Artificial intelligence has passed the point of novelty inside most companies. Pilots exist. Tools are licensed. Experiments are underway. Yet the returns remain uneven, and in many cases disappointing. The reason is not model quality or compute costs. It is a framing problem. Most organizations still think about AI in terms of tools. The companies seeing [ ]
When people say AI is becoming “political,” many immediately think of elections, content moderation, or culture-war controversies. That is not what matters most. What is about to become political—very quickly—is control: control over compute, data, energy, standards, and the rules that determine who gets to scale and who does not. In that sense, AI is becoming [ ]
Five major structural challenges are shaping the trajectory of AI right now. For leaders, understanding these constraints is essential to strategic planning, investment, and implementation. 1. Reliability and Trust Even the most advanced models still hallucinate, misinterpret instructions, or behave unpredictably under pressure. This isn’t just a technical curiosity, it limits where AI can be [ ]
Thinking about raising capital? Hold up—before you polish your deck or schedule your first investor meeting, let’s pause. Why? Because the most successful founders I know don’t start with a pitch; they start with questions. The right questions. If you want to be the kind of founder who gets funded—even in tough markets—you need to [ ]
When investors look at an innovative new project, they may get very excited about the vision. But smart investors will quickly look for all of the ways the project might go wrong, and how they could lose capital. Unfortunately, investors are rarely experts in the industry. So when they look at the risks, they often [ ]
A frequent question we get at FTL is how to finance large, innovative projects. Real innovation is exciting. But it can also be scary to investors; they may not have a perfect view of what success looks like—but can always imagine a lot of failure modes. And scary risks will stop a project from getting [ ]
Decision engines will allow AI to solve far more complex and meaningful problems.
In the US as well as in the UK, I hear complaints that the French are rude—particularly Parisians in the service industries, such as restaurant waiters. On the other side, Parisians sometimes make the same complaint of the tourists who come to town—and there are a lot of them. In any society some people are [ ]
I wrote about a brain teaser I encountered as a kid and challenged you to figure out if it has a solution, and if so, what that solution is. That brain teaser works like this: You have 12 identical coins. One of them is counterfeit. The counterfeit coin may be heavier or lighter than the [ ]
People seem to like the brain teasers I ve posted. So here s another. I first ran across this when I was about 12 years old. I still remember it as one of the toughest brain teasers I ever faced. It is a very simple problem to explain, but the answer may not be obvious. So take your time and think it through. Find the Counterfeit Coin You have 12 identical coins. One of them is counterfeit. The…