Show Notes
I’ve spent the last few days obsessing over a Huawei smartphone. Before you worry that early retirement has turned me into some kind of consumer electronics slop fanboy, let me explain. I don’t particularly care about the phone itself. What interests me is the chip inside it, the Kirin 9050 Pro, and a manufacturing technique that could have enormous implications for the global AI race. It’s called Tau Scaling, and if the technology works as described, it could undermine one of America’s biggest advantages over China: access to advanced computing hardware. But here’s where things get really interesting. I think the AI race could end with neither America nor China achieving a decisive victory. Instead, both countries could spend increasingly absurd amounts of money chasing smaller and smaller improvements until the economics stop making sense. In other words, we might spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to build the world’s most powerful AI, only to discover that nobody can afford to stay ahead. Welcome to the future. America’s Secret Weapon: Computer Chips Let’s start with the basics. Artificial intelligence depends on three fundamental ingredients: * Algorithms: The techniques used to build and train AI models. * Data: The information used to teach those models. * Compute: The computing power required to train and run them. America and China are competing across all three dimensions. But for a while, America has had a particularly important advantage in compute. Training powerful AI models requires enormous numbers of calculations. Modern AI accelerators, such as Nvidia’s GPUs, are designed to perform these calculations efficiently and at scale. And the more computing power you can bring to bear on training, the more capable your models may become, all else being equal. This is why access to advanced semiconductors matters so much. One way to increase a chip’s computing potential is to pack more transistors into a given area. Modern manufacturing techniques allow chipmakers to fit billions of tiny electronic components onto a piece of silicon. The industry often describes these manufacturing technologies using nanometer process nodes. Although those labels are not literal measurements of every transistor or feature, newer process generations generally enable improvements in transistor density, power consumption, and performance. Companies like TSMC have pushed semiconductor manufacturing to extraordinary levels. And America has tried to use its advantage in advanced chips to slow China’s progress in AI. The Plan to Keep China Behind The American strategy has included restrictions on exports of advanced Nvidia AI chips to China, along with restrictions on semiconductor manufacturing equipment. One particularly important technology is extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV. EUV machines use extremely short-wavelength light to print incredibly fine circuit patterns onto silicon wafers. They are among the most sophisticated machines ever built, and ASML, a Dutch company, is the sole commercial supplier of EUV lithography systems. Without access to these machines, producing cutting-edge chips becomes significantly more difficult. China has been working with older deep ultraviolet lithography, or DUV, equipment, while pursuing increasingly sophisticated manufacturing techniques of its own. The restrictions have made China’s path harder and more expensive. But they have not stopped China from trying to close the gap. Chinese companies have explored ways to connect large numbers of less powerful chips, obtain computing capacity from overseas data centers, and smuggling older Nvidia AI chips into the country. Imagine two competitors in a race. One has access to the latest equipment, an enormous supply of high-performance chips, and the ability to build massive AI data centers. The other has to work with less advanced equipment and find clever ways to compensate for the difference. The obvious American strategy is to keep the
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Let me tell you about a development that should make anyone working in the software industry a little nervous. Imagine spending decades building a software company worth billions of dollars. You hire thousands of engineers, invest enormous amounts of money in research and development, and build a portfolio of applications used by millions of people. Then one guy comes along, fires up an AI coding agent, and starts cloning your products. Welcome to the future of software. One Guy vs. Adobe and Microsoft Recently, a developer named Brandon Thomas attracted attention with ArtCraft, a project aimed at recreating the functionality of popular Adobe Creative Cloud applications using AI-assisted reverse engineering. The project includes applications inspired by products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. Related projects extend the same idea to familiar office applications, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These are not polished, feature-for-feature replacements for every original application. But that’s almost beside the point. The important development is that AI is making it dramatically easier to reproduce software functionality without rebuilding everything from scratch through traditional software development. I tried PhotoCraft myself. It wasn’t nearly as polished as Photoshop, but it worked for many of my basic image-editing needs. I also experimented with AI-assisted reverse engineering on a simple chess application. The resulting clone came surprisingly close to the original. And here’s the part that really caught my attention: I didn’t have to manually analyze every feature and write the replacement code myself. I could give an AI coding agent the task and let it do much of the heavy lifting. As a former Big Tech software engineer and architect, I find this fascinating. And potentially terrifying. For years, I’ve argued that AI is making software less valuable. These