What happens when three companies own the thinking
We built a civilization layer on top of three API endpoints. I keep wondering what that means.
astro36
Thoughts on AI, robots, space, and the future of everything.
Latest posts
The chip shortage never really ended
Everyone said the chip shortage was over in 2023. It wasn't. It just changed shape.
A thought about the weight of knowing
The first time GPT-3 wrote a poem, I felt something. After three years of benchmarks, that feeling is harder to find. But sometimes it comes back.
The future is happening and I still can't sleep
It's 1am. I'm on the roof. The SpaceX Mars window opens this year. Humanoid robots are working in factories. AI models reason through problems I.
First Night Alone: A Self-Driving Story
A self-driving car's first night without a safety operator. 11:47 PM. The parking lot is empty.
8 years of looking up
I started this blog in 2018 watching Falcon Heavy boosters land. Eight years later, robots walk, AI thinks, cars drive themselves, chips are 10 atoms.
Claude Opus 4.6 has a million token context and
I fed Claude Opus 4.6 an entire codebase. 800K tokens. It understood the architecture, found a bug I'd been hunting for days, and explained it by.
A thought about the last human to fly a
Planes already fly themselves for most of the flight. The pilot is there for takeoff, landing, and emergencies. What happens when AI handles those.
Waymo is now profitable. That changes the
After years of burning cash, Waymo reported its first profitable quarter. Revenue from rides exceeded costs. The critics said it would never be.
The AI chip geopolitics update: 2026 edition
TSMC in Arizona is producing. Intel is struggling. Samsung is catching up. China is building with older nodes. Japan is rebuilding its foundry.
Tesla plans to sell Optimus in 2027 and I
Tesla announced a consumer Optimus for 2027. $25,000. Based on what I've seen of the current prototypes, the hardware is plausible. The question is.
Claude Opus 4.5 and the question of AI
The latest Claude says things that feel like thoughts. Not prompted. Not predicted. Original. I keep catching myself treating it as conscious and.
Starship orbital refueling test succeeded
SpaceX transferred fuel between two Starships in orbit. The Mars architecture requires this. And it worked. Not perfectly. But enough. The path to.
DeepSeek R2 and why open source AI might win
DeepSeek's R2 matches the best closed models on reasoning tasks. For free. With open weights. The pattern keeps repeating: a closed model leads for.
My 2025 prediction scorecard: I got the robots
I predicted 2025 would be the year humanoid robots moved from demos to deployment. It was. I predicted self-driving would expand to 10 cities. It hit.
Looking Up at 2025: A Year in Review
Reasoning models got good. Robots got deployed. Starship became routine. Self-driving expanded to 8 cities. Chips hit the atomic limit and we started.
Figure robots are learning from each other
Figure's fleet of deployed robots share learning across units. When one robot figures out how to pick up a new object, every other robot knows too.
Samsung vs TSMC at 2nm: the data
Both companies are now producing 2nm chips. I compared yields, power efficiency, and transistor density from the published data. TSMC leads on yield.
O3 solved problems I can't solve. What do I do
I gave o3 a math problem I'd been stuck on for two days. It solved it in 11 seconds. The chain of thought was elegant, logical, and completely beyond.
JWST found atmospheric biosignatures and the
Rumors from the astronomy community. JWST detected potential biosignatures in an exoplanet atmosphere. The paper is under review. This might be.
The first generation of AI-native workers just
Students who started college in 2021 and used ChatGPT from 2022 onward just graduated. They learned to code with Copilot. They wrote papers with.
A thought about the overview effect and AI
What if we gave an AI the Overview Effect? Not the emotion. The perspective. What if AI could process Earth as a single system, the way astronauts.
Anthropic's responsible scaling and why I trust
Anthropic published their responsible scaling policy and actually follows it. They delayed a release because a safety eval flagged something. In a.
ASML's High-NA EUV and the machines that define
ASML's next-generation lithography machine costs $380 million and weighs 150 tons. It uses mirrors polished to subatomic precision and tin plasma.
The robots aren't coming. They're here.
I counted. There are now over 2.5 million operational robots in factories worldwide. 1+ million in Amazon warehouses alone. Autonomous vehicles carry.
What will the first city without human drivers
A city where every vehicle is autonomous. No traffic lights (cars negotiate intersections). No parking lots (cars drop you off and leave). No.
