power grids, cooling systems, and memory bandwidth are bottlenecking the next leap in computing. And the industry is rediscovering an old truth: whe

Rich Washburn
Mar 314 min read


They Called It a Fringe Idea.
August 2023. That's when I first wrote about it. Not as a prediction. As an observation about something that was already happening — the slow, inevitable collapse of the industrial-era classroom model and the arrival of something better. The piece was called Back to School or a New Dawn in Education? Most people scrolled past it. A few thought I was being optimistic. Some thought I was being naive. This week, Mackenzie Price, co-founder and CEO of Alpha Schools, sat down wit

Rich Washburn
Mar 314 min read


The Sleeping Giant Wakes: What WWDC Will Actually Tell Us About Apple's AI Play
Everyone thinks Apple lost the AI race. What if they've been playing a different game all along? Not the hyperscaler race. Not the frontier model race. Not even the benchmark race. A different game entirely — the one that matters most when 1.5 billion people carry your hardware in their pocket every single day. Let's talk about what's actually coming at WWDC. And more importantly, what it means for where phones, software, and AI agents are going in the second half of 2026. Fi

Rich Washburn
Mar 314 min read


The Next Blocks: An AI Systems Map for 2026–2028
A lot has happened since OpenClaw hit. And it wasn't that long ago. I usually do these — this week in AI, this month, whatever. I haven't done one in a while. But enough is in place now that I can say: from where I'm standing, here's what I see coming. And I think most of this lands inside a three-year arc. Let me map it out. Context Frame We are not in AGI. We are in pre-AGI industrialization — infrastructure scaling, systems hardening, capability distribution. At the same t

Rich Washburn
Mar 304 min read


This Isn't About AI (And It Never Was)
Alright. Let me try to say this clean...Because yeah — I know. I've been loud about this. But this isn't another "AI changes everything" post. This is about capability. Not AI. Not tools. Not being technical. Capability. The simple fact that right now — you can do things that used to require teams, time, money, and coordination. Now you can just start. I've been trying to explain this for a while. There are 900+ articles on this site. Most of them orbit the same idea from dif

Rich Washburn
Mar 303 min read


Business at the Speed of Thought
There's a moment that happened this week that I keep thinking about. I was driving down the street on the way to another meeting. A call came in. I hit record — nothing fancy, just a tap — and let the conversation happen. By the time I pulled into my next stop, the meeting was already over. But so was everything else that usually comes after a meeting. The recording had been automatically transcribed. The transcription had been processed into a tactical summary. The summary h

Rich Washburn
Mar 273 min read


There Is No Timeline
How the Future Started Arriving All at Once. I grew up on the future. Not the real one — the scheduled one. The kind that lived in magazines and predictions, where every breakthrough came with a timestamp. Flying cars? "Someday." Artificial intelligence? "A few decades out." Even when something revolutionary was announced, you still had to wait for it to arrive. That was the unspoken agreement: you'd see the future first… and then, eventually, you'd live in it. But somewhere

Rich Washburn
Mar 273 min read


The Eloi and the Morlocks
AI isn't dividing the world into winners and losers. It's dividing it into two different species. Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir — the company whose software helps governments and intelligence agencies automate decision-making at planetary scale — went on record this week telling people to skip elite colleges. His reasoning was surgical: unless you're neurodivergent, the only path left with real durability is skilled trades. Electricians. Carpenters. Machinists. People who wo

Rich Washburn
Mar 264 min read


The Districts Are On Their Own — Good. Here's Who Steps Up.
When federal policy fails to lead, communities don't wait. They build. A recent report from The 74 landed with a thud that should surprise no one who's been paying attention: when it comes to AI policy in K-12 schools, districts are largely on their own. No meaningful federal framework. No coherent national guidance. Just thousands of school boards making it up as they go — some banning AI outright, some embracing it blindly, most paralyzed somewhere in between. The media rea

Rich Washburn
Mar 255 min read


The Router Ban Is Just the Opening Move
The FCC just added foreign-produced consumer routers to its Covered List — meaning new models can no longer be marketed or sold in the United States without a national security exemption. The official language is measured. The implications are not. FCC Chair Brendan Carr cited a supply chain vulnerability that could "disrupt the U.S. economy, critical infrastructure, and national defense" and a "severe cybersecurity risk" that could be immediately weaponized against American

Rich Washburn
Mar 245 min read
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