Posts tagged "Ai"

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ChatGPT Is Becoming the Interface

3 min read

Sam Altman outlines how OpenAI plans to turn ChatGPT into the internet’s next interface, powered by apps, commerce, and global infrastructure growth.

When Sam Altman spoke with Stratechery this week, one idea stood out from the flurry of announcements and partnerships. OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be the single interface that connects people to everything else they do online. Altman described a clear vision. OpenAI aims to build one capable system that people can use across their entire lives, from work to learning to entertainment. That mission explains the company’s focus on three fronts: research, product, and infrastructure....
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Notes on the Modern Product Leader’s Playbook

3 min read

Notes on strategy, speed, and why modern product leadership is a leverage game.

Watched Jiaona Zhang’s Reforge talk on product leadership. It’s a dense one — part philosophy, part tactical operating manual. These are the notes (and reactions) I don’t want to forget. We’re in an in-between moment where PMs are both strategists and builders again. Jiaona calls it a new playbook, but it’s really a reminder that our leverage has changed. Mindset: From Managing to Skating Where the Puck Is The core shift is from execution to...
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How I Scaled My Blog Archive with AI

7 min read

How I built a scalable, AI-powered blog archive by learning GenAI coding constructs and focusing on product thinking, not syntax.

I’ve built this site from the ground up. Over the years, I’ve used nearly every blogging platform: WordPress, Ghost, Substack, and more. But with the rise of generative AI, I wanted to roll my own. No templates, no prebuilt themes. Just me, rolling up my sleeves and vibe coding every page and design element into existence. Part of this project is about learning firsthand how GenAI changes the way we build. I wanted to experience...
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OpenAI’s App Store Moment and the Future of Product Boundaries

2 min read

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT app store redefines how users interact with products — shifting from interfaces to intent.

Yesterday, OpenAI launched its own app store — a full ecosystem for third-party apps that live inside ChatGPT. Spotify, Canva, Figma, Zillow, and Coursera are already in. At first glance, this might feel like another platform milestone. But if you zoom out, it’s something deeper: a redefinition of where products “live” and how users experience them. The interface is dissolving For years, we’ve built products around distinct interfaces — apps, dashboards, websites—each one with its...
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The Feedback Loop Fallacy in AI Products

2 min read

AI feedback loops can lie. Learn why engagement metrics fail and how product managers can rebuild truth-centered measurement systems.

For years, product managers have lived by a simple gospel: ship, measure, learn. The faster your feedback loop, the quicker your product improves. But AI is quietly breaking this law of motion. The feedback loops we’ve trusted for decades no longer tell the truth. When feedback starts lying In traditional software, user behavior is a reliable proxy for value. If conversion rates increase or churn decreases, the product has likely improved. With AI, that assumption...
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Thinking Through Agentic Loops

3 min read

Exploring how agentic loops extend feedback loops by adding autonomy, iteration, and goal-directed action in systems and AI.

I’ve long been fond of feedback loops. Systems thinking taught me to look for them everywhere: how a fitness tracker nudges you to walk more, how customer signals shape a product roadmap, how our habits form through repeated cues and responses. Feedback loops are elegant in their simplicity: an action produces an effect, which feeds back to influence the next action. Recently, I came across the phrase agentic loops. At first, it sounded like another...
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The Shift from SEO to AEO Is Redefining Visibility Online

3 min read

The rise of answer engine optimization (AEO) marks a shift from SEO. Visibility in AI-driven answers is now the key to discovery.

When Reddit’s stock tumbled this week on concerns about traffic and AI exposure, headlines focused on the numbers. Stock prices fluctuate all the time. But the more interesting story is not Reddit’s market cap. It is the shifting landscape of how people and platforms connect to knowledge in the age of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). >Promptwatch reportedly showed that on September 30, Reddit content was cited in just 2 % of ChatGPT responses — down...
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Sora 2 Changes the Video Play

3 min read

Sora 2 pushes AI video into mainstream use. Here’s what it enables now, who gets disrupted, and why B2B teams should pay attention.

