Some ideas for what comes next, May 2026

Gemini Flash 3.5, Mythos, open-closed balance, America's open-source surge, emerging power struggles and more.

This post originally appeared in Interconnects.

“The hard part to prepare for is that there’s a good chance things just continue to ratchet up from here – more disruption, more surprises, more stakes.”

As the years of AI progress go by, it’s been accompanied by a slowly rising tide of consequence. Models are getting more capable, how we work is changing quickly, economics of AI are becoming real, just as real-world risks come to the forefront. 2026 is the first year where I don’t think there’ll be any breaks from this. The hard part to prepare for is that there’s a good chance things just continue to ratchet up from here – more disruption, more surprises, more stakes.

On my end, there’s been a growing list of topics that are very fateful to how I see the current state of AI, but I haven’t even gotten to write about them (at least not from all the angles I want to)! All of these are closely related to the implications of different models reaching new capability levels and how I use that to infer what may come next.