Field Notes · 24 Jun 2026
Best explained
AI produces generic output unless the user actively engages their own knowledge and experience in an iterative way, making the quality ceiling a function of the user, not the model alone.
By the numbers
Approximately three to four hyperscaler companies have pre-purchased all new compute capacity being built over the next one to two years.
New today — Evidence added
AI agent capability crossed a threshold in early 2026, enabling agentic coding and multi-agent tasks that were not feasible a year prior.
Walden YanThe Evoformer trunk accounts for 90%+ of both compute and accuracy in AlphaFold 2, dwarfing all other components.
John JumperNew today — Sharp calls
Nikesh Arora on the risk of enterprise model lock-in as AI memory accumulates.
Nikesh AroraThe Event Horizon Telescope had to physically ship data in boxes because the volume was too large to transfer over the internet.
Matt O'DowdNew today — Useful context
FAPE (Frame Aligned Point Error) works by asking, in the reference frame of each residue, where every other residue is, producing locally registered errors that are then averaged. Jumper identifies this as the most important…
John JumperNew today — Watchlist
Anthropic 'Routines': launched around April 2026, automates prompt generation and PR creation from feedback, representing a new abstraction layer above Claude Code for engineering teams.
Fiona FungTool watch
Salesforce faces a potential structural valuation headwind if the next generation of trillion-dollar companies never adopts it as part of their ecosystem.
Worth quoting
“The recovery is not coming if you're not getting AI budget. It ain't coming.”Jason Lemkin
“40 to 41% of employees saying they ship AI work that they couldn't explain if asked. This is bot f***.”Rebecca Hinds
“You're spending a trillion dollars a year and the revenue on AI talk about maybe 70 80 billion.”Rajiv Jain
“We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development.”Jason Calacanis
“The moon's gravity on Earth is the same no matter what the phase of the moon is.”Neil deGrasse Tyson
“If you live in a state where there is an arbitrary power who can have you put to death, you are a slave.”Ada Palmer