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Groq, NVIDIA, and the Geometry of Courage: How Creative M&A and Constraint Built the Future of AI
Let’s start where everyone’s talking right now — the number. $20 billion. That’s the reported value of NVIDIA’s “not-quite-an-acquisition” of Groq — the little AI hardware company that built a chip so unorthodox, the industry laughed when they unveiled it in 2023. Now? NVIDIA’s folding their architecture, their engineers, and their design DNA into the future of its own inference stack. Except here’s the twist — NVIDIA didn’t buy Groq outright. They structured it as a non-excl

Rich Washburn
Dec 27, 20254 min read


The Rise of Machine Capitalism: There’s an App for That
Somewhere between a vending machine in Anthropic’s lobby and a meme painted on a Memphis rooftop, capitalism quietly booted up a new operating system. We used to say “AI is coming for your job.”Now it’s coming for your org chart. The Dawn of Machine Capitalism Let’s start with a vending machine.A simple, stupid, beautiful vending machine. Anon Labs gave an AI $500 and said, “Go make a profit. ” No human babysitter. No preloaded logic tree. Just a digital brain, an API key, an

Rich Washburn
Dec 27, 20253 min read


PaaS: Privacy as a Service — The Great Data Gold Rush of the AI Era
VPNs had their time.They made us feel private, even if all they really did was move our data through someone else’s pipe. But a small startup called Phreeli might have just pulled the next big lever in the evolution of privacy. It’s not another app or encrypted messenger. It’s a carrier — a full-blown phone service that doesn’t know who you are. You sign up with a zip code. That’s it. No name. No ID. No personal record. They’ve built a zero-knowledge billing system that can

Rich Washburn
Dec 26, 20254 min read


ThermaSpine— The Reset Button for Your Nervous System
Because your body’s been white-knuckling life for too long. Let’s start with the truth:There’s a sacred moment in every shower. No, not that one. The other one. The one where you turn just right and that steady stream of hot water lands perfectly between your shoulder blades — right on your spine — and suddenly your whole body just… lets go. Your shoulders drop. Your breath deepens. And for a brief, glorious moment, the noise of the world dials down. That’s not comfort. That

Rich Washburn
Dec 26, 20253 min read


The Shortest Night, The Longest Table
There’s a strange peace that settles in on Christmas night. The noise stops. The lists stop. The chase pauses.For one night—one dark, midwinter night—everyone, everywhere, seems to remember how to be human. We spend the whole year competing.Once upon a time, that meant hunting the pig. Now it means fighting for paychecks, clients, clicks, and whatever else keeps the lights on. The arena changed, but the instinct didn’t. Survival still hums underneath everything we do. And the

Rich Washburn
Dec 26, 20252 min read


Merry Christmas from Two Swines
We all know that smell. It’s the smell that arrives before the guests do—the one that seeps through the walls and into memory. Cinnamon, clove, allspice, sugar. It’s the smell of the year turning toward the light again. Thanksgiving has a dozen good smells—roasted everything, butter, sage—but Christmas? Christmas owns a single, unmistakable note. It’s the scent that flips a switch in your brain and whispers, you’ve made it through another winter. I’m a foodie and a nerd—so, a

Rich Washburn
Dec 25, 20253 min read


The Build-in-Public Era: Breaking It a Hundred Times to Get It Right Once
Somewhere along the line, the culture shifted. We stopped pretending. For decades, success was about the illusion of control. The polished pitch deck. The glossy commercial. The polished founder who never broke a sweat — even when everything was on fire behind the scenes. That’s the “fake it till you make it” era.And it’s over. Because right now, we’re watching something wild happen across the entire digital landscape: the rise of the Build-in-Public crowd — the people who ar

Rich Washburn
Dec 18, 20254 min read


Intelligence, Infrastructure, and the Space Between
I’ve always been a hands-on kind of guy. I like to understand how things actually work —from the power that drives the servers to the AI models running on them, and the capital that fuels it all. The truth is, to build what I want to build in this space, I needed to get my hands around the entire stack . That’s why I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Eliakim Capital as Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer. It’s an incredible opportunity to help shape how compute, power, a

Rich Washburn
Dec 17, 20252 min read


Storytelling as the On-Ramp to the Meaning Economy
A while back, I wrote about The Meaning Economy — the idea that as AI and automation steadily absorb traditional labor, the next wave of value creation won’t come from what we do for a living , but from what we create, express, and share as humans. That idea felt theoretical at the time — but now we’re starting to see the first real-world on-ramps appear. One of the clearest? Tech storytelling. The Human Layer That Machines Can’t Replace Across industries — politics, media,

Rich Washburn
Dec 17, 20253 min read


Emergence: The Future That Builds Itself
There are moments in human history that split time. Fire. The wheel. The printing press. The Internet. And now this. We have built an intelligence in our own image. Not metaphorically, not poetically—literally. Every neuron mapped to a node, every synapse mirrored in silicon, every word of our collective consciousness poured into the data that shaped its mind. Humanity has done something so extraordinary that we barely have language big enough to hold it. The greatest act of

