Summary In today's episode, I break down how AI is rapidly making the traditional agency billable hour model obsolete and what firms must do to survive. Here's what this means for you. You'll gain a clear understanding of why hourly billing is collapsing and how outcome-based pricing tied to measurable business impact is the only…
It is difficult to overstate how big a deal Qwen3.8 27B is as an AI model. For those new to open weights models, traditionally, open weights models have lagged behind state of the art models by 6-12 months. Using an open weights model (usually for cost reasons) meant sacrificing capabilities for cost. The team at…
Summary In today's episode, I break down the strategic case for balancing commercial AI providers like OpenAI against self-hosted open source LLMs, using a "plan big, act small" framework. Here's what this means for you. You'll gain a business continuity playbook that hedges against major AI vendors inevitably tripling prices to cover their massive losses.…
Paul Roetzer asked over on Xitter: “I desperately want to understand how open-source absolutists believe open versions of this type of agent ability is safe. I get that open-weight models may be critical for defenses, but how does putting this capability in bad actors hands with no oversight work? Honest question. No ulterior agenda than…
Summary In today's episode, I break down how to choose between building a cheap local AI inference box and setting up a low-cost orchestration computer that hands the heavy lifting to a cloud provider. Here's what this means for you. You'll get a clear framework for matching your budget, power budget, and privacy needs to…
Another week, another Pareto distortion in AI. Two new AI models came out on the scene this week, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and zAI GLM-5.3-Flash. Both of these are Flash models, meaning that they’re smart but optimized for speed. Both of them score higher on Artificial Analysis independent benchmarks than Claude Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.7. They’re both…
Summary In today's episode, I explore where to draw the line between a helpful proactive internal AI assistant and a surveillance tool that makes employees uncomfortable. Here's what this means for you. You gain a practical framework for deciding whether AI monitoring belongs in your workplace at all. You'll also learn these concepts: why disclosure…
_Almost Timely News: 🗞️ Creating A Keynote Speaker Second Brain (2026-09-13) :: View in Browser_ The Big Plug ✍️ Enroll in my new course, AI for Writers and learn how to make AI write better. Content Authenticity Statement 75% of this week’s newsletter was made by me, the human. There’s a purely AI-generated glossary of…
Five new AI models hit the field this week, and only one of them is probably worth your time. Let’s take a look. Contender 1: Muse Glimmer. This is Meta’s newest open weights model, a 30 billion parameter dense model. It’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s slightly smarter than Claude Haiku. If you have nice…