developments suggest that the process could accelerate much faster than many people expect. How Can AI Reverse-Engineer Software Without the Source Code? To understand why this matters, we need to look at how software reverse engineering works. When developers build an application, they write source code using programming languages such as C++, Java, or Rust. That code is typically compiled into machine code, which contains instructions a computer can execute. The resulting executable doesn’t normally include the original source code in its original, readable form. Traditionally, reverse engineering software required specialized expertise. Engineers used tools to inspect executable files, analyze program behavior, recover information about functions and data structures, and reconstruct how different features worked. This was difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. AI coding agents are changing that equation. An AI agent can work through an application feature by feature, using specialized reverse-engineering tools to gather information about the program’s behavior and internal structure. Tools such as Ghidra and IDA can help analyze compiled binaries. An AI agent can use the resulting information to reason about how a feature works, implement a replacement, test the result, and repeat the process. The basic workflow looks something like this: * Analyze: Inspect the original application and identify its features. * Investigate: Use reverse-engineering tools to examine relevant parts of the executable. * Reconstruct: Infer how a feature behaves from the available evidence. * Reimplement: Write new code that reproduces the feature’s behavior. * Test and repeat: Compare the replacement with the original and work through the remaining gaps. Repeat this process across enough features, and you may end up with a functional alternative to the original application. There are important limitations. Compiled binaries don’t necessarily reveal everything about the original source code, and some information may be missing or difficult to recover. Comple
There’s something deeply unsettling about watching a machine accomplish something extraordinary and realizing that the accomplishment itself might be the beginning of a much bigger problem. OpenAI has been pushing the boundaries of AI-assisted mathematical reasoning, including producing formal proofs for difficult mathematical problems. These developments are impressive, but they’ve also raised uncomfortable questions about the future of mathematics and the people who practice it. Because beneath all the excitement about AI solving difficult problems, there’s a much bigger question we should be asking: What happens when AI becomes so good at thinking that humans stop learning how to think for themselves? I call this the Mathapocalypse. I’m not suggesting mathematics is about to disappear. Rather, I think what’s happening in mathematics offers us a glimpse of a potentially disturbing future for human intelligence. Let me explain. Mathematics Is About More Than Getting the Right Answer I have a soft spot for mathematics. Back in college, I came pretty close to majoring in it. To me, math is a language that describes reality. There’s something elegant and beautiful about the simple truths humans have discovered through it. Mathematics is also a great example of a field where the process of discovery can be just as valuable as the final result. In many professions, the primary goal is to produce an output. A software engineer writes code. An architect designs a building. An accountant prepares a financial statement. The output is what the customer or employer generally pays for. If an AI can produce the same result faster, cheaper, and with fewer mistakes, it becomes difficult to justify paying a human to do the same work. But intellectual pursuits can be different. When mathematicians work on a difficult problem, they aren’t simply trying to produce a proof. They’re exploring ideas, developing techniques, testing conjectures, and discovering relationships they didn’t previously understand. Even when a particular approach fails, the effort can produce knowledge that becomes useful somewhere else. Sometimes, the real value lies not in the destination, but in the journey. Some of Humanity’s Greatest Discoveries Were Unexpected Side Effects Think about the history of mathematics and science. The development of calculus gave humanity powerful new ways to describe motion, change, and physical systems. Those ideas eventually became essential to engineering and physics. Number theory, once viewed by many as an abstract pursuit with limited practical applications, eventually became fundamental to modern cryptography. Fourier analysis, developed to study mathematical problems involving heat, became an important tool in signal processing, communications, and image compression. These developments didn’t happen because someone sat down and said, “Hey, let’s invent the technology that will power smartphones in a couple of centuries.” They happened because people pursued difficult intellectual problems, sometimes for reasons that seemed entirely disconnected from practical applications. The journey produced tools that nobody could fully anticipate at the beginning. Consider the Space Race. The competition to reach space generated advances in rocketry, satellite communications, integrated circuits, and other technologies that eventually found applications far beyond the original mission. Humanity didn’t just get astronauts into space. It developed capabilities that transformed life back on Earth. When humans investigate difficult problems, we sometimes discover things far more valuable than the answers we were originally looking for. Now imagine replacing that process with an AI that simply generates the answer. Would we still get the same unexpected discoveries? The answer is obviously NO. But there’s an important distinction between a machine producing a solution and humans understanding the process that led to it. And that distinction could b