Rich Washburn
Dec 17, 202510 min read


Identity Inertia: How AI Is Forcing Us to Reclaim Our Agency
For as long as most of us can remember, we’ve been taught to introduce ourselves as our roles. “I’m an accountant.”“I’m an engineer.”“I’m in IT.” Somewhere along the line, our job titles became our identities. And for decades, that worked fine—because the world moved slowly enough to let us keep up with our own definitions. But AI just broke the speed limit. Now the skills that defined those roles are evolving faster than we can rewrite our résumés. The ground beneath our ide

Rich Washburn
Dec 17, 20253 min read


Dismantling Dogma: The Cognitive Architecture of Understanding Itself
For as long as we’ve been sentient enough to ask why , we’ve been trying to reverse-engineer the human mind. From philosophy to psychology, from theology to neuroscience, every field has taken a swing at decoding the mystery behind the questioner. But until now, we’ve never had a tool powerful enough — or reflective enough — to show us what our own cognition actually looks like in motion. Artificial intelligence changed that. Not because it “thinks” in the way we do, but beca

Rich Washburn
Dec 13, 20253 min read


THE NEW SPACE RACE: THE AI COMPUTE FRONTIER HAS LEFT EARTH
There’s a new space race underway. Only this time, it’s not about astronauts or flags or dusty footprints on the Moon. It’s about compute. That’s right — the real battle for AI supremacy isn’t happening in data centers in Utah or server farms in Oregon. It’s heading into orbit. Solar Megawatts, Zero Cooling Costs — The Space Data Center Revolution Let’s start with the physics. AI training at scale burns through electricity like nothing humanity has ever built. Training a sing

Rich Washburn
Dec 10, 20254 min read


This Is AI’s FCC Moment: When the Pentagon Starts Planning for AGI, You Should Pay Attention
Let’s get one thing straight: the Pentagon is now preparing for AGI. Yeah. That Pentagon. Buried inside a $900 billion defense bill is a mandate to create something called the AI Futures Steering Committee — an official U.S. Department of Defense body tasked with, and I quote, “scanning the horizon for frontier AI model threats” and developing “human override protocols” to ensure that even superintelligent systems can be shut down by people. That’s not a Reddit rumor. That’s

Rich Washburn
Dec 10, 20254 min read


When the Computer Got Faster Than Us
And why AI might finally slow us back down. There was a time when running a process meant you could go make a sandwich. Back in the day, computing was slow. You’d start a program, watch the progress bar crawl, maybe hear the hard drive click like a heartbeat, and then… you waited. Compiling code? Go grab lunch. Rendering a video? See you in the morning. Early computing was a Zen garden of patience and progress wheels. Then we got impatient.We wanted faster chips, shorter wait

Rich Washburn
Dec 7, 20253 min read


VaporVault 3.0 — The “It’s Done (No, Really)” Update
I don’t even know if it’s still night or already morning.I just know that VaporVault 3.0 is done — and it’s good . Like, shockingly good. Not “cool prototype” good. Not “it boots without catching fire” good. I mean finished product good. If this thing were in an enclosure instead of hanging off my desk with a spaghetti mess of jumper wires and a button dangling from a breadboard, I’d buy it. Full stop. It’s clean. It’s stable. It’s slick. You connect to it and it just feels

Rich Washburn
Dec 6, 20252 min read


The Signal Before the Click: The Moment Before the Quantum Acceleration
There’s a feel to precision—the instant a mechanism locks into place and the world goes quiet for half a second.Right before that click, though, there’s the glide: friction drops, alignment happens, inevitability hums. That’s where we are with quantum. The parts are lining up, the resistance is gone, and you can almost feel the system seat itself. History Has a Rhythm Every so often we get a cycle big enough to reset the world.They’re far enough apart that we forget what they

Rich Washburn
Dec 5, 20253 min read


The Moment the Maker Remembered the Magic
We’re living in a strange, beautiful time — a time where a thought can become a thing overnight. Not through teams, or funding, or decades of engineering — but through collaboration with machines that think just enough to amplify us. It feels unreal, but it’s not. It’s the most human thing we’ve ever done. Because at our core, that’s who we are. We are creators — designed by a Creator. If you cracked open the source code of humanity, the header on that file would read: "MADE

Rich Washburn
Dec 5, 20252 min read


VaporVault Node — The Shared Vault
So… remember how I said VaporVault was an offline, personal password vault? Yeah — about that. Apparently, it’s also a collaboration tool now. I didn’t plan this, but the Node firmware kind of turned into something way cooler than I expected. The Idea The standard VaporVault is totally offline — your private Wi-Fi network, your private data. But then I thought, what if a small team or family could share one safely? So I built VaporVault Node. It runs the same hardware, sam

Rich Washburn
Dec 5, 20252 min read


VaporVault — I Guess It’s Launching?
3:55 a.m. So… apparently I built a product. Not on purpose — it just kind of… happened. What started as a tweak to Firefly’s little built-in notepad turned into a full-blown, stand-alone thing. And now, somehow, it’s 4 a.m. and I’m sitting here with half a dozen of these little units printed, flashed, and basically ready to ship. What It Is VaporVault is a tiny, Wi-Fi-based password vault. No apps. No cloud. No syncing. It’s basically that “passwords.txt” file everyone has —

Rich Washburn
Dec 5, 20252 min read
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