Going Deeper
Executive TechnicalLonger pieces on how models get built and where this work sits in the wider AI landscape, written for the most skeptical person in the room.
01 What This Column Is For
The other columns answer questions about the practice. This one answers questions about the wider landscape: how models get built, what has been tried before, and where causal reasoning sits in the AI industry as it exists today.
These are longer than the other pages and less immediately practical. They are here because the questions come up in real conversations, usually from the most skeptical person in the room, and they deserve a fuller answer than a meeting allows.
02 How a Model Gets Built
How a Model Gets Built is the most practical page in this column and the one most engagements start from.
It covers how expert knowledge gets drawn out and turned into a working model, what to do when there is very little data, how the result connects to systems you already run, and what gets reused from one project to the next.
If you are trying to picture what the first eight weeks of an engagement actually look like, this is the page.
03 The Deep Dives
Eleven essays, each taking on a question that comes up repeatedly.
04 Two Versions of One Argument
Why Isn’t Causal Reasoning Already Built In? and Where Causal Structure Actually Appears are the same argument written twice, at different depths. This is deliberate.
The shorter one is for a sponsor deciding whether to fund the work. The longer one is for the person that sponsor will forward it to, typically someone technical whose first instinct is to check whether the claims hold up. It carries twenty-one references for exactly that reason.
Send the short one. Let them find the long one.
Why Not Just Use a Bigger LLM sits alongside these two in The Deep Dives, but it isn’t a third depth of the same argument. It answers a different, sharper version of the question: not whether causal reasoning is missing, but why the labs with the most researchers and the largest budgets haven’t already added it.
05 What Is Still Coming
A documentation set covering the EARA architecture in full is in progress and not yet published. It will sit in this column when it is ready.
Until then, the architecture is covered at working depth in the Architecture overview and the pages beneath it.
These questions come up from the most skeptical person in the room. They deserve a fuller answer than a meeting allows.