Good reads #223- 29th July 2026

Dear Reader,
Welcome to the 223rd edition of the Good reads newsletter by Malpani Ventures. Sharing your weekly dose of articles for this week’s reading!

• An Ancient Tradition: The Church and the Scientists

• AI is not intrinsically bad, but that it takes on the aims of those who build and use it.

Anthropic and the Pope

One particular lay person stood out at the encyclical’s presentation: Chris Olah, Anthropic co-founder, interpretability researcher, and an atheist. He sat just a few seats away from the pope and, during his remarks, asked the church to keep watch over his industry: “We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing,” he said. “We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.”

• DoorDash, Instacart, and Uber Eats were solving the same problem of trying to understand a user’s intent when they type something in search.

Two harder problems lie beneath this:

• The long tail: Grocery and restaurant platforms see an enormous number of unique queries. Any specialized model trained on conversion data struggles with queries that appear only a handful of times, because rare queries are rare by definition.

• The constraint problem: A query like “vegan chicken sandwich” has a hard constraint inside it, and similarity-based retrieval might return a chicken sandwich that violates the constraint, because the similarity score still looks close. Dietary restrictions, allergens, and quantity filters all sit in this bucket.

• Please take a look at this week’s video

Until next time!