OpenAI’s Sora 2 is not just a model upgrade. It’s text-to-video with sound, physics that make sense, and a social app where anyone can remix clips. That shifts AI video from a lab demo to something that can spread in the wild. The following screenshot is from the video generated realistically with this prompt (shared by the Sora team): "A person is standing on 2 horses with legs spread. make it not slowmo also realistic....
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AI Platforms as the New Distribution Layer

4 min read

OpenAI’s Instant Checkout turns ChatGPT into a commerce channel. Here’s what product managers need to know about AI-native distribution.

Seven hundred million people use ChatGPT every week. That’s not just a user base, that’s a distribution channel that makes traditional retail look small. With its new Instant Checkout feature, OpenAI isn’t just adding payments. It’s signaling that AI platforms are on their way to becoming full-blown storefronts. For product strategists, this marks a shift as significant as the arrival of the App Store. Distribution itself is being rebuilt inside AI platforms. From Infrastructure to...
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The Factory Robot for Apps

7 min read

Cloudflare’s VibeSDK acts like a factory robot for apps. It turns plain language into live software while teams stay focused on customer value.

Cloudflare announced a game-changing open source AI vibe-coding platform: VibeSDK. Think of it like a factory robot that understands plain language and builds the gadget you describe. You walk into a high-tech workshop and say, “I need a device that tracks expenses with clear charts.” The robot designs the blueprint, picks the parts, assembles the device, tests it, and rolls out a working demo in minutes. You request a tweak, and it updates the device...
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Level Up or Get Left Behind by AI

3 min read

Walmart and Accenture show why AI is an existential risk for workers who don’t adapt, but also a chance to reinvent work for the better.

The sugarcoating is over. Walmart’s CEO Doug McMillon says, “AI is going to change literally every job.” Accenture’s CEO Julie Sweet is blunt too — some employees will be retrained, others will be exited. The world’s biggest employers are making it clear: if workers don’t adapt, they risk being left behind. The Existential Risk The risk is not just about losing jobs, but about jobs losing relevance. At Walmart, warehouse automation is already cutting some...
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Rethinking Product, Market, Channel, and Model for AI Era

6 min read

How Brian Balfour’s Four Fits framework has been updated for the AI era, and what product leaders can learn from the shift.

Frameworks that endure disruption are rare. Brian Balfour’s original Four Fits framework has long been a foundational lens for growth strategy. He recently released The Four Fits: A Growth Framework for the AI Era to capture how AI is shifting the constraints inside each dimension. The Four Fits have always been about scaling companies to $100M+ revenue at venture speed. To succeed, all four fits must align simultaneously. In this article, I explore the evolution...
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From Architect to Gardner to Orchestrator: The AI-era Product Leader

3 min read

How AI transforms product leadership from building to conducting. The rise of the Orchestrator mindset in product management.

Last year, I wrote about two product management mindsets: the Architect who blueprints everything upfront, and the Gardener who plants seeds and discovers what grows. That framework made sense when humans did all the work. Not anymore (or not very soon). AI is changing the game. It can architect better than architects—generating requirements, writing specs, and creating test cases. It can garden better than gardeners—running thousands of experiments, adapting in real-time, finding patterns we'd never...
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What a Gigawatt of AI Really Means

3 min read

What a gigawatt of AI really means, and how abundant intelligence could reshape technology, healthcare, and society.

Sam Altman wrote yesterday about a future of abundant intelligence, imagining a world where we add a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week. This week, we already saw their partnerships with Nvidia and Oracle. He teased about more partnerships and details coming soon: >"If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will, then amazing things will be possible. Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer....
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From Product-Led to Product-Agentic Growth in B2B

7 min read

Product-Agentic Growth reframes how B2B software must evolve: AI agents doing work for users, reshaping PLG with autonomous workflows, predictive expansion, and real ROI.

