State of the blog, mid-2026

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Nathan Lambert's Interconnects newsletter marks its 3-year anniversary as he navigates a career transition after leaving Ai2. In this reflective post, he outlines why the blog remains raw and high-voice — a deliberate choice he believes will differentiate against proliferating AI-generated content. Lambert explicitly considered pivoting Interconnects into a full-time revenue operation in the style of SemiAnalysis or Stratechery but stepped back from that path. His reasoning: his actual goals — building an open model ecosystem and pushing for open-science at the frontier — require more than commentary alone. The post discloses that his recent job search found few companies genuinely enthusiastic about him continuing to write publicly, revealing real tension between institutional employment and independent AI commentary. He positions independence itself as a differentiator given how many analysts have undisclosed financial stakes in the models or companies they cover. For practitioners, Interconnects remains one of the few newsletters written by someone with direct lab experience without corporate backing. This post confirms that arrangement continues — though Lambert notes that a full-time newsletter operation remains a future ambition.