Writing on Reed Bender

Data Is the Moat

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The AI discourse right now is fixated on two things: model improvements and agent frameworks. Which model is best. Which orchestration layer is cleanest. How many tools can you wire into a loop. How many agents can you run in parallel? Every week my X feed is filled with a new harness, a new benchmark, a new claim about reasoning.

None of it matters as much as the data.

The models are converging. A leaked Google memo called it in 2023: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI.” Since then, Qwen, DeepSeek, and Llama have all closed the gap. James Betker at OpenAI said it best:

Please Explain this Gap in your Resume

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a stretch on my resume between leaving a computational biology role at Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge and showing up as a Senior Data Engineer at Lantern Pharma in Dallas that doesn’t look anything like career progression.

I was on a farm in North Carolina.

I’d spent two years at Etiome as the first software engineer, building ML infrastructure for single-cell RNA-sequencing and electronic medical records. We were modeling the biochemical factors of disease progression temporally, at single-cell resolution, trying to capture how disease actually evolves across patients where everybody is n=1. Great team, good data, interesting problems. But the higher the resolution got, the more it felt like I was getting a sharper and sharper image of the wrong thing. We could see what happened as disease progressed. We couldn’t see what caused it to progress. If the biochemical pathways were transistors, we were watching them flip without ever finding the programming language behind their orchestration. Those are two very different questions, and no amount of sequencer resolution was going to collapse them into one.

Our Superconducting Consciousness

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Expand, by Amy Pennell.

“Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?”

– John Archibald Wheeler, 1986

Note: If you would prefer to read this as a PDF manuscript, it is available here.

2026 Author's Note: This essay was originally published in February 2022. In September 2022, Nature retracted the Snider et al. (2020) paper on room-temperature superconductivity in carbonaceous sulfur hydride, which is cited in Section 4. The retraction states: "We have now established that some key data processing steps used a non-standard, user-defined procedure... these processing issues undermine confidence in the published magnetic susceptibility data as a whole." (Nature 610, 804, 2022). The broader argument of this essay, that biological superconductivity may be possible drawing on Cope, Becker, and Mikheenko, does not depend on the Snider result. The relevant passage has been annotated below. I have left the original text intact for transparency rather than silently removing it.