Deep Dives

Analysis, summaries & research

2026

Power Density: The Spatial Constraints Behind Every Decarbonisation Bet Apr 2026 Vaclav Smil argues that land will determine how fast civilisation can decarbonise. A decade later, his framework explains why hyperscalers are buying nuclear plants. · 18 min

Energy and Civilization: The Physical Constraints Behind Every Technology Bet Mar 2026 Vaclav Smil reveals why transitions take generations, why welfare saturates at 110 GJ, and why energy enables but never determines. · 17 min

Four Books, One Synthesis: Can We Power the Intelligence Revolution? Mar 2026 Energy, compute and the thermodynamic ceiling of AI scaling. · 7 min

2025

Intelligence Isn't the Moat Anymore: The New Frontier Is Verification Nov 2025 AI isn't progressing evenly. Jason Wei argues the real question isn't when it changes everything, but which kinds of tasks it conquers first, and why verification, not intelligence, defines the next frontier. · 9 min

Deployment Metabolism: Mapping Constraints to Strategy Oct 2025 A framework for diagnosing your five deployment forces and understanding how constraints determine which strategic approaches can work. · 10 min

The Deployment Paradox: How AI and Complex Systems Actually Reach Markets Oct 2025 You need trust to deploy, but you need deployment to earn trust. How to resolve the circular dependency. · 7 min

AI Moats Are Different: A Framework for Competitive Advantage Oct 2025 Why traditional moats fail in AI, and a four-level framework for building defensible positions: technical foundation, product depth, market position, sustainability. · 16 min

Market Sizing for Founders Oct 2025 A practical framework for sizing markets when you're building something new. · 23 min

On Systemic Errors: Probabilistic LLMs at Scale Sep 2025 When your system is wrong 2% of the time but processes a billion requests. · 8 min

AI as Normal Technology: Investing Beyond the Illusion of Magic Sep 2025 General-purpose technologies diffuse slowly and unevenly. AI will follow similar patterns. Value creation depends on when bottlenecks collapse, not benchmark scores. · 21 min