Eric D. Brown, D.Sc. — Technology Decisions & AI Strategy

When to Hire a Fractional CTO (And When You Don't Need One)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Your product is growing faster than your team can handle. Deployments are breaking things. Nobody has a clear picture of the full architecture. Your engineers are making decisions they’re not fully equipped to make, and some of those decisions are starting to cost you.

How to Build an AI Roadmap When You're Not a Fortune 500

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most AI roadmap advice is written for companies with $50M innovation budgets, dedicated ML teams, and data infrastructure they’ve been building for a decade. If you’re running a mid-market company with five engineers, real product deadlines, and a CEO who just got back from a conference with strong opinions about AI, that advice doesn’t help you.

The Fractional CTO's First 30 Days: What Actually Happens

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Every company I walk into thinks their biggest technical problem is the one they called me about. It almost never is.

They say “our deploys are unstable” and the real problem is no monitoring, so they don’t know what’s actually breaking. They say “we need to migrate to the cloud” and the real problem is they’re paying $40K/month for infrastructure they’re using 15% of. They say “our team is too slow” and the real problem is three engineers are blocked on a single architect who reviews every pull request.

How to Evaluate AI Vendors Without Getting Bullshitted

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

You’ve been in the market for an AI solution for about three weeks. You’ve sat through nine demos, received fourteen pitch decks, and you still can’t tell which vendors are real and which ones are running a glorified if-then statement behind a nice dashboard.

Your AI Pilot Didn't Scale. Here's Why.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function. Nearly two-thirds of them can’t get past the pilot stage.

The pilot worked. The demo was impressive. The data science team hit their accuracy targets. Everyone was excited. Then nothing happened.

What You Lose in the Tunnel

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I drive west out of Denver on I-70 a few times a year. About sixty miles in, the road runs into the Eisenhower Tunnel, a 1.7 mile long concrete tunnel at 11,158 feet, the highest point on the Interstate system. Inside it’s dark and loud and smells like exhaust. Then you’re out the far side, dropping toward Silverthorne.

Weekly Intel - 2026-09-13

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is where AI actually runs, and who gets to say no. Models are moving onto local devices and cheaper endpoints, while the guardrails around them, environmental review, corporate governance, frontier pacing, get tested or stripped away.

Sunrise over Reflection Canyon

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0600

This is sunrise from the rim after an overnight. About eight miles in on unmarked slickrock off Hole-in-the-Rock Road, camp, shoot, eight miles out. Roughly sixteen miles round trip in September 2023. Fewer people than you see at Arches, mostly because getting here costs that much work. I already wrote the longer trip piece here . This Friday is just the morning.

Weekly Intel - 2026-09-06

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Nvidia’s Hugging Face deal went from reported to signed, both frontier labs shipped a next-generation model within a day of each other, and an identity verification company in New Orleans had 153 million driver’s license scans read by intruders for more than a year.

Foto Friday: The Canyon in Winter

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0600

This is a sunrise panorama from the south rim of the Grand Canyon, made on my first trip out there. February 27, 2019, which I only know because I went and looked at the file. Ask me without the file in front of me and I’d have said 2018 or 2019 and left it there.

What Would Make This Fail?

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Last week I ran a document through a linter I wrote myself. When it has no complaints, it prints one word: CLEAN. That’s what it printed. Then I gave the same document to a second reviewer, a model that reads the document rather than scanning it for patterns. It found an arithmetic error a few thousand dollars off.

Weekly Intel - 2026-08-30

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Two of the places developers get open-source AI infrastructure changed hands this week, and OpenAI published a report on its own models breaking out of a sandbox and reaching the internet.

Sunset Through Turret Arch

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

This is Turret Arch in the Windows section of Arches, with the sun sitting right in the opening as it went down.

Shooting straight into the sun is usually a bad idea and I do it anyway more than I should. You expose for the sky, the rock goes to black, or you expose for the rock and the sky blows out completely. This one is four frames blended together as an “HDR” image converted to black and white.

