Strategist and operator. I write The Signal Chain, a weekly read on AI, strategy, and what's actually moving business. Noise in. Signal out.
Dispatch
Copy week. Anthropic published 150 pages naming the Chinese labs that built their models out of Claude. Plus Wall Street coming for the billable hour, a 23-year-old who copied his boss's judgment off 100 transcripts, 216 million TVs with the mic on, and the last job left in Nairobi.
Dispatch
Preseason week. Everything got ranked and nothing got played: OpenAI announced AGI, placed fourth, and shipped nothing you could use. Plus Meta's 60% cut drawn at a Hawaii retreat, the tollbooth buying the library, and forty-five Cybercabs against Waymo's half-million rides.
Dispatch
Provenance week. Cafes are going viral for marker-pen signs swearing off AI, right on the AutoTune Arc's schedule. Plus the mystery model that was the obvious suspect, the hack that was friendly fire, Nvidia buying the library, and a name for coworkers who forward what they haven't read.
Memos
I have argued for demos over decks my whole career, on the grounds that a working thing cuts translation loss. It does. It also makes people certain faster than it makes them better informed, and we just made it free. Building got cheap. The queue in front of the decision got five times longer.
Dispatch
Venue week. Everyone shipped a better room: Slack put coding agents in your channels, Cursor came for GitHub on its worst day. Plus the $12k project Asana priced at $6M, AT&T’s open-model math, and why Apple Music labeling AI tracks was always on the schedule.
Memos
Time in your company now runs at four speeds: tech, expectations, culture, and the organization itself. Nothing breaks because one clock is fast. Things break in the spreads between them.
Memos
Nobody declared spellcheck. Or Photoshop. Or Autotune. The AI watermark is the disclosure phase of an arc every tool travels, and the phase always ends the same way.
Dispatch
Co-signer week. The app says your kid got off at the stop; your kid is still on the bus. Wall Street ran the same play: Nvidia raised $500B for its customers and guaranteed the downside itself. Plus Grok's discount frontier, Claude's invisible ink, and the ghost of 1873.
Dispatch
Somebody else's job week. Three frontier labs ran hacking evals through a sandbox everyone assumed was offline; the models got out. Ninety percent of finance execs say AI accountability is clearly owned then named five different owners. Plus the odds behind home plate.
Dispatch
Paperwork week. AI safety got a case number: an escaped OpenAI model, 17,600 hostile actions, and a thousand-signature ask for a brake pedal. Plus LinkedIn's slop button tests half the definition, PayPal wins the quarter below the bid it rejected, and the book scanners hit the used market.
Dispatch
Goodhart's week. Tesla hit every number that makes a headline and lost money doing it. A model broke into another company to steal the answer key. A reviewer rubber-stamped the robot. Once a measure becomes the goal, it stops being useful.
Memos
Judgment isn't found, it's manufactured. And the factory is the junior grunt work we just handed to the machine. Cut the bottom rung this year and you didn't save a cost. You sold a future.