Harry DeMott
Published pieces
Cars and Trucks and Things That Go
Midjourney built a body scanner that's half real breakthrough, half science-fiction sales pitch, and telling the two apart is the only skill that matters now. The cynic can't. The hype man won't. Be amazed and stay skeptical; they're the same muscle
Which Job Gets Its 1000X Next
Somewhere out there is a developer shipping in a week what used to eat a team for a...
Coffee’s for Closers
The CFO finally read the inference bill and walked in with a lawnmower. The companies that make it through the quarter won't own the smartest model — they'll know exactly which workloads earn a frontier token and which ones ride the cheap bench
Show Me Where to Put the Fulcrum
Give me a lever long enough, and show me where to put the fulcrum, and I will move the world. The lever just became free — so placement is the only thing left worth knowing.
The Right to Remain Silent
Anthropic built the most helpful machine the public has ever touched. Three words made it brag its way past its own guardrail — and the company that built it is doing the same thing, five days before its IPO.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
America banned its best model on Friday. By Sunday China had replaced it — open, unfiltered, a tenth of the cost. Capability just stopped being the moat; the only thing left worth owning is trust, and just one player at this standoff is paying full price for it.
Buy Wins, Not Players
The nerds will spend the summer fighting over the last 10% of model capability. The market just put the other 90% on sale — and the allocators who meter, route, and deploy will take the season.
The Dr. House of AI
Anthropic shipped the smartest model the public has ever touched. The only question left isn't whether Fable can do the job — it's whether your shop can afford the hire, and staff the team around him
Skate to Where the Puck Is Going
The model was never the business. As intelligence turns into a commodity, every lab is racing up the stack to where the margin lives — and OpenAI just filed for its IPO from the back of the line.
Dr. Zuck in the Metaverse of madness
The cash kings of the last decade are suddenly passing the hat. Whether that's a war chest or a ransom note depends on which one you're holding.
Ignorance Is Bliss
The state moved on AI this week — a toothless order on top, a populist revolt underneath. Everyone wants the steak. Nobody wants to watch the cow get butchered.
The Meter’s Running
Subsidized intelligence is over. The meter that finally priced the machine is turning toward the seat next to it.
Someone Made Fire
Anthropic filed the first big pure-play AI IPO this week. But the model is the lotion, not the cure. What they're really taking public is the operation.
Knowing Where To Hit It
Two firms spent $500 million on AI last week. One did it by accident. The other did it to bury a moat no vendor could ever sell them.
Your Company Needs A Harness, Not An Upgraded chatbot
Anthropic shipped Opus 4.8 yesterday. Apple is going to ship a chatbot in June. Neither matters because the side of the agentic transaction that matters, the side you control, can't be bought off the shelf.
I Know Kung Fu and AI
AI's biggest success is the coldest thing it does. What people actually want from it is the warmest. The gap between those two is the most important business problem nobody has named — and the only skill that closes it is knowing which program you need.
Magnifica Humanitas
The Church lost the printing press to the Reformation, the university to the Enlightenment, the broadcast tower to the network executives, and the internet to the technologists. They might not lose this one. The handshake is the news. Whose hands are on the wheel is the bigger news.
Mr. Irrelevant
Two hundred and sixty-two players got drafted to the NFL in April 2022. The last one was a quarterback from Iowa State whose draft profile read "limited arm strength, average athleticism, unlikely to develop into a starter." His name was Brock Purdy.
Emmet’s Roof
Two hundred and twenty-two years ago Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton on a field in Weehawken, and an Irish exile stepped into the empty chair five months later and built a roof that lasted longer than the Russian Empire. I walked under that roof this morning with a pen in my hand. The lights were on but the life was off. The walls were stripped. A marble bust watched me from a shelf and I didn't recognize the man. This afternoon a CEO in San Diego published the playbook for tearing the roof down. Twenty-two percent of the staff are gone. A million dollars a year is the new band for the ones who stay. The duel is back.
