Mark Pesce

The business watershed needs more than one kind of intelligence. It needs three. It needs workers. It needs auditors. And it needs planners. The worker you need every day, nine to five. Fast, efficient, eager to get things done, and frankly a little credulous - it does what it's

This week will see the public release of Qwen3.8 Max, the new flagship model from Alibaba. It scores high on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index - within striking distance of both the latest Claude Opus and GPT. That's interesting, but the model is very big, and has to

Google invented the Transformer in 2017. Everyone in the field knows this. Everyone in the field also knows that - beyond language translation, which suddenly got very, very good - Google did nothing with it. Not, apparently, for lack of trying. A few people understood. But not enough, and certainly not enough

Apple could own SME agents outright. Not compete for the market. Own it, the way IBM owned business computing for a decade after 1981. The hardware exists. The silicon is already designed. The distribution is already built. Every accountant, every law firm, every architecture practice in the developed world already

The Watershed - the moment cognitive work collapsed to near-zero marginal cost - looked like a one-off event. In reality, it unfolds as a series; the Watershed isn't a singular event, it's the same event happening four times, at four different scales and price points. Each

Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · August 2026 Abstract The methods section is the part of a scientific paper that lets a stranger attempt what its authors did: do this, and you should see what we saw. The newest results in mathematics have no methods section. A counterexample that ended an

Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · July 2026 Abstract Every human being has a discernment horizon: the line past which they can no longer judge whether an answer is right, because checking the work is itself beyond them. As machine intelligence rises, every output crosses more horizons, until outputs arrive that

Consider a trip to the auditor. You’ve received a notice from the ATO. Now you have to present everything to justify the last seven years of your tax filings. In order to prepare for that audit, you will need to gather up all of your records. Hopefully you still