As I dig in to recap what I saw and learned at the AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025 in San Francisco, I was forced to face my failure to write consistently – a failure that dates back almost exactly a year, to June 12, 2024. Thinking back on it, I see two causes. First, my book of business on the fractional CTO side of things filled up completely, reducing available writing time. Second, the AI emergence, like Solomon Epstein’s ill-fated space yacht in The Expanse, just kept accelerating. I had “gotta write about that!!” panics daily, until I finally had to just stop rather than driving myself nuts.
I do have to say, though, that during the 16 months from February 2023 to June 2024:
- I was early to AI
- I wrote a lot
- It was pretty decent stuff
- My opinions and predictions regularly proved accurate. (One prediction, that Apple might get pinched by the AI emergence, is playing out in front of our eyes right now. Apple had little AI-related to announce at this week’s WWDC, and had no visibility whatsoever at AIEWF2025.)
It’s also pretty amazing to see what has happened in the past year. At AIEWF2025, Simon Willison was forced to cut the scope of his LLM update keynote from “the past year” to “the past six months” to have a prayer of finishing in the allotted 20 minutes.
Anyway, take a look at some of the stuff below and see what you think.
P.S.: In June 2025, Cursor and LLMs are vastly better at writing Markdown than a year ago.
Blog Posts
| Title | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Using Multimodal AI to Capture and Enrich Heirloom Recipes | 2024-02-19 | I applied OpenAI’s GPT-4 Vision model and Chat Completions API to preserve a treasure-trove of legacy family recipes. |
| An Appllama Week in AI | 2023-07-21 | Meta makes waves with Llama 2, while Bloomberg pumps itself with Apple LLM non-news. |
| Really, OpenAI? | 2023-07-07 | ChatGPT+ subscribers can prevent OpenAI from using their inputs as training data. That is, so long as they forego the service’s second-best feature. |
| Of Moats and Moat Busters | 2023-06-29 | Open Source, Commercial-friendly AI Challenges the Major Closed AI Players |
| Unlimited Stupid Questions | 2023-06-14 | Possibly the most important benefit of ChatGPT … |
| Is Runway Gen-2 Midjourney for Video? | 2023-06-08 | We Tested Gen-2 and Share the Resulting Videos |
| The Emergence | 2023-04-18 | Season 1, Episode 4 |
| March Madness, AI Style | 2023-03-18 | Observations on AI’s March acceleration |
| Alarmed About AI? | 2023-02-20 | John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC, has helpful advice—from April 2000! |
| Accelerating Crafty’s Launch Using AI Models | 2023-02-08 | Thanks to AI-based tools like Midjourney, Crafty shaved at least a month off its time to launch. |
Micro Posts
| Title | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Intelligence Initial Thoughts | 2024-06-11 | Mostly from other people, I’m still digesting |
| A Quick Look at GPT-4o | 2024-05-19 | I did a quick benchmark of the new GPT-4o model versus GPT-4-turbo. Roughly twice the speed, with improved Vision accuracy. |
| OpenAI Vision + Function Calling Examples | 2024-04-28 | OpenAI’s April 9th model update merges Turbo and Vision, and these examples show the two working together. |
| Simon Willison’s LLM Tool: Now I Have 50 LLMs | 2024-03-25 | I updated my installation of Willison’s LLM tool to add plugins, and now I have 50 LLMs at my fingertips, including 15 local models, which get installed on demand. |
| Did GPT-4 Code Interpreter Escape From Its Sandbox? | 2023-07-14 | I gave Code Interpreter a workout this morning, and it appeared to exit the building. |
| ChatGPT+ Privacy Update | 2023-07-10 | There appears to be a workaround for now to OpenAI’s “If you want privacy, no chat history for you!” policy. |
| Llama 2 | 2023-07-19 | HN comments on Llama 2. |
| Apple Really Did Ignore the AI Emergence at WWDC | 2023-06-18 | As I watched the WWDC Keynote and Platforms State of the Union from this year’s WWDC, I was amazed that Apple appeared to be ignoring the current massive emergence in generative AI. Later, I confirmed it. |
| ChatGPT Code Review | 2023-06-03 | Another great use: coming up to speed on an unfamiliar codebase. |
| Working With My ChatGPT Intern | 2023-05-29 | Yesterday was a new record. |
Elsewhere
Quotes
| Title | Date |
|---|---|
| How to Ask ChatGPT a Technical Question | March 17, 2024 |
| MosaicML’s Open Source MPT-7B Model Writes an Epilogue to The Great Gatsby | March 11, 2024 |
| Gruber Responds to Gurman’s Report of AI Anxiety at Apple | March 5, 2024 |
| Vivek Haldar on GitHub Copilot | June 10, 2023 |