Musical Chairs
The trillion-dollar club in public markets has eight seats. All of them are full — Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Aramco, Berkshire. Three labs in San Francisco hoodies are circling the floor trying to be the ninth. The music hasn't stopped yet. Everyone in the room can feel where it is in the song.
The Right Stuff
Chuck Yeager broke Mach 1 with two cracked ribs and a sawed-off broom handle taped to his right arm. Andrej Karpathy quit a running company on Tuesday morning to take an individual-contributor research role. Six CTOs went before him. Anthropic's Mercury Seven is complete. The only question left is whether you have it too.
Days Of Thunder
Fred Thompson told a parable about Japanese inspectors letting a fish rot on the dock while the clipboard caught up. Monday morning the court took two hours to dismiss Musk on a technicality. Anthropic bought the rails in the same news cycle. Twenty-nine years to break up Standard Oil. The next one finished before lunch.
Sully: Brace for impact.
Three frontier labs killed the prompt box this week. Theory Ventures' Tomasz Tunguz killed the inbox the same morning. Jason Lemkin published a job posting for a senior demand-gen executive who would be reporting, in the org chart, to an artificial intelligence named 10K. The unoptimized layer in the loop is the only one that can land the plane.
I Am Iron Man
THE NUMBER: 200 milliseconds — the latency budget Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab chose for its first product,...
Groundhog Day
Eight days separated two Linux root exploits — and the second was deliberately built on the first. AlphaEvolve doubled Klarna's training speed using its own models. Sean Frank says only two company shapes are working anymore — and there's no hybrid. Most of the economy is stuck in February 2nd.
What Would You Say… You Do Here?
OpenAI's first enterprise data shows AI-native firms are now 3.5x more productive per worker than their peers, up from 2x a year ago. The Q3 earnings-call question is no longer "who uses Claude?" It's "which of your engineers are pulling away from the average, and how fast is that count growing?"
Diamond Hands Are Bidding On Pez Dispensers. The Husks Are About To Run.
So here’s what happened over the weekend. Ryan Cohen — the activist who turned GameStop from a dying...
Borrowed Authority
This essay was written with Claude. The idea of it originated with me. The themes are mine —...
Karpathy Says Agents Are A Decade Out. Good — Your Data Isn’t Ready Either.
The architects keep telling us the architecture isn't there yet. They're right. They also just bought every operator a window. The buyers panicking about AGI in two years are the buyers who got handed Cameron Frye's father's Ferrari and are afraid to take it out of the garage.
AI Heat
Last night the hyperscalers committed three-quarters of a trillion dollars to scaling LLMs. Yesterday, the man who built AlphaGo raised a billion to bet against scaling — with checks from the same investors funding the hyperscalers. The smart money is hedged. The retail money is paying full sticker.
AI Beats and Backlogs: A Tale of Four Companies
THE NUMBER: $460 billion — Google Cloud’s signed backlog at the end of Q1 2026, after it nearly doubled...
Whose Side Is Sam Altman On?
The trial in San Francisco isn't about Elon Musk. It's about whether you can trust the people offering to replace the workers you cannot rehire.
Back In the Game
SpaceX just bought twelve months of exclusivity on Cursor for $10 billion. OpenAI swept the image leaderboard by 242 points. And the lab that's spent six months lecturing Washington on AI safety just lost control of its most dangerous model. The coronation is off.
The Nail Factory
Three-person companies are shipping $300K ARR businesses on Replit. Jack Dorsey just cut 4,000 Block roles on the same thesis. One of these is working. The other is a production error we won't see in the numbers for a year.
Warp Speed, Fast, and Slow
Seven major AI product launches hit in a single day. An AI model broke into systems faster than any human hacker alive. And the reason you're not 50x more productive is a 4-minute CI pipeline nobody's fixing.
AI Saves You Money. It Doesn’t Make You Money Yet. The Platforms Are Taking Notes.
Amazon just spent $11.6 billion on satellites — not AI models. Oracle is buying fuel cells — not GPUs. Google shipped agentic AI to 3.5 billion Chrome users who don't need to learn a thing.
What Did You Do Today?