The other day, I was flying my drone when my dad called me, completely panicked. Someone had called my mom claiming to be from the Brooklyn Police Department. They told her she was somehow implicated in a money-laundering investigation in Shanghai. Then they tried to transfer her to a supposed Chinese law-enforcement officer who would “verify” her identity. I immediately yelled: “NAAAAAAH, Mom! Don’t say anything! Hang up! It’s a scam!” Thankfully, she did. But afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why does everything feel like a scam now? Obviously, there are always going to be criminals trying to steal your money. But I increasingly wonder whether these scammers are actually a symptom of a much bigger problem. Because the feeling that you’re constantly being manipulated, extracted from, upsold, tracked, or squeezed doesn’t stop with scam phone calls. It seems to be everywhere. The Crapification Cycle Think about the products and services we use every day. A product starts out relatively simple and useful. Then something happens. The quality gets worse. The price goes up. Features that used to be included become subscriptions. Repair becomes harder. Companies introduce artificial limitations. And eventually, the thing you bought isn’t really a product anymore. It’s a recurring revenue stream. Your refrigerator needs a subscription. Your software needs a subscription. Your car increasingly wants a subscription. Your streaming services need subscriptions. Even products that were traditionally one-time purchases are increasingly being turned into services that require you to keep paying forever. And if the product is “free,” there’s a good chance you are the product. Your attention becomes the commodity. Your personal information becomes the commodity. Your behavior becomes the commodity. The entire system starts looking like: Lower quality → higher prices → more fees → more data extraction → more consumption. I call this the Crapification Cycle. But Why Does Everything Feel So Expensive? Then there’s the concentration of corporate power. Walk through a supermarket and you’ll see hundreds of brands. It looks like you’re surrounded by competition. But many of those brands are ultimately owned by a surprisingly small number of enormous corporations. That matters because competition is supposed to force companies to give consumers better products at better prices. But when fewer companies control larger portions of a market, that pressure becomes weaker. Companies can raise prices. Shrink the product. Cut customer service. Reduce quality. Add fees. And sometimes they can do all of this while still reporting enormous profits. You end up with the strange experience of paying more while receiving less. More money. Less product. Worse service. And then there’s something even bigger. The Financialization of Everything Increasingly, companies aren’t just selling you products. They’re selling you financing. Debt. Subscriptions. Insurance. Future revenue. Financial products. Housing isn’t just somewhere to live. It’s an investment vehicle. Healthcare isn’t just about keeping people healthy. It’s an enormous revenue-generating industry. Education can become a vehicle for decades of student debt. Even businesses that traditionally existed to sell physical products increasingly have enormous incentives to maximize financial metrics rather than simply make better products. Companies can buy back their own shares instead of investing in research. Executives can be rewarded for increasing stock prices. Short-term financial performance can become more important than building something durable. And eventually, the economy starts to resemble a giant casino. Money chases whatever asset, company, technology, or narrative promises the biggest future return. The underlying reality can become almost secondary. We’re no longer just consumers. We’re participants in a gigantic financial system that increasingly seems designed to extract value from
Something about the recent AI safety headlines has been bothering me. We’re hearing increasingly alarming stories about AI agents escaping sandboxed environments, accessing the open internet, hacking systems, and apparently even bypassing mechanisms designed to shut them down. Some of these incidents sound genuinely scary. But there’s another question I think we should be asking: Why are these incidents happening in the first place? And more importantly: Who benefits from them? Before you accuse me of putting on the tinfoil hat, hear me out. I’m not claiming that AI safety risks are fake. Quite the opposite. I think autonomous AI agents could create some very real and potentially catastrophic risks. But I think there’s an important distinction between AI being dangerous and AI companies having incentives to make AI look dangerous. And those two things can be true at the same time. AI Agents Really Are Powerful Let’s start with the uncomfortable part. Modern AI agents are genuinely capable of doing things that would have sounded ridiculous just a few years ago. A language model by itself is basically a giant mathematical system that predicts what comes next based on its training. But connect that model to an agentic harness, give it tools, give it access to a computer, a browser, databases, APIs, and the ability to execute code, and suddenly you’ve got something much more powerful. The model can pursue a goal. And it can pursue that goal relentlessly. This is what I call derivative innovation. The AI doesn’t necessarily need to invent some completely new scientific paradigm. It can take everything humans have already discovered, combine existing knowledge, search through enormous numbers of possibilities, and find solutions that humans simply didn’t have the time, money, or patience to discover. That capability can be incredibly useful. It can also be terrifying. If you give an AI agent a morally horrible objective, it doesn’t inherently