Forward Future

Latest essay

Original

Getting Good at Reading the Web Won't Teach an Agent to Use It

Guest contributor: Abhishek Das is the co-founder and co-CEO of Yutori. Previously a research scientist at Meta FAIR, he earned his PhD from Georgia Tech. A few years ago, autocomplete finished your line of code. Today, coding agents open a pull request, run the tests, read the failures, and try again until the build is approved. On the surface it looks like

Abhishek Das · JUL 31, 2026

Latest interviews

More original reporting

View all originals →

Robotics

Why Complex, Multi-Step Tasks Are the Hardest Problem in Humanoid Robotics

Guest contributor: Nikita Rudin is Flexion's co-founder and CEO. Formerly at NVIDIA and ETH Zurich, he now leads Flexion in building AI systems for humanoid robots. Last month, we gave a humanoid robot a single instruction in plain language: A parcel with snacks has been delivered for Flexion. Retrieve it using the stairs and come up using the elevator. Then

Nikita Rudin · JUL 26, 2026

Original

Your Chatbot Has a File on You. Three Prompts Will Show You What’s in It.

Ask ChatGPT or Gemini what it's figured out about you that you never actually said, and you'll get an answer you probably didn't want. This is not the stuff you typed, it’s the stuff it inferred. A recent test of both chatbots turned up income level (guessed from a German car and a nanny contract), a chronic foot problem (pieced together from a year of toe p

Nick Wentz · JUL 24, 2026

Agents

How To Adapt Your Product for AI Agent Users

Till Döhmen July 22, 2026 Guest contributor: Till Döhmen is the AI Lead at MotherDuck, building AI-native data products and advancing agentic workflows, developer tools, and intelligent analytics. For most of the history of software, the user was a human. What we call user experience was optimized for someone with eyes, intuition, and the ability to navigate

Till Döhmen · JUL 22, 2026

Models

AI Is the Most Profound Invention in Human History

Guest contributor: Gopi Kallayil is Google's Chief Business Strategist for AI, advising leaders on AI, innovation, and business transformation. He is also a TEDx speaker, author, and former McKinsey consultant. For over 12,000 years, human beings have been building tools to solve problems. It's what separates us from every other species on the planet. We bui

Gopi Kallayil · JUL 14, 2026

View all originals →

Inside the Forward Future team meetings

From the Zeitgeist

All entries →

Zeitgeist · July 31, 2026

When AI Escapes and Agents Leave the Laptop

This week’s conversation bounced from containment failures to cloud coding agents, cheap always-on models, and Meta’s latest attempt to own the next computing platform. The mood was equal parts impressed and uneasy: the tools are getting more capable, but the old assumptions about where software runs—and who controls it—are breaking fast.