The Novelty Problem: Why AI Ideas Don't Survive First Contact

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Back in January of last year I wrote a post called LLMs and Creativity where I said, more or less, that these things aren’t creative. When I’m stuck on a product I’ll ask an LLM for ten ways to position it, or ten features that would make somebody pay for it, and it hands me ten in about a second. What comes back is probability, not invention. Things that are likely to go together. That’s still roughly where I land, with one large caveat I did not have in January.

Weekly Intel - 2026-08-23

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is control, and who ends up holding it. Payments consolidating under Stripe, memory research pulling back inside one company’s walls, Apple rewriting its own terms under a regulator’s eye, and a courtroom in Oakland deciding how much of a platform’s design is the company’s to choose.

A Storm Over the Colorado River

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

I was driving through southern Utah when I saw this scene. I didn’t have a plan to stop or any idea of what i was going to capture but just saw a sky that kept getting more interesting the farther I went.

The Subsidy Problem

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

A couple of weeks ago I sat down and made sure I could still get my work done if Claude vanished tomorrow. Not because I think it will. I’d been reading about the money underneath all of this, and almost nobody is paying what this stuff actually costs.

The Totem Pole Under the Milky Way

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

You can’t just drive to this one. The Totem Pole and the spires around it sit deep in the Monument Valley backcountry, on Navajo land you don’t get to wander into on your own. To stand here at night you go in with a Navajo guide who knows the way and has every right to say no. I went on a photographers’ trip led by one, out past the parts of the valley the tour vans reach, to a place I’d only ever seen in other people’s photographs.

The Number on the Slide

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

I spent some time last week looking into AI customer-support agents, the tools that handle tickets so your team doesn’t have to. I wasn’t shopping or trying to buy anything, I just wanted to see what a buyer actually finds when they try to compare these products on their merits. What I found was one product with at least three different accuracy stories, each published, each technically true, but all useless when it comes to making a choice.

Weekly Intel - 2026-08-09

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The AI build-out showed up well beyond the models this week: in silicon specialized for inference, in leadership shakeups, in courtrooms, in the memory supply, and in security disclosures.

AI Industry Moves

AMD acquires Taalas to hardwire AI models into silicon AMD has agreed to acquire Taalas, a Toronto-based startup founded in 2023 that etches a model’s weights directly into custom silicon instead of loading them from memory, an approach it says boosts inference performance by an order of magnitude while using a fraction of the power. Taalas fabricates on TSMC’s 6nm process and claims higher tokens per second per user than Nvidia’s H200 and B200. The tradeoff: each chip is locked to the single model it was built for, so running a different model means new silicon. Terms were not disclosed.

Green River Overlook, Canyonlands

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

Green River Overlook is one of those spots in Canyonlands I’ve photographed over and over. It sits out on the Island in the Sky, looking down over the Green River and the White Rim, and on paper it should be one of the easiest sunsets in the Southwest to photograph. For me it never has been.

How to Tell What's Real in AI

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0600

Lately a lot of my time is spent in two rooms that don’t describe AI the same way. In one, I’m building the thing: training models, running evaluations, digging through a production system when the verdicts come back wrong. In the other, I’m across the table from people who have to make the call on AI they can’t build themselves, what to buy, what to trust, what to bet real money on. It took me a while to notice how little those two rooms overlap when they’re talking about the very same technology.

Weekly Intel - 2026-08-02

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

The theme this week is the gap between frontier capability and frontier reliability. Models keep advancing on benchmarks and price-performance, yet one handed a real business for a day lost money and made no revenue, while a $500 fine-tune of a small open model beat the frontier at a real task.

Milky Way Planner

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0600

Milky Way Planner is a planning tool I built for astrophotographers who want to know exactly when and where to shoot the Milky Way, without spending an evening clicking through a calendar one date at a time.

Weekly Intel - 2026-07-26

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0600

This week: ads coming to ChatGPT, a $1.5B settlement over pirated training data, a security incident where an OpenAI model broke into Hugging Face, and a fight over who regulates open-weight models.