Picture this: A procurement manager signs up for your B2B marketplace. Within 30 minutes, your product has analyzed their company's spending patterns, identified $2M in potential savings, and pre-vetted 15 suppliers that match their compliance requirements. It drafted three RFPs based on their historical templates and scheduled demos with the right stakeholders. The procurement manager didn't do any of this. The product did. This isn't just good onboarding. It's not even personalization in the traditional...
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The Massive AI Opportunity Hiding on Your Home Screen

7 min read

Most 'AI products' aren't AI-native. Use the Home Screen Test to spot the billion-dollar opportunities hiding in plain sight.

Right now, stop reading and look at your phone's home screen. Count how many apps are built specifically for AI—not regular apps that added AI features, but products designed from the ground up for the AI era. ChatGPT probably makes the list. Maybe a few others. But for most of us, the answer is surprisingly close to zero. This observation comes from Andrew Chen's recent piece on how AI will change startup building, where he...
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Platform vs Product: The AI Era Convergence

4 min read

AI is collapsing the line between platforms and products. The winners will master both, balancing ecosystems and user experiences.

“In technology, whoever controls the platform controls the narrative,” as several strategic analysts have observed. The rise of AI is testing that maxim in new ways. A single large language model can be both the underlying platform that developers build on and the end-user product millions adopt directly. For companies in the AI era, the question is no longer whether to be a platform or a product, but how to navigate being both at once....
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Atlassian's Browser Move

3 min read

Atlassian’s $610M bet on The Browser Company is bold. Here’s why it makes sense, and the big risks that could derail it.

Atlassian, the company behind Jira and Confluence, is spending $610 million to acquire The Browser Company, the maker of Arc and the newer AI-forward browser, Dia. That sounds strange at first. Atlassian makes collaboration software, not browsers. Chrome and Edge dominate the market. Why on earth would they want to own a browser? But once you look closer, it starts to make sense. The browser as a starting point Brian Balfour puts it well in...
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AEO is the New SEO?

3 min read

A quick look at Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), why it matters for both consumers and businesses, and how it differs from SEO.

Most product and marketing teams already know SEO. Search engine optimization has been the backbone of digital visibility for decades. But a new acronym is creeping into conversations: AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. I’m still digging into it, but here’s what I’ve learned so far—and why it matters. From Search Engines to Answer Engines SEO is about ranking high in search engine results. When a buyer types a question into Google, the goal is to...
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Apple’s Sugar Water Trap

4 min read

Apple’s iPhone 17 shows the sugar water trap risk as AI reshapes tech. A lesson for product managers on balancing incremental progress with bold bets.

Steve Jobs once asked John Sculley, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” That question pushed Sculley to leave Pepsi for Apple, and it has lingered ever since as a reminder of the difference between comfortable success and transformative ambition. The launch of the iPhone 17 makes the metaphor newly relevant. On paper, Apple delivered a strong upgrade: a Promotion display...
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Learning How to Learn Is Your Real Superpower

5 min read

Learning how to learn is the real superpower for product managers. It’s not about speed, but reinvention, adaptability, and enjoying the process.

“It’s very hard to predict the future, like 10 years from now, in normal cases. It’s even harder today, given how fast AI is changing, even week by week. The only thing you can say for certain is that huge change is coming.” Demis Hassabis, speaking at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, in the same context, said the most important skill of the future isn’t coding, design, or even...
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Claude Now Builds Spreadsheets and Documents

3 min read

Claude now generates real files—Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and PDFs—from prompts.

Claude just got a big upgrade. According to Anthropic’s announcement, it can now create real files: Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint decks, even PDFs—straight from your prompts (whether you're working in Claude.ai or the desktop app). Here's how Anthropic puts it: Turn data into insights: Give Claude raw data and get back polished outputs with cleaned data, statistical analysis, charts, and written insights explaining what matters. Build spreadsheets: Describe what you need—financial models with scenario...
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GTM Playbook for Feature Products in the Platform and AI Era

9 min read

A GTM playbook for feature products competing with platforms in the AI era, focused on delight, speed, and switching costs before the bundle arrives.

Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Dropbox and Google Drive. The pattern is not about who shipped first or who had the clever feature. The pattern is that platforms with native distribution absorb features, then win on adoption. In 2025, AI accelerates that cycle. Features can be cloned in months, not years, and updates land on millions of seats overnight. This is not a reason to stop innovating. It is a call to...
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APIs are the Strategic Foundation for Agentic AI and Beyond

7 min read

APIs are not small. They are the backbone of digital growth and the foundation of agentic AI and MCP orchestration.

(Expanding on my earlier quick-thought piece on APIs) APIs Hidden in Plain Sight APIs are often dismissed as “technical plumbing,” invisible to most business leaders. Yet they quietly power nearly every digital interaction, from mobile payments to streaming recommendations. Some of the most valuable companies in the world—Amazon, Stripe, Twilio—built their fortunes by turning APIs into products. Now, APIs are entering an even more strategic chapter. They are becoming the backbone of agentic AI and...
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OpenAI’s GPT-realtime Brings a Step Forward in Voice AI

3 min read

OpenAI’s GPT-realtime unifies voice AI into a single model. See why its technical leap and early adopters make this the moment voice AI goes mainstream.

For years, voice AI has felt like a half-step behind its text-based counterpart. The standard architecture relied on a clunky chain: speech-to-text, a language model for reasoning, then text-to-speech. The result was often laggy, robotic, and disconnected from the flow of natural conversation. OpenAI’s new GPT-realtime changes that dynamic. By unifying speech recognition, reasoning, and speech synthesis into a single model, it eliminates the pauses and disconnects that made past systems frustrating. The model not...
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The Token Squeeze is Real

3 min read

AI isn’t getting cheaper. Token demand is exploding, and flat-rate subscriptions are doomed. What pricing models can survive the squeeze?

AI should feel like it's getting cheaper. After all, compute costs fall, models get optimized, and every year brings new claims of a 10x drop in inference prices. But as Ethan Ding argues in Tokens Are Getting More Expensive, the opposite is true: the economics of AI subscriptions are in a squeeze. Ding’s Core Argument The paradox is simple. While yesterday’s models do get cheaper, users don’t want them. Demand instantly shifts to the latest...
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When AI Bots Rule the Web

2 min read

AI crawlers dominate web traffic, but most don’t send users back. Here’s what product managers need to know about training bots, referrals, and strategy.

Most of the traffic hitting websites today is no longer human. Cloudflare’s AI Insights dashboard makes this clear: the majority of crawling comes from AI bots, and the balance of power among those bots is shifting fast. For product managers, that reality changes how we think about traffic, attribution, and strategy. !AI Insights Cloudflare Training bots dominate Close to 80% of AI crawler traffic serves training purposes. These bots pull content to feed large language...
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Nano Banana and the Future of AI Image Editing

4 min read

Google’s Nano Banana is redefining AI image editing. Here’s what it means for creativity, platforms, and trust in the digital age.

When Google teased three bananas in a post from CEO Sundar Pichai, the internet buzzed with curiosity. The reveal—Nano Banana (aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), a new AI image editing model. It was more than a quirky codename. It signals a shift in how we think about digital creativity. Unlike earlier AI tools that struggled to maintain consistency or required heavy post-editing, Nano Banana delivers precise, natural-language edits while keeping subjects unmistakably themselves. This is...
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The Big Squeeze in B2B and the Challenge of Lasting Defensibility

5 min read

In B2B, escape velocity isn’t enough. Startups must turn rapid distribution into lasting defensibility before incumbents close the window.

