Peter Yared's Musings

Dedicated I-5 lanes and a midroute vehicle swap could move riders between Los Angeles and San Francisco years before the planned train is available. This post was also published in Inc. Much has been written about the travails of California high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles, with an initial projected cost of $33 billion and estimated completion by 2020. That original estimate from 2008 has now expanded to a projected cost of up to $231 billion and an estimated start of operations in 2040. What if there’s a better way to achieve high-speed transport with technology that’s already been deployed? Transportation and AI technology have accelerated in the eighteen years since the 2008 California Proposition that approved the high-speed rail project. In the last six months, both Tesla Robotaxis and Waymo self-driving taxis have started operating on highways. Combined with innovations in battery range, self-driving vehicles now present a viable public transport...

This time, the great leap forward had Washington’s help. This post was also published in National Review What made the Soviets’ successful launch of the satellite Sputnik in 1957 a major crisis for America was our realization that Soviet technology had leapt ahead of the West in the space race. Nearly 70 years later, a new Chinese AI model should sound similar alarm bells across the West — not least because this time, U.S. policy is partly to blame. The release of China’s free, open-source DeepSeek R1 in January 2025 showed China was closing the gap with American AI faster than Western analysts expected. Still, it was not quite a Sputnik moment, because R1 was optimized for Nvidia chips. Consequently, even if you wanted to run advanced Chinese AI models, you still needed American-made chips and developer tools. That advantage has now vanished. DeepSeek V4, released in April 2026, took the world by surprise because it was optimized for Huawei chips. Even before DeepSeek V4,...

We're excited to be at the Oslo Freedom Forum today! Layer3.Press is launching ResumosBrasil.com , a News Hub that uses AI to present the most current political stories in Brazil and ensure that dissident voices are heard. Brazil is labelled as problematic by the Reporters Without Borders 2026 World Press Freedom Index after years of digital censorship led by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Layer3.Press’ publishing system builds news hubs by using AI to aggregate content directly from news sites, RSS feeds, and X/Twitter accounts. Layer3.Press’ AI is tuned to cut through AI slop and AI influence campaigns and present differing viewpoints fairly and accurately. It delivers news hubs as a polished website and mobile site. To bypass blocking, Layer3.Press also publishes directly onto the Nostr censorship-resistant network across multiple global relays and Nostr clients. The ResumosBrasil.com news hub was built in collaboration with leading Brazilian dissidents who now...

Export controls undermine America’s long-term technological edge. This post was also published in National Review For years, the United States has tried to slow China’s progress in artificial intelligence by restricting exports of advanced AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment. That strategy may have bought time, but it is now backfiring. China has become self-sufficient in AI and is getting ready to export its technology everywhere. Controls that limit America’s ability to compete could hand the global AI market to China on a silver platter and will eventually put even America’s superpower status at risk. Export controls are motivated by fear of enhancing China’s military capability, but that case is weaker than it seems. Many military AI applications run on smaller models and specialized hardware, not only on the most advanced data center GPUs. And where large-scale compute capacity does matter, China has developed qualitatively comparable domestic alternativ...

This post was also published in Inc. Everyone talks about AI, but getting your own organization to meaningfully use it can be frustratingly difficult. Until now, specialized personnel have handled tasks like SEO keyword identification, content writing, and image editing. If you expect to consolidate those responsibilities to a single person or project lead using AI tools , you’re dramatically increasing mental load. Instead of collaborating with and delegating to a team of specialists, they now have to conceptualize the deliverable, precisely prompt the AI, and refine the output. But why can’t agents or automations just replace the specialists? Well they can . But understand that automating multi-step organizational tasks, such as generating outbound sales messages, requires a structured approach, not just a simple directive to “start using AI.” Here are four practical and proven approaches to getting through implementation blocks: Get an AI Guy Automating business process...