AI Opinion & Analysis
Open almost any app you used happily a year ago and there is a new little sparkle icon in the corner, promising an AI assistant you did not ask for and probably will not use. The bolt-on chatbot is the defining product decision of the year, and I think it is quietly making a lot of software worse. I say this as someone who loves the underlying technology.
Read more: What we lose when every product bolts on a chatbot
Every few weeks someone asks me if AI is a bubble, usually hoping I will pick a team. Yes or no, hype or real, tulips or telephones. I find the question a little boring, because the honest answer is that it is obviously both, and the useful conversation starts only after you accept that.
For a long time the comforting story about AI went like this: sure, it can crunch numbers and play chess, but it will never do the human things, the creative things, the intuitive things. That was the line, repeated confidently, for years. I want to gently point out that the line keeps moving, and it is moving in a direction that deserves more honesty than it usually gets.
Read more: AI is getting good at the things we were told it never would
I want to make a small, cranky request on behalf of clear thinking everywhere: stop calling everything an agent. The word has been stretched so far that it now means anything from a genuinely autonomous system to a chatbot that calls one API. When a word means everything, it means nothing, and the fuzziness is not an accident. It is marketing.
Every model launches with a splashy chart and a breathless thread. Almost nobody reads the boring document that ships alongside it, the model card, with its dull sections on training data, limitations, and known failure modes. I read them, every time, and I think it is one of the highest-value habits you can build in this field. Here is why.
Read more: Why I still read the model cards nobody else reads