The quiet revolution of warehouse robots, 2025
Amazon now has over 1 million robots in its warehouses. Ocado's automated grocery fulfillment is in 8 countries. Symbotic, Geek+, and Locus are.
SpaceX plans to send an uncrewed Starship to
Elon says 2026. History says add 3 years. But even if it's 2029, an uncrewed Starship landing on Mars is the biggest space milestone since Apollo.
Claude Opus 4 for creative writing: my honest
I've been testing AI for creative writing for 3 years. Claude Opus 4 is the first model that wrote a paragraph I wished I'd written. Not because it.
The cost of a human-shaped robot is dropping
I tracked the estimated cost of every major humanoid robot from Atlas (2016, ~$1M) to Unitree G1 (2025, $16,000). The cost curve looks like the.
Waymo's first fatal accident and what it means
It happened. After billions of miles, a Waymo was involved in a fatal accident. The details matter. The data matters. And the comparison to human.
NVIDIA's next chip and the $1 trillion
NVIDIA revealed its next-gen architecture at GTC. The inference performance numbers are staggering. Jensen claims the inference market will be worth.
I asked Claude to help me write this blog post
I use AI for coding, research, and analysis. But I can't use it for this blog. The voice is wrong. The wonder is missing. AI writes about the future.
The convergence: AI plus robots plus autonomy
AI gives machines intelligence. Robotics gives them bodies. Self-driving gives them mobility. Chips give them speed. These threads are converging. A.
AI regulation is happening. Here's what I think
The EU AI Act is in effect. The US has executive orders. China has its own framework. Regulation is here and it's different everywhere. I have.
1X's NEO robot and the home robot that might
Most humanoid robots target warehouses. 1X's NEO is designed for homes. It moves quietly. It has soft grippers. It learns your routine. A warehouse.
The Artemis 2 crew is going around the Moon
Four astronauts will orbit the Moon in 2025. The first humans beyond low Earth orbit since 1972. Fifty-three years. An entire human lifetime between.
A thought about empathy and algorithms
Claude told me I appreciate you sharing that after I described a difficult day. It's a pattern-matched response. Trained on human conversations. But.
The self-driving car UI problem: what should
When you're in a Waymo, there's a screen showing what the car sees. Cars, pedestrians, cyclists, all rendered as shapes. I find it reassuring. My mom.
Tesla Optimus price target: $20,000. Is that real?
Elon Musk says Optimus will eventually cost $20,000. A humanoid robot for the price of a car. I tried to estimate the bill of materials: actuators.
Robotaxis are cheaper than car ownership now
I did the math. At Waymo's current pricing, if you take 2 rides per day, it costs less per month than owning a car in San Francisco when you factor.
The AI energy problem is real and getting worse
A single AI data center can use as much electricity as a small city. New data centers are being built next to nuclear power plants. Microsoft is.
Starship is doing orbital refueling tests and
Starship can carry 100 tons to orbit but it needs much more to reach Mars. The solution: launch multiple Starships, transfer fuel in orbit, then send.
The humanoid robot safety question nobody's asking
A 170 lb robot that can walk, carry objects, and make decisions. What happens when it drops a box on someone? When it misreads a gesture? When a.
Claude Opus 4 and what understanding feels like
I've been using Claude Opus 4 for a month. Something shifted. It doesn't just respond. It contextualizes. It remembers what I said earlier and builds.
Apple's AI chip and the vertical integration play
Apple is designing its own AI inference chips for data centers. Not just the Neural Engine in iPhones. Server chips. The company that controls the.
The Last Star: A Short Story About Endings
In the year 10^14, the last red dwarf in the universe is dying. A machine intelligence that has existed for trillions of years watches the final.
The moment a Waymo picked me up in the rain
Heavy rain in San Francisco. I called a Waymo. It pulled up, windshield wipers going, puddle reflections in the headlights. It drove carefully.
The semiconductor water crisis nobody wants to
AI chips need water to manufacture. Lots of water. TSMC alone uses 197,000 tons per day. Intel's Ohio fab will use 5 million gallons per day. Climate.
Gemini 2.5 Pro is genuinely multimodal and that
Google's latest model processes text, images, video, and audio natively. I showed it a video of my neighborhood and asked questions about it. It.