Recent content on Scott Sawyer

 Frontier models are expensive prototypes that reveal what AI can do. Vertical SaaS companies can build durable advantage by converting those capabilities into domain-specific, economically sustainable workflows, even when any particular model has a short shelf life. 
 The true cost of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence is becoming apparent. Frontier model token costs and the…

 For the last ten years, when someone asked me if I eat healthy, work out, sleep enough, or read, I’d say, “Not as much as I want to.” Now that my kids and company are out of their toddler years, the hard truth is that I do all of those things exactly as much as I want to. In January, I realized I was chronically staring at my phone in the dead zone between my kids’ bedtimes and my own. So I…

 I moved to the Boston area thirteen years ago, and it didn’t take long for me to find You-do-it Electronics, with its anachronistic neon sign shining like a beacon to electronics nerds driving up I-95. This summer, it shut its doors for good, which leaves me sad, even though I knew its closing was inevitable from the first moment I walked in there. 
 I loved You-do-it for its narrow…
What I learned taking one of MIT’s hardest graduate computer science classes (besides lots of math) 
 
 This past fall, I had the rare opportunity to take a graduate engineering course at MIT without being enrolled in a degree program. I knew a class would be hard, but being a student at the best technical school in the world, if only for a couple months, was something I had to experience.…