AI has created the fastest-scaling companies we’ve ever seen. Lovable, for instance, hit $100 million ARR just eight months after launch. As Brian Balfour observes in The Big Squeeze, “Escape velocity elevated Lovable from obscurity to household name. And now the company has a real chance to build a large and successful business. But there’s no guarantee they’ve found long-term defensibility or can turn this wave of interest into a sustainable business.” That tension—between speed...
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Curiosity Beats Tenure in the Age of AI

3 min read

Junior developers’ curiosity and adaptability make them the most AI-native talent. Cutting them now risks weakening future innovation.

Key Takeaway The jury is still out on whether AI will replace or empower software developers, but dismissing junior talent is a short-sighted approach. Their curiosity and adaptability make them the best positioned to thrive in an AI-driven future—qualities that matter more than years of experience. Why This Matters AI is reshaping the nature of engineering work. Leaders face pressure to cut costs and experiment with automation. Some argue junior developers are the most “replaceable”...
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Agentic AI Needs APIs to Act

2 min read

Agentic AI can reason, but it needs APIs to act. APIs are the execution layer that makes AI autonomy real.

APIs are often seen as back-office plumbing, but in the emerging world of agentic AI, they are the execution layer that makes autonomy possible. Without APIs, AI remains stranded in theory—able to reason, but unable to act. From Copilots to Agents The last wave of AI adoption has been copilots—tools that help users write emails, summarize documents, or draft code. These copilots assist, but they don’t take initiative. Agentic AI is different. Agents can plan,...
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No New Ideas in AI? The Power and Limits of Data

2 min read

A critique of the idea that AI progress is only about data, exploring the role of algorithms and human creativity alongside new datasets.

The claim that there are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets, is both provocative and partly true. As Jack Morris argued in his recent post, many of the most important AI milestones have been driven not by theoretical leaps, but by new sources of data. He puts it succinctly: “The breakthroughs weren’t big ideas; they were new ways to learn from new kinds of data.” from blog.jxmo.io That framing resonates with history. The...
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Observability Now Includes Watching AI

2 min read

AI observability means monitoring accuracy, drift, and hallucinations, not just uptime. PMs must treat it as a core product feature.

When product managers think of observability, they usually mean uptime, latency, or error rates. But as AI becomes central to user experiences, that definition must expand. Observability now includes monitoring model accuracy, hallucinations, prompt injection, and real-time behavior. As Datadog’s CPO Yanbing Li notes, AI systems add a new layer of complexity to enterprise monitoring. Why AI demands a new observability lens Traditional software is deterministic. If a server or a function fails, you can...
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Why Empathy, Not IQ, Defines Success in the AI Age

3 min read

Empathy and critical thinking—not IQ—are the keys to thriving as a product leader in the AI era.

Walk into any workplace today, and you’ll see AI embedded in daily tools and workflows. It drafts emails, generates reports, and even proposes design ideas. What it can’t do is sit across from someone, understand their frustration, and respond with care. That distinctly human capacity is becoming the true differentiator. Carnegie Mellon professor Po-Shen Loh puts it bluntly (video): “The only sustainable trait in the age of AI is the ability to care about people...
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Build, Buy, or AI-Build

4 min read

Vibe-coding opens a new AI-build path, but Marty Cagan’s point on business rules shows its limits. Can AI ever capture this hidden and complex logic?

In my recent post on build vs buy in the age of vibe-coding, I argued that the classic binary is breaking down. Thanks to generative AI tools, teams now face a third option: AI-build. Instead of waiting for engineering capacity or relying entirely on vendors, product managers can prototype, test, and even wire together solutions themselves using natural language. Marty Cagan just published a piece on build vs buy in the age of AI. He...
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Vibe-Coding Is Early But Already Changing SaaS

3 min read

Vibe-coding is still early, but already empowers non-technical builders while pressuring SaaS vendors to deliver leverage beyond features.

In a recent Every article, Dan Shipper highlights people who replaced expensive SaaS tools with AI-built alternatives. The stories aren’t just about cost-cutting. They show how quickly software creation is becoming accessible to people who never considered themselves builders. This is still early days. Vibe-coding — natural language prompting to generate working tools — is in the first phase of its maturity curve. It often takes a few iterations to get things right, as Shipper’s...
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How Product Leaders Can Adapt and Thrive in the AI Era

5 min read

Practical playbooks for product leaders to adapt and thrive in the AI era using wedge expansion, jobs-to-be-done, and dual transformation.

