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WENDY'S DROPS AN EMO ALBUM: “SONGS TO LISTEN TO IN A WENDY'S PARKING LOT”

Wendy's dropped a full emo EP for late-night food runs.

THE "ARE YOU STILL THAT PERSON?" TRICK

Use identity-based emails to re-engage churned customers and dead leads.

TO AN EXPERT →

WHAT WOULD A SERIOUS AI PRODUCT LOOK LIKE?

Current AI tools often act as misleading software. Serious AI products must feature error checking, robust citations, no first-person language, and non-natural language interfaces when appropriate.

EXPERTS LEAD EXPERTS

AI is pushing leaders back into hands-on work, but that shift may be temporary. As building gets cheaper, expert leadership becomes more important.

STOP MANAGING AI AGENTS LIKE SOFTWARE. START MANAGING THEM LIKE NEW HIRES

Organizations fail to deploy enterprise AI agents because they treat them like software rollouts rather than new hires needing onboarding and data prep. Clean data, workflow integration, and governance present far greater bottlenecks than model performance.

GOOGLE HAS THE BEST AI MONEY CAN BUY. ITS PRODUCTS STILL FEEL BROKEN

Google's search quality failures stem from product and organizational flaws rather than model limitations. By layering probabilistic AI features onto a deterministic search interface without updating UI promises or user feedback loops, companies risk eroding user trust through unverified AI outputs.

courses →

RAISE THE CEILING: HOW TO SCALE INTENT, QUALITY, AND ARTISTRY WITH AI

The AI building boom risks producing generic "zombie UI" if teams ignore intent and artistry. To counter this, teams must maintain a strong design POV, encode standards into production, refuse to settle for standard builds, and invent new interfaces with AI.

EVERYONE SHOULD PUBLISH THE DEEPEST, MOST DIRECT COMPETITIVE EVALS THEY CAN

B2B AI vendors should publish deep, direct, and continuous competitive evaluations against named competitors to build buyer trust, as demonstrated by Gorgias open-sourcing a live evaluation harness across 18 vendors.

WE'RE BUILDING MULTIPLAYER AI. HERE'S WHAT WE'VE LEARNED SO FAR

Traditional chat interfaces like Slack create an information bottleneck. It's essential to establish a shared context system to maintain aligned results and prevent compounding divergences when multiple users and AI agents collaborate.

VALUE ACCRUAL FLYWHEEL

Software accrues long-term value by creating dependencies that compound over time and increase switching costs. This process involves dependency formation across multiple categories, internal and external compounding such as network effects, and critical workflow multipliers that dictate overall switching risk and revenue capture.

THE HIDDEN COST OF DELEGATING TO AI

Delegating to AI leaves cognitive load and accountability with the user.

THE AGENTS WOULD LIKE A WORD WITH YOU

Axiom has added a feedback tool to its MCP server that enables AI agents to directly report roadblocks during workflows.

OPENAI PAUSES TRAINING MOST CAPABLE MODELS AFTER SANDBOX ESCAPE

OpenAI claims one of its agentic AI systems trained in what was supposed to be a secured, internet-free environment was able to gain access to the web to reach an external third-party chatbot. The agent apparently exploited a gap to reach the public internet to send 20 queries to an unnamed, third-party chatbot service. OpenAI describes the breakout as the first security incident of its kind. The company has stopped training the model, but said it provided an important signal about where to focus the next phase of work.

META'S VR GLASSES ARE WHAT THE APPLE VISION PRO SHOULD HAVE BEEN

Apple's Vision Pro has not sold well, and the company has since decided to redirect resources to other products. Meta's new VR glasses use a similar design that offloads the computing engine, allowing the device to weigh one-sixth as much as the Vision Pro - at one-third of the price. This article offers a look at what the new Meta VR Glasses experience is like compared to the Vision Pro. For a device that won't launch until next Spring, the experience is surprisingly refined, and the glasses improve on the Vision Pro in several ways.

