The AI Realist

The AI Realist

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The Verification Tax
The GPU ate the AI narrative. The CPU kept doing the work.
 • Julien Simon
Open From Both Sides
Chinese proliferation, trivial alignment removal, and the week the safety moat didn't hold.
 • Julien Simon
Train, Deploy, Write Down
The AI industry’s most expensive assets depreciate faster than anything in corporate history. The accounting rules haven’t noticed.
 • Julien Simon
What to Buy for Local LLMs (April 2026)
A practitioner’s guide to inference and training, why they’re not the same machine, and why you may still need cloud
 • Julien Simon
Your Parents Paid
NVIDIA built the world’s most profitable hardware company by treating its consumer GPUs as a recruitment pipeline. Now many recruits are buying Macs.
 • Julien Simon
Open Source Won, But Changed Owners
Smaller, cheaper, open — and the base layer is up for grabs.
 • Julien Simon
What China Shipped While the West Was Banning Chips
Six domains where China’s deployment record contradicts the restriction narrative.
 • Julien Simon

March 2026

The Half-Life of a Press Release
Small Modular Reactors, Hyperscalers, and the Distance Between a Press Release and a Megawatt
 • Julien Simon
Reverse-Engineering The Apollo 11 Code with AI
I used Claude to crack 40,000 lines of 1960s assembly for a computer with 4 KB of RAM. No code is too old for AI.
 • Julien Simon
Build, Regulate, Scare
Europe’s digital sovereignty strategy isn’t a plan. It’s a three-stage retreat, each stage a confession that the previous one failed.
 • Julien Simon
Acquired, Absorbed, Disaggregated
Amazon spent a decade buying Annapurna Labs. Two years digesting it. Now the talent is following the architecture out the door.
 • Julien Simon
The King's New Datacenters
€109 billion in AI pledges. Only €25 billion with accountability. The rest is theater.
 • Julien Simon
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