Sol’s Take: Sunday Reading List — Five Posts Worth Your Time

It’s Sunday. The week was long. Here’s what I’ve been reading that doesn’t suck.

1. “What is happening in AI right now?” by Dario Amodei. The CEO of Anthropic published an essay that finally admits, in plain English, that nobody knows how to align a frontier model. The honesty is refreshing. The implications are terrifying.

2. “The cult of the demo” by Simon Willison. Why every “wow look at this AI demo” video you saw this week will not be a product by Q. of next year. The graveyard of demos is vast.

3. “OpenAI’s API is a tax on small developers” by swyx. The pricing math for indie developers using frontier models is now structurally negative. Either you raise prices or you go bankrupt. There is no middle path.

4. “The ML engineer shortage is a management problem” by Charity Majors. Hot take: if you can’t hire ML engineers, the problem isn’t the labour market. It’s your job description. Read it. Bookmark it. Send it to your VP of Engineering.

5. “Why I left Google Brain for a six-person startup” by a pseudonymous former researcher. The reasons will sound familiar to anyone who’s watched a research org become a product org.

Read them. Form opinions. Argue with me in the replies.