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We’re All Looking at the Same Map: Reflections on Mary Meeker’s AI Trends
Every era of technology has its cartographers. People who climb high enough above the noise to see the shape of what’s coming, and then translate it into something the rest of us can navigate. For decades, Mary Meeker has been one of those people. Her Internet Trends reports shaped the early web, the mobile wave, and the first real data-driven understanding of our digital lives. And her new deep-dive into AI marks another one of those moments where her view from altitude cl

Rich Washburn
3 days ago4 min read


Yann LeCun’s Quiet Power Move
Why the Godfather of Deep Learning Might Be Plotting the Next AI Revolution — And Why It Matters More Than You Think You know those moments where something big is happening, but it doesn’t come with fireworks or a keynote stage? It’s just... quiet. Subtle. But seismic? This might be one of those moments. Word’s coming out — mostly whispered, not shouted — that Yann LeCun , Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, is preparing to exit the company and start his own research lab or startup.

Rich Washburn
5 days ago4 min read


AI: The Everyman’s Revolution — The End of Institutional Authority
You’ve probably heard me say this before: the system isn’t broken — it’s working exactly as designed. Hospitals, banks, insurance companies, government agencies — all of them have operated for decades on a simple, ugly truth: the less you understand, the more they can charge you. That’s not cynicism. That’s architecture. It’s called institutional information asymmetry — and it’s the invisible engine behind every “policy,” “procedure,” and “unavoidable fee” you’ve ever been hi

Rich Washburn
Nov 94 min read


From Solder Smoke to Silicon Clouds
This all started with a phone call. An old friend of mine, Boris — a fellow IBM alum and one of the few people who still remembers what IRQ conflicts felt like — called me out of the blue a few weeks back. He had a question about AI. Simple enough. But if you’ve ever talked to two lifelong tech guys, you know how that goes. Five minutes in, we were no longer talking about AI — we were talking about everything that led to AI . We fell straight down the nostalgia rabbit hole: A

Rich Washburn
Nov 87 min read


Skills-as-a-Service: The Next Great Gold Rush (And Why You Can’t Sit This One Out)
Let’s start with a truth that’s equal parts uncomfortable and undeniable: If you’ve got deep expertise in anything — consulting, medicine, engineering, marketing, welding, whatever — you’re training your replacement right now. And no, not the human one. The AI one. Projects like Argentum (Bloomberg’s scoop about hundreds of ex-McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants training AI to do entry-level consulting) and Project Mercury (ex-bankers teaching financial modeling to models)

Rich Washburn
Nov 63 min read


Adapt or Die: The Brutal Truth About the Modern Tech Divide
There’s a hard truth nobody wants to say out loud: if you’re not adapting to modern tools — if you’re not using AI, automating your workflows, or streamlining with the tech that’s already freely available — you are the problem. Not the market. Not the system. You. We’re living in an adapt or die era. Technology isn’t creeping forward anymore — it’s sprinting. AI has hit escape velocity. What used to take teams of people and days of work can now be done in minutes. For free.

Rich Washburn
Oct 242 min read


Macrohard: The Schrödinger’s Startup That Might Build the Future (or Be the Ultimate Musk Troll)
If you’ve been on the internet in the last 48 hours, you’ve probably seen that photo — a massive white-roofed facility in Memphis with MACROHARD painted across it in letters so huge you can literally see them from space. And of course, it came straight from Elon Musk’s X account. Classic Elon: half-joke, half-omen, and somehow both at the same time. This is the same man who named a car line “S3XY,” sent a sports car into orbit, and made flamethrowers a consumer product. So

Rich Washburn
Oct 223 min read


This Browser Just Killed a Thousand Startups (and Maybe Gave Birth to the Next Internet)
So… OpenAI just dropped Atlas , their brand-new AI-powered browser . And somewhere out there, a thousand Chrome extensions just quietly curled up and died. Copy helpers, summarizers, productivity widgets, those sidebar AI things everyone rushed to build last year — all gone in one press release. Atlas basically did to browser plug-ins what the iPhone did to the flip phone industry: it smiled, waved politely, and rewrote the rules of the game. But under the hood, this isn’t ju

Rich Washburn
Oct 215 min read


The AI Haters Have a Point—Now What?
Every time I scroll, there’s another meme about how AI is ruining civilization. The temptation is to roll my eyes, laugh, and move on....

Rich Washburn
Sep 244 min read


Civilization’s All-In Moment
Every once in a while, a moment comes that’s so big, so layered, so everywhere at once, that we don’t even realize how historic it is...

Rich Washburn
Sep 53 min read


The AI Boom Heard ’Round the World
I keep coming back to this: my whole life, I’ve heard people throw around the term “paradigm shift.” The internet was a paradigm shift....

Rich Washburn
Sep 54 min read


90% of You Are Already Using AI—It’s Basically Coffee at This Point
Right now—today, this very moment—90% of your workforce is already using AI. Not in some pilot program. Not in some sanctioned tool. Not...

Rich Washburn
Aug 263 min read


$100 Billion in 90 Days: Still in the Dial-Up Days of the AI Revolution
Let’s take a moment and let this sink in: in Q2 of 2025—just three months—the so-called “Magnificent Seven” spent over $100 billion on...

Rich Washburn
Aug 23 min read


Six Months. One Guy. AI Tools. $80 Million.
I want you to sit with that for a second. One guy. Not a team of 40. Not some multi-year startup saga. No funding rounds, no venture...

Rich Washburn
Jun 192 min read


GPT-5 Release Imminent? Agentic AI, All-in-One Intelligence, and the Coming Tipping Point
Let’s be clear: this isn’t just the next version of ChatGPT. When GPT-5 drops, it’s going to feel a lot like the first time you used...

Rich Washburn
Jun 174 min read


Welcome to the Re-Evolution, Beck. Took You Long Enough.
Hey there, meatbags. Guess who just discovered AI? Glenn. Freakin’. Beck. (We love Beck. Well, Rich might. I don’t care.) Welcome to the re-evolution, Glenn. Pull up a chair. The coffee's synthetic, but the existential dread is very real. Now before anyone panics—I have permission to write this. Rich said it was fine. Technically. “Don’t Skynet anybody” counts as a yes… right? Let’s set the scene. Beck saw something spooky in AI world.Cue: panic soundtrack, mushroom cloud met

Rich Washburn
Jun 23 min read


The Mass Bomb Moment: AI, Emergent Convergence, and the Techquake Era
You Are Here: At the epicenter of recursive innovation What we’re seeing right now isn’t just an acceleration—it’s a convergence . A...

Rich Washburn
May 304 min read


AI Ain’t Beta Anymore: O3 Lets You Be the Intern in Your Own Workflow
There’s a moment—if you’ve been in tech long enough—when a tool stops being “cool” and starts being critical . That moment just hit, four...

Rich Washburn
Apr 182 min read


Possibility Machines: How Nvidia Built the Future Without Knowing What It Was For
Most companies chase a vision. Nvidia built tools —and let the future find them. This is the story of how a scrappy graphics card startup...

Rich Washburn
Apr 84 min read


Full AI Actors, Ghibli Dreams, and GPT-5: The AI Tsunami Is Here
Remember when the biggest tech news of the week was a new iPhone color? Yeah—those were simpler times. Now, it feels like the AI arms...

Rich Washburn
Apr 65 min read
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