Bill Friend

The most important AI risks in 2026 are not at the model layer. They sit lower down, in memory, networking, power, cloud access, and the physical systems that keep AI running. That is where the real leverage is. These bottlenecks decide who can scale, who gets delayed, and who ends up dependent on someone else’s … Read more

On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted a 22-point summary of Alexander Karp’s worldview on its official X account. It wasn’t just a corporate update or a marketing push. It was a public ratification of a value framework. The points lay out a clear perspective on technology, national security, societal critique, and American purpose. Instead of … Read more

Compute is the new oil, and the Gulf is learning how to pump it. The emerging U.S.–Gulf AI relationship is not just a story about sovereign wealth diversifying into tech. It is a bargain in which Washington trades access to frontier compute for something it increasingly lacks at home: vast, controllable power, land for hyperscale … Read more

At 2 a.m. this morning, I realized why my multi-LLM setup feels so familiar. It’s because I’m using team leadership skills with LLMs. That made me think this may be one of the missing skills in AI adoption right now. People keep looking for the perfect prompt, the perfect framework, or the perfect agent stack. … Read more

The AI boom has given Latin America a rare opening to move beyond its old role in the global economy. Whether it can seize that chance depends on turning resource wealth and technical ambition into lasting political and industrial power. Latin America’s AI push is not mainly about catching up in technology. It is about … Read more

What comes after the facts have settled By the time you reach the end of a series like this, the technical details have usually done their work. You know how the systems operate. You’ve seen where the legal architecture fractures, where corporate accountability dissolves into procurement loopholes, and where the Security Council veto acts as … Read more

For years, AI was talked about as if it lived nowhere. It was “in the cloud,” which made it sound borderless, weightless, almost detached from the physical world. But that was always only half true. The cloud has buildings. It has land, substations, cooling systems, permits, cables, backup power, and legal jurisdictions. It can be … Read more

On Imminent Danger of Unscrupulous Intrusion In the same week, two American institutions made decisions about dangerous capability. One institution looked at what it had built and decided the public could not have it. The other looked at what it had built and decided, at two o’clock in the morning, that it could not decide … Read more

Thinking Out Loud is a personal series where I trace patterns in real time, share how I’m reading them, and invite your perspective. These are working observations—not forecasts, not policy prescriptions, not statements of fact. Just one analyst’s lens, offered in the spirit of discussion. In Part I, I traced how energy grids, fiber corridors, … Read more

Thinking Out Loud is a personal series where I trace patterns in real time, share how I’m reading them, and invite your perspective. These are working observations—not forecasts, not policy prescriptions, not statements of fact. Just one analyst’s lens, offered in the spirit of discussion. What began as a technical review of regional AI strategies … Read more

Executive summary Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Israel are racing to become the Middle East’s primary AI hubs because AI is now central to economic diversification, regime security, military power, and regional influence in a US–China–dominated technology system.[cite:4][cite:43] All three are trying to secure compute, talent, and data, position themselves as indispensable … Read more

Recursive self-improvement in AI is no longer just a speculative idea. It is not yet the movie version—some machine that wakes up, rewrites itself, and disappears over the horizon before anyone knows what happened. But it is no longer honest to talk as though we are dealing only in theory. What is emerging now is … Read more