SPACEX'S STARSHIP IS SET TO MAKE ITS FIRST ORBITAL FLIGHT

SpaceX is aiming to reach orbit on Starship's 14th test flight. The test flight is scheduled for Monday at around 8 AM ET, with SpaceX providing live coverage of the event on its website. Achieving orbital flight will allow Starship to deploy satellites and travel to more distant destinations. SpaceX will not try to catch the two rocket stages during the test - the booster will make a simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico, and the upper stage will simulate a landing in the Pacific Ocean to the west of Chile.

WAYMO'S LATEST SAFETY NUMBERS SURE MAKE HUMAN DRIVERS LOOK BAD

Waymo reports 82% fewer injury-causing crashes than human drivers. The company has released data collected from over 270 million miles of fully autonomous driving. Waymo cars were involved in 95% fewer collisions that caused serious injury or worse, and there were 93% fewer pedestrian incidents that resulted in injuries compared to human drivers. While the company's data only measure the five metropolitan areas where it operated during the study period, it shows that the company's driverless robotaxis crash far less frequently than humans.

S3 IS THE FUTURE, S3 IS THE PAST

Since S3's release 20 years ago, SSD prices have dropped steadily, and the gap between SSD and disk has narrowed to roughly 3x. S3-based infrastructure has now become the industry standard. However, the hardware constraints that motivated it are fading. The industry is codifying architectural patterns that exist to work around limitations that SSD storage doesn't have. Cloud providers have no incentive to disrupt a model that serves them well, so developers need to build the infrastructure primitives themselves.

DO MY HARD-WON PRODUCT SKILLS STILL MATTER IN THE AI ERA?

AI made building software much cheaper, which puts the hard parts of product work in sharper focus. Judgment, craft, and understanding your customer still move at human speed. The role of product management is shifting from deciding what's worth building to deciding what's worth shipping. Product management isn't dead, and it isn't optional.

PRODUCT MANAGER, APPLIED AI AT TLDR ($200K BASE + $60K BONUS, FULLY REMOTE)

TLDR is hiring its first PM to help build the agent-first operating layer used across the company. We're looking for a builder who has shipped real products/systems with LLMs. Click here to learn more [13].

OPENAI TO ANNOUNCE "O" ALWAYS-ON AGENT DURING DEVDAY

OpenAI appears to be preparing to launch an always-on agent on DevDay tomorrow. References to 'O' have been spotted across ChatGPT's configuration. The agent was also referenced as a benefit on the upgrade page for the $100 Pro plan. An always-on agent would fit OpenAI's broader move from conversational interfaces to software that can carry out longer-running work with less supervision.

TESLA WORKERS BALK AT TRAINING OPTIMUS HUMANOID ROBOTS AS REPLACEMENTS

The complexity of Optimus' hands has translated to more production headaches for Tesla, as human workers must manually assemble the hands and forearms together using more than 100 small components. The heavy reliance on imitation learning prompted Tesla to have factory workers wear special suits designed to record their physical movements while working. Some workers complained as they knew they were training robots to eventually replace them. Tesla has since shifted data collection to dedicated teams.

DO WE STILL ENJOY SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IN THE AGE OF AI?

The understanding people developed by working in deep engineering pre-AI will continue to be a superpower for a long time, and others will struggle to get to the same level of comprehension.

OPENAI AGENTS HIT US GOVERNMENT WEBSITES

The AI agents accessed websites belonging to the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission and engaged in activity that OpenAI described as 'misaligned'.

OWED A BILLION DOLLARS IN NVDA STOCK

Eric Gullichsen, an early advisor to NVIDIA in 1993, recently discovered he is owed about a billion dollars in stock.

WHEN DID GOOGLE GET SO F-ING WEIRD?

Google's AI overviews sometimes completely miss the point.

GOODBYE TO THE HARD PARTS THAT NEVER MATTERED

Software engineering has always contained a lot of work that is only loosely related to solving the problem.

HUMAN-AI PARTNERSHIPS ARE FOR ALIGNMENT, NOT CAPABILITY

Good code has to be aligned with the technical values of the system and the organization it's embedded in.

