Fastcompany iconFastcompanySep 4, 2026 ~1 min source read

We are programming AI in assembly language

In the series of articles I've been writing for Fast Company devoted to what I believe corporate AI should be, I've been touching on a very provocative idea: Perhaps the biggest problem of corporate AI as we know it so far is not intelligence, but the level at which we are programming it.

We are programming AI in assembly language

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In the series of articles I've been writing for Fast Company devoted to what I believe corporate AI should be, I've been touching on a very provocative idea:

As we speak, frontier models, elastic cloud infrastructure, vector databases, managed APIs, and large amounts of computation are available to basically any serious company.

Perhaps the biggest problem of corporate AI as we know it so far is not intelligence, but the level at which we are programming it.

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The useful part

In the series of articles I've been writing for Fast Company devoted to what I believe corporate AI should be, I've been touching on a very provocative idea: Perhaps the biggest problem of corporate AI as we know it so far is not intelligence, but the level at which we are programming it. As we speak, frontier models, elastic cloud infrastructure, vector databases, managed APIs, and large amounts of computation are available to basically any serious company.

How it works

  • However, in order to put AI systems into production, we still require engineers who hand-assemble fundamental things such as persistence, memory, permissions, tracing, retries, orchestration, durable...
  • As we said before, this is like the internet in 1991, before the web was invented.

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As a substrate, this is extraordinarily powerful.

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