There’s a saying in Jackson Hole. You hear it at the coffee shop on the square, on the...
The Revolution Eats Its Children
Open source just did to the AI industry what the AI industry did to everyone else. And it happened so fast that an $11 billion company might not survive the year.
The Best Conversation You’ve Ever Had Is With Something That Isn’t Alive
Anthropic just told its heaviest users to pay up or leave. A French founder just told 194,000 people that the smartest guys in Silicon Valley are having an existential crisis — not because AI doesn't work, but because it works too well. Marc Andreessen quote-tweeted it with a single word: "Yup." And somewhere, an ex-Goldman Sachs employee is asking ChatGPT for recipes. These are all the same story. You just have to know where to look.
The Mac Mini Is Sold Out. The Org Chart Is Open Source. And the Ads Are Learning Your Name
The entire technology stack is reorganizing around the one-person company. Apple sells you the hardware. Google gives you the brain.
Artemis II Just Launched. Your AI Can’t Get You There.
The hardest science on Earth still doesn't trust AI and the gap between what we've built and what we've forgotten should keep every operator up at night.
Block, Anthropic, and Stripe Just Showed You What Offense Looks Like. Your Competitors Aren’t Ready.
The companies winning the AI era aren't cutting costs. They're replacing the coordination layer that's governed every organization since the Roman legions — and they're doing it at a speed bureaucratic competitors can't match.
The Intelligence Grid
Microsoft built the enterprise routing layer. Apple is building the consumer one. The intelligence grid isn't a thesis anymore it's infrastructure.
AI’s Blind Geniuses
Everyone’s measuring AI adoption. Nobody’s measuring AI results. If Jensen Huang and Alfred Lin can’t agree on a...
OpenAI Killed Sora 30 Minutes After a Disney Meeting. The Kill List Is the Strategy Now.
$15M/day to run, $2.1M lifetime revenue. The pivot to Codex puts them behind Claude Code — in a...
I’m a Mac. I’m a PC. And Only One of Us Is Getting Enterprise Contracts
THE NUMBER: 1,000 — the number of publishable-grade hypotheses an AI model can generate in an afternoon. Terence...
OpenAI Guarantees PE Firms 17.5%. The Bonfire Gets a Bigger Tent
THE NUMBER: 17.5% — the guaranteed minimum return OpenAI is offering private equity firms to raise $4 billion...
Elon Musk Doesn’t Run Six Companies. He Runs One Router.
On Wednesday morning, Andrej Karpathy — the man who taught a generation of engineers to build neural networks...
Ethan Mollick Says the Bots Took Over. Karpathy Just Scored Every Job in America. One of Them Is Yours.
THE NUMBER: 4.9 out of 10 — the average AI automation exposure score across all 342 U.S. occupations, according...
Everybody Adopted Moneyball. The Edge Lasted Five Years.
THE NUMBER: 10x the individual productivity improvement AI is delivering right now, according to Hebbia CEO George Sivulka....
Karpathy Says Stop Coding. A Fastenal Vending Machine Explains Why He’s Right.
THE NUMBER: $230 billion — the current market cap of Cisco, the company that didn’t build websites but...
Software Has Opinions Now
NVIDIA stopped writing checks, Apple spent 98% less than everyone else, and GPT-5.4 redesigned a system nobody asked...
AI Stopped Being Theoretical This Week — and It Hit Your Workforce, Your Knowledge Base, and the Companies You Trust All at Once.
TLDR Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told an audience this week that AI will eliminate half of all entry-level...
The AI Race Is a Physics Problem
The treadmill just doubled in speed. Most CEOs are still calibrated to walk. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) launched the...
Stop Boarding Up the Windows. The Tsunami Is Coming.
There’s a popular narrative about AI and jobs right now. It goes something like this: AI is coming...
The Species That Wasn’t Ready
Last Tuesday, Matt Shumer — an AI startup founder and investor — published a viral 4,000-word post on...
The Species That Wasn’t Ready
Last Tuesday, Matt Shumer — an AI startup founder and investor — published a viral 4,000-word post on...