Rich Washburn

Recently, a team of researchers mapped the neural wiring of a fruit fly. They didn’t “program” the fly to walk or react to light; they simply recreated the architecture of its brain inside a simulation. The result? The simulated fly started behaving like a fly. It turns out that in complex systems, structure produces behavior . You don’t need to teach a piano how to sound like a piano; you just need to build it with the right tension and layout. When you strike the key, the sound is a...

The Technology Behind My “Holy Shit” Moment If you just read the last article — the one where my brain basically melted in public — you might reasonably be asking: “Okay… but what actually is  this thing?” Fair question. Because if you only read that piece, it probably sounded like I discovered some mystical AI wizard hiding in a cave somewhere. I didn’t. If anything, the wizard lives in a deep, dark data center somewhere humming away behind a few million dollars’ worth of GPUs. What I’m...

I was halfway through writing an article about how badly this whole thing had just broken my brain when my phone rang. It was Jimmy. Now, this wasn’t some staged testimonial call. I didn’t send him a survey. I didn’t ask him for a quote. He wasn’t calling to help me finish a thought. He was calling because he’d been using this thing for about a week in the real world, in the middle of serious work, and he was basically having the exact same holy-shit moment I was. That timing alone was...