Forward Future

Good morning. It's Thursday, June 4, and we're covering how AI is minting new trillion-dollar winners in the chip industry, the growing debate over AI's impact on jobs, and Tesla's latest move to scale robotaxis. Plus: new reader poll, and a guest essay arguing why running local AI models may become as essential as digital literacy. Tesla expands its unsupervised robotaxi service across the entire Austin metro area even though it operates far fewer vehicles there than rival Waymo.

Guest contributor: Ahmad M. Osman is an AI researcher and systems engineer specializing in infrastructure and hardware. He's building toward a frontier, infra-first AI lab in the West. Ahmad is also a GPU moderator and open-source AI advocate on r/LocalLLaMA, one of the largest communities for running AI models locally. ❝ So run the models. Break them. Stress-test refusal boundaries. Compare them. Fine-tune one badly. Make one summarize your own notes.

Good morning. It's Wednesday, June 3, and we're covering Hollywood's growing embrace of AI, Morningstar’s SpaceX valuation, and Cognition's attempt to become the operating system of AI coding agents. Plus: the results of yesterday's poll on AI and the church, and a guest essay unpacking what economists actually proved when they claimed UBI can't stop AI layoffs.

Good morning. It's Tuesday, June 2, and we're covering an AI weather startup challenging the top forecasting agencies, the debate over whether AI is actually eliminating jobs, and Anthropic's quiet move toward IPO. Plus: a reader poll on the Pope's AI manifesto, and a new piece from Google's Chief AI Business Strategist Gopi Kallayil. Anthropic quietly files confidential IPO paperwork, giving itself a path to public markets without committing to a listing date.

Guest contributor: Gopi Kallayil is Chief Business Strategist for AI at Google, board member and advisor to CEOs, TEDx speaker, and former McKinsey consultant. The answers were surprising. First, it determined that guests cared more about breakfast than fine dining experiences. They’d been investing heavily in prestigious dinner restaurants with celebrity chefs, but guests really wanted an excellent breakfast. Second, 90% of breakfast orders were modified.

Good morning. It's Monday, June 1, and we're covering the accelerating demand for AI hardware, the growing cost of competing in the AI race, and SoftBank’s largest AI infrastructure investment in Europe. Don’t miss this week’s Prompt of the Week ↓ SoftBank announced Friday it will spend up to €75B (~$87B) to develop up to 5 GW of additional data center capacity in France, calling it the firm's largest AI infrastructure investment in Europe.

Guest contributor: Ethan Wang is founding member of Google DeepMind Spark agent and founding member of Google DeepMind Mariner Agent. Most agent projects that miss the quality bar actually do not miss because the model is too weak. They miss it because the tools are too sophisticated, the system instructions are too crowded, or the team tries to evaluate quality before the plumbing actually works.

Good morning. It's Friday, May 29, and we're covering whether AI-generated wealth should fund the public good, why calls for AI-specific taxes are gaining traction, and Anthropic’s latest effort to make AI more reliable. Don’t miss the Friday Fact + yesterday's poll results ↓ Anthropic says Claude Opus 4.8 is four times less likely than Opus 4.7 to miss flaws in its own code, framing honesty and judgment as key upgrades rather than raw benchmark jumps.

Guest contributor: Janakiram MSV is principal analyst at Janakiram & Associates, an independent analyst and advisory firm focused on cloud-native infrastructure, platform engineering, and agentic AI. He writes for Forbes, The New Stack, and Forward Future. Every serious AI agent platform in 2026 is running the same handful of frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Same APIs, same context windows, same benchmarks.

Good morning. It's Thursday, May 28, and we're covering a $100 million bet on modular fusion, the 40% collapse hiding under Asia's AI export boom, and the botnet that poisoned 300+ GitHub repos. Yesterday's Real vs AI Results + the "Best Model" Poll ↓ Hackers quietly poisoned more than 300 GitHub repositories by targeting developers instead of the software itself. CrowdStrike, working with Google and Shadowserver, dismantled parts of the Glassworm botnet used in open-source supply chain attacks.