Marginalia is a space for the intellectually curious—people who read not just to absorb, but to start a conversation.
The story of the open source AI movement — from Meta's LLaMA leak in March 2023 through DeepSeek-R1's January 2025 release that triggered a US stock market rout. The debate between open and closed AI, what open source AI has enabled, what risks it has introduced, and the specific governance question of whether the open source model is compatible with the safety requirements of frontier AI.
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The sequel to P16 — Sam Altman's return to OpenAI after the November 2023 board crisis and the year that followed. The year of GPT-4o, the for-profit conversion, the $157 billion valuation, the Sutskever departure, the AGI rhetoric escalation, the Apple partnership, and the deeper question of what the year revealed about OpenAI's mission and Altman's position in the AI industry.
Continue reading →The story of what generative AI is doing to the creative professions — art, music, writing, and the deeper question of what creativity means when the boundary between the artist's idea and the machine's contribution becomes impossible to draw. The cultural and economic transformation that the technical breakthroughs of the previous decade have produced, and what it means for the relationship between humans and the work of making things.
Continue reading →The story of the development of chain-of-thought reasoning and the emergence of 'thinking' models — AI systems that generate explicit intermediate reasoning steps before producing a final answer, dramatically improving performance on complex reasoning tasks. The technical development that began closing the gap between AI pattern-matching and genuine systematic reasoning.
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