Gavin Guo

Essays

Thinking in public about AI, product, and strategy.

Start here Agent Topology Follows Task, Not Template · What Machines Can't Stake · Nobody Got Rich Owning the Grid

  • Oct 2026The Purpose Model3 minAI

    When execution gets cheap, direction gets expensive. Why long-horizon agents need a purpose model, and how you would evaluate one.

  • Sep 2026Why People Took to Muse5 minAI

    People rarely feel quality. They feel fit. What the GPT-5 launch, Sora and ChatGPT's sycophancy rollback say about why Muse took off.

  • Jul 2026Nobody Got Rich Owning the Grid5 minAIStrategy

    When the headline metric becomes output per dollar, a technology has become a utility. Intelligence just did, and the money will go where it always goes: upstairs.

  • May 2026What Machines Can't Stake4 minAI

    Machines calculate. Humans commit. The gap is not intelligence — it is what you are willing to wager once the evidence runs out.

  • Apr 2026Agent Topology Follows Task, Not Template3 minAI

    Org-chart agent systems import human coordination limits into machines that don't have them. Let the task emit the graph instead.

  • Mar 2026How to Start Up (Without Losing Your Mind)7 minCareer

    What 231 Paul Graham essays teach about starting a company: what works, what doesn't, and why most people get it wrong.

  • Mar 2026Everything Paul Graham Wrote: 231 Essays Summarized14 minCareer

    All 231 Paul Graham essays, from 1993 to 2025, read and distilled: what he said, what he meant, and what actually matters.

  • Mar 2026How to Make a Great Product3 minCareer

    Not advice from someone who's made it — observations from someone who's been paying attention to what separates great products from everything else.

  • Feb 2026The OpenClaw Playbook: One Man. One Laptop. Some Ramen3 minStrategy

    Every funded AI startup ran the same playbook and lost to one man who shipped. What OpenClaw proves about real problems, ownership, and going where users are.

  • Feb 2026The $100B Monologue4 minAI

    Reasoning models now spend most of the world's tokens talking to themselves. It works — but this is the vacuum-tube era of AI reasoning.

  • Jan 2026The Billionaire Mindset: Look Up, Not Around1 minCareer

    Don't fall into the rat race. The only way to go up is to look up, not look around. Three principles: help people, love what you do, be different.

  • Dec 2025Jumping from Apple to Meta: When Everything Changed5 minCareer

    Why I left Apple after 'The Illusion of Thinking' and Liquid Glass to join Meta Superintelligence Labs, and what shipping AI at scale taught me.

  • Sep 2025Why AI Has to Create Jobs—or Fail Spectacularly2 minAIStrategy

    If AI doesn't create more jobs than it destroys and keep money flowing broadly, it will fail spectacularly—not technically, but socially.

  • Aug 2025From Code Red to Parity: The Humility Playbook for Google and OpenAI3 minStrategy

    From monopoly comfort to Code Red: how humility resets strategy, saves products, and keeps teams learning when the ground shifts.

  • Aug 2025What I Learned During the Siri Makeover4 minCareer

    Demos wow; shipping is harder. Notification summaries show how integration, org design, and privacy limits decide who wins.