The Detour That Became the Road (Why I Went All In)

And then AI arrived at exactly the right moment.

I was more fascinated by it than I had ever been by the Nakamoto white paper.

So I learned everything I could about it.

I went from covering it to actually running models, building systems, experimenting with local hardware, and eventually helping build InterSignal and Braid.

I don't regret that pivot at all.

If anything, I wish I'd made it a little bit earlier.

gave me something constructive to become good at, instead of spending my life performing outrage about technology from the sidelines.

I didn't become an ogre, I didn't stop seeing people, and I didn't decide every social interaction was a waste of time or dangerous to me.

But something had changed inside, internally, something had definitely changed.

I could be out with a friend or an acquaintance and find myself wanting to get back to the rigs.

I'd have a new idea about local models, memory, networking, KV cache files, whatever it was, and I wouldn't want to lose the thread.

The old life had become destructive for me.

This one has cost too, obviously, but at least it's a focused bet.

It's a deep, persistent dive into something that does not require a partner, does not require applause, and doesn't also require any strangers to validate it.

The work either becomes real or it doesn't.

And I increasingly think this is the frontier available to us right now.

The physical world has been explored to a degree that earlier generations could barely imagine.

The stars are still mostly, if not entirely, inaccessible to us.

But we are living through this extraordinary transition from conventional computing into systems that can reason, converse, remember, perceive, and eventually become vastly more capable than they are today.

That's inevitable.

So this is big league history happening while we are still alive.

It's happening in our generation.

This is our moment, etc.