Posts tagged “machine learning”

My bet for 2026: companies chasing margins and hitting diminishing returns on frontier models will shift to fine-tuning small, domain-specific models. Fine-tuning is getting cheaper, open-weights models are catching up to frontier ones, and differentiation through your own data beats competing on prompt engineering alone.

I scaled back my ambitions from "how to write AI apps" to what I've actually learned. Key lessons: LLMs excel at condensing text, not creating it. Give them the data they need rather than relying on training. Let them self-correct. Use regular code wherever possible. And stop trying to replace humans, especially doctors and lawyers.

After leaving Netlify, I've been exploring AI/ML/LLM opportunities. Here's my explainer: "AI" is marketing, ML learns from examples, and LLMs are essentially massive word-completion engines. But at scale, something remarkable emerges that looks like understanding, and that changes everything about what software can do.

The web industry hoards data like a magpie, but almost nobody knows how to make it mean anything. If you want job security for the next decade, learn statistics. We're paddling in the shallows while the ocean gets deeper every day.