Frontier Bylines is a narrative magazine. Profiles and essays that earn their length. We follow our subjects across rooms, across years, and occasionally across hemispheres.
The current cover · Vol. I · No. 3
Twelve months after walking out of OpenAI, the former CTO is in talks for a round that would make Thinking Machines Lab one of the most valuable private companies in the world. There is no product. There is no public roadmap. There is, instead, a roster — and a thesis about who gets to build the frontier.
Features
He left OpenAI a second time, founded an education company, coined the word that defined a million new developers, wrote the year's most-cited critique of the agent industry, and then — eighteen months later — joined Anthropic to run pretraining. The most-quoted individual in AI made a choice. The choice was the year's loudest signal.
Before the protein folding, before the Nobel, before DeepMind itself, there was a decade of game design that almost no one in the AI field has actually sat with. A long look at the years that produced the operator who would, much later, become the operator.
She is, by some interesting margin, the most-watched and least-quoted founder of her cohort. A second look at Murati, drawn from the small set of long-form interviews she has actually given. What she has been willing to say on the record — and what the pattern of her omissions, taken as a whole, says about the company she is building.
He is the rare founder of his cohort who actually answers a question. A close read of Perplexity's twenty-nine-year-old chief executive, drawn from the long catalog of stage talks, podcast appearances, and on-the-record interviews he has been generously willing to give.
On the small subset of operators who treat their twenties as a single arc — and what their patience reveals about the kind of work the next decade of AI will actually need. A reported essay.
Before the OpenAI of the post-ChatGPT era, before the board firing, before the trillion-dollar conversation, there was a decade of much smaller decisions. A reported essay on the Loopt years, the Y Combinator years, and the operator the public conversation has stopped trying to remember.
She is, by some interesting margin, the least-quoted senior executive at the most-cited research lab of the current cycle. A close look at the company's president, drawn from the small set of public talks and interviews she has actually given, and from the visible architectural decisions inside the company she helps run.
Standing series
1 entry
An ongoing Carter Vance series on the small set of operators building the agentic architecture of the next decade.
2 entries
A standing series of long-form profiles of frontier-lab operators.
1 entry
Imogen Reilly's arc pieces on the figures the field listens to.
The slow dispatch