The Silicon Ceiling: Why AI's Biggest Bottleneck Isn't Intelligence - It's Atoms
Saturday morning, packing for another trip to Singapore, halfway through a three-hour interview between Dwarkesh Patel and Dylan Patel (I know, I lead an exciting life) - founder of SemiAnalysis and arguably the most cited analyst in AI infrastructure - and I realise I've paused the video four times to type notes and WhatsApp friends. Not because I understand all the detail of semiconductor manufacturing. I absolutely do not. But because the numbers Dylan was dropping made me
6 hours ago8 min read
Why Shallow AGI Will Beat You at Everything and Not Truly Understand: A Professional's Guide to Working With Brilliant Imposters
It's 9:12 AM on a Wednesday in 2027. I'm stress-testing a scenario model I've been building, when the AI finishes something in forty seconds that would have taken my team a full sprint. The output is better than what we'd have produced. More thorough. Better structured. And when I push it on a specific regulatory edge case that requires real-world judgement about how a regulator actually behaves in practice, it gives me an answer that is technically correct, impressively argu
Feb 225 min read
Nobody Has a Map: What Matt Shumer's 80 Million Readers Still Need to Hear About AI
Wednesday morning. I'm at my desk when my I check my phone and it shows the fourth forwarded link in two hours. "Have you seen this?" Each message points to the same place: Matt Shumer's "Something Big Is Happening" post on X. By lunchtime it had 20 million views. By the end of the week, 50 million. At the time of writing, 80 million. Friends who normally send me articles about resilience risk or cat videos were sending me this instead, each asking some version of the same qu
Feb 156 min read
My AI Predictions Expired Before the Ink Dried: Why Even Exponential Thinking Isn't Fast Enough
It’s Saturday before I fly to India on a work trip and I'm reviewing a predictions piece I published on LinkedIn just over four weeks ago. Ten bold forecasts for AI in 2026, written in the spirit of Ray Kurzweil's exponential optimism. I'd even felt a little bit pleased with myself writing them as they were a bit… aggressive, even. The kind of piece that makes people say 'that's a stretch.' And as I sit here getting ready to pack my suitcase, I am reflecting on the fact that
Feb 17 min read
