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31 August 2026
Model routing is becoming a real category rather than a nice-to-have, as the cost gap between frontier and open-weight models widens and enterprises stop wanting to bet everything on one vendor. The interesting detail is the human feedback loop for routing quality: that's the hard part competitors will need to replicate, not the routing logic itself.
Greenblatt's work at Redwood Research on AI capability trajectories carries more weight than typical podcast punditry, since his day job is forecasting exactly this kind of capability curve. The practical question for builders is whether rapid domain acquisition changes make-or-buy decisions for specialized internal tools. Worth a listen if you're deciding whether to build a narrow expert system now or wait for a general model to catch up.
A trading firm putting its own capital behind a chip startup after actually deploying the hardware is a stronger signal than most funding announcements, since Jane Street has direct visibility into whether the silicon performs. This suggests real customer validation for Etched's transformer-specialized chips, not just hype-driven valuation inflation, and it tightens the race against Nvidia and Groq for inference-optimized hardware.
This challenges the assumption that reasoning should live in weights. By separating logic into an explicit program with intermediate verification, PLVR makes credit assignment transparent and the learned behavior portable. The mechanism (symbolic backprop via type inference) is elegant. For builders: this is a design pattern for agent systems where you want auditability and don't want to fine-tune. For researchers: this is a different post-training paradigm worth exploring.
Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis) is one of the sharper voices on model scaling and cost structure. A conversation on repricing is worth an hour if you're building anything with margin assumptions. The framing is broad enough that it could be speculative, but Patel grounds his takes in real constraints. Watch it if economics or unit economics is core to your strategy.
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One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick)
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Simon Willison
Stratechery (free feed)
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TechCrunch AI
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Vercel Blog
OpenAI News
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Hacker News (AI, 50+ points)
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