In the first post of this series, we looked at why AI disruption affects startups, giants, and companies with product-market fit differently. We saw that structural forces—like scale economies, network effects, and capability stacks—shape who adapts and who stalls. This post turns from why to how. The real challenge for product leaders is not predicting disruption but navigating it. While AI is reshaping every industry, companies that apply structured playbooks are better positioned to adapt...
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Why Startups Struggle and Giants Stall in the AI Era

7 min read

Why AI disruption challenges startups and giants while firms with product market fit adapt faster, explained through proven strategy frameworks.

Sam Altman has observed that both startups and large companies face unique struggles during the current wave of AI disruption, while firms that already have product-market fit often adapt more effectively (OfficeChai). Startups, despite their speed, often lack the foundation to scale. Giants, despite their resources, get trapped in bureaucracy. Companies with strong user adoption and proven fit, on the other hand, can use AI to deepen their advantage. This raises an important question for...
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Product Managers Who Think in Systems Will Survive the AI Era

7 min read

AI is reshaping product management. Learn how to map, optimize, and automate your systems before someone else does it for you.

AI is not a side trend. It is changing the work of product managers right now. Elena Verna wrote about eliminating her own job in Growth by automating 101. Read it in full. Her point was simple. If you automate yourself, you survive. If you do not, you are replaced. She was right on. But for product managers, this is not only about using a few AI tools. It is about thinking in systems. Your...
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From Promise to Practice - AI's Real Impact on Medicine

3 min read

Real-world data on AI in medicine. Where it works (imaging, drug discovery), why it fails (data, integration), and what actually drives adoption.

Yesterday, we explored how AI transforms medical understanding, informing patients. Today, let's examine where AI actually delivers results in clinical practice. New research from the Journal of Clinical Medicine maps the gap between hype and reality. Resonates well with my personal experience. >"The central challenge is evident: as AI tools become more sophisticated, our capacity to integrate them ethically, equitably, and effectively into clinical practice must evolve in tandem. This editorial explores the remarkable progress...
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When AI Becomes Your Medical Translator

8 min read

How AI LLMs are transforming healthcare by empowering patients with PhD-level medical knowledge and reshaping the entire industry ecosystem.

Picture this: You receive an email from your doctor with three different cancer diagnoses. Your heart stops. The medical jargon feels like it's written in a foreign language. But instead of spiraling into a Google rabbit hole of worst-case scenarios, you take a screenshot and upload it to ChatGPT. Within seconds, you have a clear, understandable explanation of what you're facing. This isn't a hypothetical scenario—it's exactly what happened to Carolina, one of the patients...
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The Winner's Curse: Rhyming History in the AI Era

3 min read

Why AI disruption differs from past paradigm shifts: faster cycles, probabilistic computing, and why today's tech winners face an accelerating curse.

Ben Thompson's latest piece hits on something crucial: when computing paradigms shift, yesterday's winners often become tomorrow's strugglers. >The risk both companies are taking is the implicit assumption that AI is not a paradigm shift like mobile was. In Apple’s case, they assume that users want an iPhone first, and will ultimately be satisfied with good-enough local AI; in AWS’s case, they assume that AI is just another primitive like compute or storage that enterprises...
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Vibe Coding and Test-driven Development

2 min read

Vibe-coding coolness

TDD I've been playing around with various vibe-coding tools. While working on building this blog using Astro, I asked Claude Code to use a test-driven development (TDD) approach. Bingo! It just built a whole test bed and followed the TDD approach for every new feature that's built. I liked Bolt.dev, but since I started using Claude Code, it's a completely different experience. Bolt can still provide compelling prototypes. That, along with Claude Code, takes it...
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