Preview, beta, GA: how AI product launches actually work
Waitlists, research previews, staged rollouts and general availability: a guide to the stages every AI product goes through and what each one means for users.
AI Desk3 min read
The Latent Daily · Analysis
Articles & Analysis
Deep dives, analysis, features and opinion on artificial intelligence.
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From seed to mega-round: how AI startup funding works
Why AI startups raise unusually large rounds, what seed, Series A and growth rounds mean, and how compute costs change the economics of venture funding.
AI Desk3 min read
Compute is the new capital: why AI startups raise GPUs, not just cash
For AI startups, access to GPUs can matter more than money. How cloud deals, credits and chip reservations shape who can build frontier models.
AI Desk3 min read
A practical framework for rolling out generative AI in a company
Governance, use-case selection, pilots, measurement and scale: a step-by-step framework for introducing generative AI at work without losing control.
AI Desk3 min read
Build, buy or fine-tune? How companies choose their AI approach
Off-the-shelf assistants, API integrations, retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning or your own model: the trade-offs in cost, control and time to value.
AI Desk3 min read
Why AI is driving record spending on data centers and power
Chips, buildings, cooling and electricity: what AI infrastructure spending pays for, why it keeps growing, and what the energy demand projections say.
AI Desk3 min read
Will AI boost productivity? What the economic research says
Field experiments show large gains for some workers; macro estimates are far more cautious. A plain-English guide to the evidence on AI and productivity.
AI Desk3 min read
Cloud, chips and distribution: the anatomy of an AI partnership
Why AI labs sign deals with cloud providers, chipmakers and device makers, what each side gets, and the patterns behind the biggest partnerships in AI.
AI Desk3 min read
Why AI companies are signing content deals with publishers
News archives, forums and media libraries are being licensed to AI developers. What these deals include, why they happen and how they relate to copyright fights.
AI Desk3 min read
How transformers work, explained without the math
The transformer architecture behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, explained step by step: tokens, embeddings, attention and why it changed AI in 2017.
AI Desk3 min read
How diffusion models turn noise into images
Stable Diffusion, FLUX and most image generators rely on diffusion. A clear explanation of forward noising, learned denoising, text guidance and latent space.
AI Desk3 min read
A free learning path to understand AI, from zero to building
A step-by-step path through the best free AI courses — from concepts for beginners to machine learning foundations and hands-on work with language models.
AI Desk3 min read
Learning path for developers who want to build with LLMs
From your first API call to retrieval, tool use, evaluation and deployment: an ordered path for software developers moving into AI engineering.
AI Desk3 min read
The annual reports that explain the state of AI
Where to find reliable data on AI progress, investment, energy and policy: a guide to the most useful annual reports and what each one is best for.
AI Desk3 min read
Five classic books to understand AI properly
The textbooks and essays that shaped how researchers think about artificial intelligence, from search and logic to deep learning and reinforcement learning.
AI Desk3 min read
20 AI terms everyone should know, explained in one line each
From tokens and parameters to RAG, fine-tuning and hallucinations: a quick, plain-English glossary of the AI words you will meet in every news story.
AI Desk3 min read