Colossus Magazine

Subscribe to print for your office or home. First, select a pint glass. Now hold it up to the light. Clean won’t do; it must be spotless. Any fading lipstick stain, lingering food residue, the faintest greasy smudge or evidence of unrinsed detergent can contaminate the product, compromising the taste. To avoid this, your glass should have been washed and rinsed, separately from other beer or wine glasses, or cutlery or crockery, and then thoroughly drip-dried so not a hint of moisture remains.

Subscribe to print for your office or home. In November 2025, Anthropic, known to its employees as Ant, trained a model called Claude Opus 4.5 on warehouses of liquid-cooled processors, and on the day the worker ants released it, machines became agentic. That is to say, they no longer needed handholding. Before November, the machines had felt like eight-year-olds: eager, literal-minded, completing your sentences, getting it nearly right but mostly wrong, the way eight-year-olds do.

Subscribe to print for your office or home. Steve Ross was a legend. Starting with nothing but a job at his father-in-law’s funeral parlor, he built Time Warner into one of the world’s largest companies, making a mark on every part of the media landscape. MTV and Nickelodeon were born under his roof. He bought and ran Atari. He helped found the New York Cosmos and, with it, professional soccer in America.

I. Four years ago, soon after learning that my wife was pregnant with our first child, I was sitting on the Metro-North commuter train, reading. I was thinking about being a father; specifically, I was wondering what it would take to be a great father. Unconditional love and support seemed obvious. Patience too. But what could I teach my son Pierce and future kids that would help them live good, fulfilling lives? That day, I read the following passage from Jiddu Krishnamurti[i]: Man lives by time.

Subscribe to print for your office or home. Editor’s note: Cognition is a Colossus sponsor and portfolio company of Positive Sum. There is a familiar arc to the type of mathematical genius that captivated audiences in the days when Americans had sex, won wars, and shoved nerds in lockers, and the public face of technological power belonged to the WASP, the good old boy, and the jock.

Subscribe to print for your office or home. Raspberry Pi is quietly ahead of the Silicon Valley zeitgeist. It is a computer company that exists to make people more creative programmers. It solved the automation challenges to reshore manufacturing over a decade ago. It has spent years making slightly sub-frontier technology more cost-effective to use. And it has built an ardent community around a rather bare metal platform.

Subscribe to print for your office or home. Today’s discourse is littered with obituaries: Software is dying, legacy giants are dead, swaths of startups are going extinct. Stuck at the center of this wave of AI creation is a debate about which companies are “over.” And the consensus is that one type of company is deader than the rest: the pre-IPO, pre-AI startup that everyone used to love. If you’re not AI-native, the internet tells us, chances are you’re not going to make it.

Subscribe to print for your office or home. On a Friday in January, before dawn, a 43-year-old was taken from his home in Saint-Léger-sous-Cholet, in western France. He was driven 30 miles to the small commune of Basse-Goulaine, where he was beaten, bound, and abandoned. Twelve hours later, once the sun had set in the suburbs of Paris, three men armed with a single handgun kicked in the door of a family home in Verneuil-sur-Seine.

Subscribe to print for your office or home. The following is an exclusive excerpt adapted from the author’s new book, THE INFINITY MACHINE: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, out today. In the autumn of 2015, Mustafa Suleyman embarked on a grand experiment in making AI good for society.

References Ready, Kevin, “A Startup Conversation with Steve Blank”, Forbes, August 28, 2012. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinready/2012/08/28/a-startup-conversation-with-steve-blank/. Accessed January 19, 2026. Boyle, Robert, 1663, "Some considerations touching the usefulness of experimental natural philosophy propos'd in familiar discourses to a friend, by way of invitation to the study of it." In the digital collection Early English Books Online. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A29031.0001.001.