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THE STACK

Weekly AI insights from someone who builds it.

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Latest Issue

The Stack · Issue #002

$852 Billion and a Printer That Jams

April 4, 2026 · ~8 min read

The AI industry raised more money than any startup in history, fired thirty thousand people to pay for data centers, leaked its own source code through a rookie mistake, and filed for the biggest IPO ever — all within about 72 hours. The money printer worked. The secondaries didn't.

Read the full issue →

This Week in The Stack

Three things happened in AI this week.
Two of them are bullshit.

The one that matters is below. Along with the context the headlines keep leaving out.

Model Wars

GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1, and Grok 4.20 all dropped in 23 days.

Three frontier model releases in less than a month. The capability gap is narrowing while the infrastructure gap is widening. That's where the actual leverage is.

Money

OpenAI raised $110B at an $840B valuation.

Amazon committed $50B and became their exclusive cloud partner. That's not an investment — that's a power move dressed as a check. The infra layer is eating the model layer.

Infrastructure

MCP hit 97 million installs.

The Model Context Protocol is quietly becoming the HTTP of agentic AI. I've been building on MCP since early beta — the developer experience shift matters more than another benchmark.

Reality Check

xAI and SpaceX merged. $1.25 trillion combined.

Grok + orbital infrastructure + Starlink compute + X's data moat targeting a $1.5T IPO. Vertical integration at that scale is a different category of company.

Open Source

Mistral Small 4 topped open-source reasoning benchmarks.

The gap between frontier closed models and open source is compressing fast. If you haven't stress-tested open-source alternatives in 90 days, you're leaving money on the table.


Recent Issues

From the archive

Issue #002

$852 Billion and a Printer That Jams

April 4, 2026

Issue #001

March Was a Lot. Here's What Actually Mattered.

March 31, 2026


Featured Writing

AI · Policy · Infrastructure ~7 min read May 1, 2026

The Mission Statement Was Always the Cover Story

The Musk v. Altman trial started this week, and the 2015 emails are extraordinary. Not for the personal drama everyone's covering — for what they reveal about how the AI industry's founding mythology was constructed, and why a jury verdict won't fix the underlying design problem.

Read the full essay →