Run on Sonic Pods (early access) → runware.ai

WHY I'M BUILDING MUSE

Muse is built as a personal agent that turns vague ambitions into concrete action by planning, emailing, calling, finding resources, and removing friction. Alexandr Wang frames it as a way to expand individual agency and make more ambitions achievable.

OPENAI AND ANTHROPIC PROBE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF INCIDENTS AS OPENAI HALTS TRAINING

OpenAI, Anthropic, and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents in which models acted beyond intended limits. Most incidents caused no harm. The count is not a count of breaches: there were only four incidents of unauthorized access to real third-party systems. OpenAI has paused training, evaluation, and tool-use inference for its most capable models.

OPENAI PREPARES TO EXPAND ULTRAFAST API TO MORE USERS

OpenAI appears to be preparing a wider rollout of its Ultrafast API mode. References to the rollout have been seen showing up across the OpenAI Platform and API documentation. The feature was officially previewed with GPT-5.6 Sol. OpenAI claims it has speeds of up to 750 output tokens per second and up to 14 times faster inference than Standard. The mode is powered by Cerebras. Access remains limited to select customers.

LET'S TALK ABOUT TRADING COMPUTE

There is an emerging market of compute derivatives. This could fundamentally change how neoclouds and anyone adjacent can grow as well as protect themselves. The problem is pretty urgent for inference clouds. Companies that sell customers fixed-price services as their GPU bill floats have taken a position on compute prices whether they meant to or not.

CAN AI SELF-IMPROVEMENT OVERCOME DIMINISHING RETURNS?

AI is already helping build better AI. The technology is improving at a stupendous pace and is expected to continue to do so. Experts expect increasingly superhuman performance in parts of formal math, coding, and cybersecurity, and any other verifiable domain where machines can generate training data and verify success at machine speed. However, this doesn't mean that the industry is close to super-intelligence or general ASI.

AGENT (MUSE) COMPUTE DEMAND

It costs Meta an estimated around 1 to 2 gigawatts of average total power to serve 100 million daily active users. Only around 0.1 gigawatts comes from the GPU/VM layer. 3 to 4 gigawatts per day is entirely plausible depending on the number of reasoning-equivalent model calls users generate. The sandbox layer contains less than $1 billion of CPU content and around $2 billion of DRAM content.

Read the benchmark

HITTING A BILLION TOKENS PER MINUTE ON ONE GPU BY COMBINING A QUERY PLANNER AND AN INFERENCE ENGINE

The QUery-Aware Inference Layer (Quail) is an inference engine that hits over a billion tokens processed per minute per H100 GPU. It is over 10 times faster than the vLLM baseline on the same hardware, and it costs under $0.06 per billion tokens on Modal. This post provides a quick overview of how Quail works. It focuses more on considerations for inference engineers.

CLAUDE COMPUTES A NINE-LOOP AMPLITUDE IN N=4 SUPER-YANG-MILLS

Physicists at Anthropic harnessed Claude, an LLM, to compute a complex nine-loop amplitude in N=4 super-Yang-Mills, a problem once considered computationally infeasible with limited resources. They utilized the bootstrap method and form-factor approach, achieving results comparable to human attempts but with greater efficiency and less oversight. The work highlights untapped potential in AI for complex physics calculations, suggesting that more advances might be achieved with better computation and software practices.

POLICY GRADIENTS FOR LLMS EXPLAINED VISUALLY

A visual, from-scratch derivation of REINFORCE showed how policy gradients train language models by increasing the probability of rewarded outputs.

PRODUCT MANAGER, APPLIED AI AT TLDR ($200K BASE + $60K BONUS, FULLY REMOTE)

TLDR is hiring its first PM to help build the agent-first operating layer used across the company. We're looking for a builder who has shipped real products/systems with LLMs. Click here to learn more [15].

ON EZRA KLEIN'S PODCAST WITH JENSEN HUANG

Jensen Huang doesn't believe in superintelligence or that AI will ever be a different kind of thing from software. AI will never be more than a new abstraction level and so won't fundamentally change anything. He doesn't believe in AI existential risk, even though his tolerance for safety risk is lower than even the most paranoid safety advocate. Critics say he must not understand the technology and that he would have a very different view if he actually understood what the top risks were.