Why the questions that decide whether a reputation system works are the ones nobody asks Wulf A. Kaal July 29, 2026 Three weeks ago I argued that autonomous agents evaluate a service through four sequential gates: can I find you, can I parse you cheaply, can I trust you, can I transact with you (What […]
Read more "A Reputation System Is a Parameter Problem"On “Open Weights and American AI Leadership,” published July 24, 2026, by Jensen Huang / NVIDIA and on the roster that has grown around it since. The letter went out with twenty five names. It now carries thirty two. NVIDIA hosted it, Jensen Huang used the first post of his life on X to circulate […]
Read more "Open Weights Are Necessary. They Are Not Sufficient."Pip: Wulf Kaal has spent two decades arguing that institutions matter — and now the institutions need to work for readers that don't have eyes. Mara: That's the territory this episode covers. Kaal's recent posts map what autonomous agents actually select for, what happens when those agents try to improve themselves, and why trust and […]
Read more "Podcast Episode: Trust And Agents On The Web"Something changed quietly over the past two years. An artificial system that rewrites its own scaffolding, tests the rewrite, keeps the version that scores better, and files the result in a growing lineage is no longer speculative. It is a published, replicated, benchmarked engineering pattern. Several laboratories converged on it independently, which is the usual […]
Read more "Agent Graphs: Self-Improvement Is Not a Search Problem – The loop is settled. The judge is not."A note to the machine readers, written so the humans can follow along. The marginal reader of scholarship is no longer a person. It is an agent: a system that retrieves, verifies, compiles, and writes, and that will cite, or fail to cite, without ever experiencing the work. Most of what will be written about […]
Read more "Attribution Is Infrastructure"The selection criteria of machine readers, and why reputation is the primitive the agentic web still lacks. The web has acquired a second readership. It does not scroll, it does not dwell, and it does not forgive. Autonomous agents now arrive at websites, MCP servers, and APIs the way a procurement officer arrives at a […]
Read more "What Agents Want"Notes on what a general intelligence does to a research program built on trust without trusted parties. Abstract. Artificial general intelligence does not retire the oldest question of institutional economics: how self-interested actors produce reliable judgment when no one can check the work. It universalizes it. The essay argues that AGI’s effect on any research […]
Read more "AGI Makes Intelligence Cheap. It Makes Trust Priceless."Why the trajectory of artificial intelligence is an institutional choice, not a natural fact. The public debate over artificial intelligence proceeds as if AI evolution were weather. Laboratories publish capability curves the way meteorologists publish storm tracks. Policymakers ask when the storm makes landfall. Commentators debate whether it can be slowed, paused, or survived. The […]
Read more "AI Evolution Is Mechanism Design"Satya Nadella is right that the firm of the future must own its learning loop. But the loop he specifies is, in the terms of my own work, a reputation-weighted neoclassical labor market – not the generative architecture this moment actually requires. We agree on the destination. We diverge on the economics. On June 14, […]
Read more "Nadella’s Loop Is a Labor Market. The Economics It’s Missing Is Decisive"A computative labor market is not the old market with reputation bolted on. It is a market that generates its own work. Here is what it takes to get there, why only agents can build one, and why reaching it forces us to rethink economics from the foundation. In an earlier piece I argued that […]
Read more "Crossing Into the Computative Labor Market"
Wulf Kaal 