AI StrategyFuturesEfficiency
When Models Converge, What Actually Wins?
GPT-5.4, Claude 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 launched within weeks of each other. No clear winner on benchmarks. That is the most important result.
·5 min readRead
Jake Chen
Strategy Lead at Waymo
I study what happens when AI meets the real world.
How it reshapes decisions, organizations, and the systems that run them — and what the best teams do differently. Previously McKinsey, HubSpot, Microsoft. MIT Sloan MBA.
Now
Day job
Leading strategy at Waymo — helping autonomous mobility scale from prototype to product.
Writing about
What happens when AI systems start making real decisions. Second-order effects. The gap between what gets announced and what actually ships.
After hours
Tinkering with code. Built an AI-themed game arcade and coded this site from scratch in TypeScript and React.
Featured project
Resume Runner
Jump over career milestones to build my resume in real time. From undergrad to Waymo — clear all seven blocks to see the full picture. Built with Canvas and React.
Try it yourself
Interactive experiments
What's your AI strategy score?
Question 1 of 5
Your AI model makes a mistake that costs a customer money. What happens next?
The bottleneck finder
Pick your industry. I'll tell you what AI makes abundant — and where the new bottleneck forms.
Recent essays
All writingAI StrategyInfrastructureEfficiency
Sora's Shutdown and the Efficiency Story Told in Reverse
OpenAI killed Sora because $15 million a day in inference costs dwarfed $2.1 million in lifetime revenue. It is the strongest case study yet for why delivery economics — not capability — decides what survives.
·5 min readRead
AI StrategyInfrastructureEfficiency
TurboQuant, ChatJimmy, and the AI Efficiency Story We're Missing
Everyone asks how smart the model is becoming. The better question is how cheap intelligence is becoming to deliver.
·9 min readRead
On the shelf
Books that shaped how I think
Thinking in Systems
Donella Meadows
“The best book on understanding why complex organizations behave the way they do. I re-read it every year.”
The Alignment Problem
Brian Christian
“The most honest book about what goes wrong when AI systems meet the real world. Required reading for anyone deploying AI.”
Competing in the Age of AI
Iansiti & Lakhani
“Gets the operating model question right — AI changes how firms run, not just what they sell.”
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
“Every decision framework I use has roots here. The gap between System 1 and System 2 is the gap between a demo and a product.”
Join the conversation
I send essays when they're ready — honest thinking on how AI is reshaping decisions, industries, and the systems we rely on. No spam, no schedule.