A proof of concept is a bill for the part you didn't finish
Buyers ask for a proof of concept when they don't believe the outer rings exist — completeness is what removes it.
Nobody asks a utility for a proof of concept.
Some of these are teasers for pieces published elsewhere — those link out. Some are standalone notes: something that turned up at work, or that I worked out and wanted written down. Each one carries its finding up front, so the page is worth reading without clicking anything.
Nothing filed under that yet.
Buyers ask for a proof of concept when they don't believe the outer rings exist — completeness is what removes it.
Nobody asks a utility for a proof of concept.
WordNet lists 24 senses of the word "order" — 15 nouns and 9 verbs. In the nineties we resolved that by hand; a model now reads it off the surrounding sentence.
My first real project was EDI at Heineken, in 1995 or 1996 — I'd have to check which. Electronic data interchange: moving orders and invoices between companies that had never agreed on what anything was called. What I ended up building, we'd now call a semantic database. We didn't have the phrase for it at the time.
Levitt's model has four rings and you only build one of them — the other three belong to your ecosystem.
"We can do that."
More than 30 million paid Copilot seats against a commercial base Microsoft put at 450 million — roughly 7%, three years in.
Microsoft 365 Copilot came in at more than 30 million paid seats, up from more than 20 million three months earlier. That's strong growth. Now put it next to the other number: a commercial base Microsoft put at 450 million back in January. Call it 7%, three years in — while 44% of US adults have used ChatGPT at least once.
Frontier agents passed about a quarter of 1,500+ expert tasks across 55 occupations — useful, nowhere near unsupervised.
"Agent" is currently the most-used and least-defined word in tech. The definition I use: software you give a goal instead of instructions. "Book me a flight to Chicago Tuesday" is a goal. Open the app, search, compare, pick, pay — those are instructions, and until now they were your job.
The best voice model on earth shipped two features that argue against its own story — it delegates the reasoning, and it renders cards on your screen.
Every voice launch gets read the same way. Voice is about to eat every interface, type less, talk more, watch the screen disappear.
ElevenLabs went from $330M to $500M in ARR in five months — and nobody is pricing voice as telecom anymore.
The Substack piece is the patient version. Short of it: voice came back because the models stopped running a relay race — one turns speech into text, one writes a reply, one reads it back, each waiting its turn — and started listening and talking at once. That's the unlock. Everything else follows from it.
Four panels, eleven buttons visible at once, and a cheat sheet taped to the monitor after three months on the job.
Four panels. Eleven buttons visible at once. A text field labeled "notes" jammed into the bottom left corner. Three months into the job and the agent still kept a cheat sheet taped to her monitor to remember which button did what.
Notes here take replies on LinkedIn. Pieces published on Substack take theirs in the comments there, where the conversation already is. New pieces go out on Substack. There is one list, and it lives there.