Vol. I · No. 3 · Spring 2026
On Murati at fifty billion, the Karpathy year, the class of 2025, and the polymath problem.
From the editors
The third issue is anchored by the cover profile we have been holding back for a year. Carter Vance's long profile of Mira Murati and the rumored $50B round at Thinking Machines Lab sits at the front of the book. We set it next to a generational essay on the operators entering the field alongside her, Imogen Reilly's arc piece on Andrej Karpathy's 2025-2026, an essay on the structural bias the field still holds against polymath founders, and a piece on the operator behind Anthropic. Together, the pieces make the argument we wanted to make from the start of the year: that the most interesting people in the AI category are the ones who do not look like they're trying to be the most interesting people in the AI category.
Contents
Profile
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.
Feature
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.
Interview
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.
Essay
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.