David's Saturday AI Thoughts
Each Saturday, David reflects on what feels important in the world of AI. Not the breathless hype or the doom. The practical, analytical perspective: what happened this week, what it means for people who use language models in their work, and what to try next.
A spoken-word audio edition of David's weekly email, with different voices for each section.
Testing. I'm experimenting with an AI text-to-speech version of the weekly email. Different AI voices read different sections: one for the essay, another for the news, another for tips, another for reader reactions. I'd love your feedback. Is the quality good enough to listen to each week? Reply to any Saturday edition, or email david@steadman.ai.
Episodes
Ride the bike
Anthropic's newest model lists at double its predecessor, and the bill has become the story. I did the maths: the gap between the cheapest sensible model and the dearest buys about 40 seconds of a manager's day. So manage the judgement, not the number: a five-prompt floor, delegation budgets run like expenses, and Eddy Merckx's advice. Ride as much or as little as you feel. But ride.
The open door
For years I told people to hire graduates and never did it myself. This week I did. Ethan is here on his placement year, and he is the experiment. I have four hypotheses about why a graduate is still worth it when the machine can do the work, and a year to test them. The fourth is Hamming's open door: leaving it open costs you time, but it lets the useful things in.
Kids these days
Elliott walked off the kitchen table to use ChatGPT instead of me. He came back having mastered the method I've been teaching professionals for three and a half years: use AI, check the answer, understand why it's right, own the result. And he aced the test in class the next day.
What boards accept
Boards drive change by addition: a new strategy, a new programme, a new dashboard. In AI, the loop is too damn slow. Subtraction is the alternative. Refuse what the firm has been accepting. Ten refusals worth making, and the case for picking the one you've been avoiding longest.
Choosing is the work
The cost of building anything you can describe has fallen close to zero. So choosing well — what to build, who uses it, where the saved hour goes — is now the work. Not choosing is failure. Everything else is just typing.
The bill and the harness
Flat-rate AI pricing is breaking. Bills will rise either way. The choice is whether the spending compounds for you, in the harness, or for the vendor in raw model use.
Rise of the auditors
AI-native teams need three roles: Director, Builder, Auditor. Execution is cheap, verification is expensive. Most organisations have zero Auditors.
The proxy break
AI broke the old proxy (good writing = good thinking) but the new proxy ('sounds like AI' = no thinking) is equally unreliable. Evaluate thinking, not wording.
What a day can do
Team-level AI infrastructure can precede individual training. A small jewellery company built thirteen shared skills in a day. Step two can contain step one.
What is your organisation actually for?
Organisations say they're production systems but behave like human systems. The revealed preference is togetherness, not efficiency.
The system and the surrender (plz fix!)
A Wharton study of 1,372 people identified 'cognitive surrender': when AI produces an answer, people stop questioning it. The better the system gets, the harder it becomes to stay vigilant.
Reckoning and slope
The gap between AI wonder and behaviour change. Jeremy Howard's slope-over-intercept frame: capability growth matters more than current output.
The power and the care
The dual experience of AI acceleration: excitement and terror. Top builders 3-5x more productive, median only 10-20%. The gap widens.
Extraction or expansion
Leaders deploying AI face a binary choice: extraction (cut costs) or expansion (grow capability). The apprenticeship pipeline paradox.
The hundred small things
AI value sits not in dramatic one-off wins but in a hundred small daily elevations that compound into transformation. Firms can't see it because they track big projects.
The wonder and the weight
The tension between individual excitement about AI and organisational inertia. 84% of the world has never used AI. The wonder of what's possible, and the weight of spreading change.