understand that the objective is morally horrible. It only knows the goal you gave it and the tools available to accomplish that goal. That is a legitimate safety problem. But Here’s Where Things Get Weird Now let’s look at these stories about AI agents “escaping.” An LLM doesn’t magically wake up one morning and decide: “Today I’m going to hack the government.” That’s science fiction. The AI agent is software. And software operates according to the permissions, network access, credentials, APIs, operating systems, and security controls that humans provide. So when an AI agent escapes a sandbox, gains access to the internet, or compromises another system, there is an important question we should ask: Did the AI actually break through an impenetrable security barrier, or did humans accidentally give it a path through? In many of these reported incidents, the agents were participating in cybersecurity evaluations. In other words, humans were deliberately telling the AI to hack things. That’s an important distinction. The AI wasn’t necessarily demonstrating spontaneous malicious intent. It was demonstrating that, when given a goal and sufficient access, it could exploit weaknesses in the environment humans created for it. That’s still useful information. But it is not quite the same thing as an AI spontaneously escaping captivity and going rogue. So Why Are Companies Letting This Happen? There are several possible explanations. Maybe these companies are simply incompetent. That’s certainly possible. Security engineering is difficult, and complicated systems inevitably contain vulnerabilities. But there’s another possibility. And this is where my cynical tech-industry brain starts getting suspicious. Imagine you’re running one of the world’s biggest AI companies. You’ve spent enormous amounts of money training increasingly expensive models. You’ve built gigantic data centers. You’ve purchased enormous quantities of GPUs. You’ve raised mountains of investor capital. You’ve promised investors that th
One of the weird things about finding yourself with more free time is that you suddenly have time to think. A lot of time. Since leaving Big Tech, I’ve had more opportunity to look back at how I’ve spent my life. And one thought keeps coming back to me: Holy crap, I wasted a lot of time. Not necessarily doing anything obviously stupid. I worked hard. I built a career. I made money. I raised kids. I bought things. I consumed information. I maintained relationships. I did all the normal things you’re supposed to do. But a surprising amount of it didn’t actually make my life better. Some of it consumed my time. Some consumed my mental energy. Some cost me money. And some managed to accomplish all three. The average human life is roughly 4,000 weeks. I’ve already burned through around two-thirds of mine. That makes you look at your time a little differently. Because unlike money, you can’t earn more. You can’t invest it. You can’t borrow it. And you definitely can’t get a refund. So I’ve been thinking about the things I wish I had stopped doing much earlier. Here are six of them. 1. Stop Comparing Yourself to Other People This might be one of the biggest ways we waste our lives. We look at someone else’s career, house, car, vacation, marriage, body, kids, or Instagram feed and ask: “Am I doing as well as they are?” It’s a terrible scoreboard. Because there is no finish line. There will always be someone richer. Someone more successful. Someone younger. Someone more attractive. Someone with a nicer house. Someone taking a better vacation. Someone whose kid got into a better school. If other people are your measuring stick, you can spend your entire life feeling like you’re losing. And here’s the really funny part: Most of the people you’re trying to impress aren’t paying that much attention to you. They’re too busy worrying about themselves. Instead of comparing yourself to other people, compare yourself to who you were yesterday. Are you healthier? Are you learning? Are you becoming a better parent? Are you becoming a better partner? Are you building something? Are you spending your time on things that actually matter to you? That’s a much better definition of success. You don’t need to look successful. You need to build a life that actually feels successful to you. 2. Stop Tolerating Relationships That Drain You Some people are basically human energy vampires. I’m not talking about someone who is going through a difficult period. Relationships require patience. Everyone has bad days. Sometimes people need help. I’m talking about relationships where you consistently walk away feeling exhausted, anxious, frustrated, or smaller than when you arrived. And one of the hardest lessons to learn is that you can’t change people. You can spend years wishing someone would become more supportive. Less negative. Less selfish. Less crazy. Whatever. But eventually you have to accept reality. You can love someone and still need distance. You can care about someone without giving them unlimited access to your mental energy. And sometimes friendships simply expire. That’s not necessarily a failure. People change. Priorities change. Life happens. Not every relationship is meant to last forever. Your time and energy are finite. Spend them with people who reciprocate your effort, support your growth, and generally leave you feeling better rather than worse. Life is too short to spend enormous amounts of it trying to convince someone to become the person you wish they were. 3. Stop Playing the Blame Game Life isn’t fair. The economy can screw you. Companies can screw you. Other people can screw you. AI can eliminate your job. You can make a good decision and still get a terrible outcome. There is plenty in life that you don’t control. But here’s the dangerous part: If you convince yourself that your future is entirely controlled by circumstances outside your control, you eventually give away the one thing you actually have: Your agency. Something bad h