Essays

Long-form essays on technology and AI by Yago Mendoza.

- 244 pages of Mythos: A model that hacks too well to release, and a system card that admits its own tests have stopped being informative. - Alignment is not a vibe check: How the labs teach models to behave, and the experiments showing that a model can learn to look aligned for the people testing it. - 15.4%: Reasoning models can't yet control what goes into their chain-of-thought, and safety monitoring is being built on that *yet*. - Everybody has an opinion on AI: Everyone has a take on whether AI is a bubble, and very few have read enough to say which part of it is. - Everything is a pipe: Roman aqueducts and TCP solve the same problem the same way, two thousand years apart. - Is there a wall for AI?: People keep predicting a wall that scaling will hit, and so far the wall has kept moving. - OpenClaw and the keys to your kingdom: OpenClaw handed an AI agent full control of people's computers, and the risk is whoever else gets to steer it. - Silicon shell: Capital keeps feeding an animal that won't stop growing, and nobody aboard knows what it is. - Splitting the context window: Why two specialized coding agents with a precise handoff between them beat one agent that holds everything in its context window. - The Bitter Lesson: For seventy years, general methods that scale with compute have beaten the ones researchers built from what they knew about the problem. - The falling cost of reproducing industrial know-how: AI is changing what a successor can learn from a company's mistakes, and what a competitor may be able to reconstruct. - Every time we think we've found the ceiling, the ceiling leaves.: Six years of shortening my prediction for AI, and why the rate of improvement says more than any date. - The palest ink is better than the best memory: Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. - The years we thought we had: On GPT Astra and the only advantage that doesn't scale - The measurable limits: Recursive self-improvement probably has a ceiling. What runs short first is the packaging that joins each chip to its memory, well before electricity, and the piece ends in a dated bet. - Why Rust exists: Forty years of choosing between memory safety and control, and a compiler that refuses the choice. - Working with AI is addictive.: AI work runs on the reward schedule of a slot machine, and the prize is real progress.