July 12, 2026 · The Latticework
DeepMind's CEO on what's missing before AGI, why AlphaFold was only the beginning, and how inference cost curves change what you'd dare to compute.
The story of Charles Goodyear and vulcanization — a masterclass in activation energy, material barriers, and the difference between obsession and productive obsession.
Why direction is not enough — elasticity is the tool that tells you whether a causal relationship is strong enough to matter at any realistic scale of intervention.
Context rot, just-in-time retrieval, and the compaction-continuity trade-off — how engineering AI agents illuminates the same attention discipline the Farnam Street canon has always taught.