AI Opinion & Analysis
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.
Read enough launch posts and you notice something strange: every new model is state of the art. All of them. Simultaneously. That cannot be true, and yet each chart is technically honest. Welcome to the benchmark wars, where nobody is exactly lying and almost everyone is being misled, gently, on purpose.
There is a huge industry teaching people how to use AI: prompt courses, tool roundups, productivity threads without end. Almost nobody teaches the skill that is quietly becoming more valuable than any of them: knowing when not to use it. In 2026, the people doing the best work are not the ones using AI the most. They are the ones who know when to close the tab.
Read more: The most useful AI skill in 2026 is knowing when to turn it off
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
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