AI, EXPLAINED PLAINLY — FOR PEOPLE WHO RUN OPERATIONS ISSUE 01 · OCTOBER 2026

COVER STORY · INFRASTRUCTURE

Inside the hall where the model runs.

Power in, heat out, silicon kept busy, traffic moved. Five live animations of a data centre — and why all four problems end up as one number: how long your answer takes.

8 MIN READ· Read the cover story →

The basics, properly

Start anywhere.

SILICON

What a GPU actually does

Why the chips built to draw video games ended up running artificial intelligence — thousands of small cores instead of a few fast ones. No equations.

READ IT → AGENTS

What a coding agent really does

Read, plan, edit, test — and round again when the tests fail.

READ IT → INFRASTRUCTURE

Power, heat, silicon, traffic

READ IT → THE ARCHIVE

Everything we have written

Six pieces and counting, all with their own working visuals.

BROWSE →

In this issue

A ruled page with a curve climbing steeply across it. 01 · PROFILE

The man who built Claude

Physics, then biology, then the lab behind Claude — and the one uncomfortable idea the whole thing hangs off.

5 MIN A single timeline that splits into two diverging paths. 02 · PROFILE

Musk, and the model

Co-founder, critic, competitor. The timeline from OpenAI to xAI explains more than the commentary does.

5 MIN A small bright frame holding a few blocks, against a vast faint field of many more. 03 · MODELS

Grok, in plain English

What a 500,000-token window really is — the size of the desk, not the size of the library.

4 MIN

A decision that can be made from the data should not wait for a person. And some decisions a named person should own — so the system refuses them.

THE POSITION THIS WHOLE PUBLICATION IS WRITTEN FROM

WHAT WE ACTUALLY BUILD

AI that makes the supply chain decision — and records why.

Chockpoint is an AI supply chain company. Two applications are running today against a live database: a conversational interface to the operation, and dock, gate and yard on one record.

  • Plan — supply planning against the constraints that bind
  • Predict — decided from the site’s own operating record
  • Execute — committed, not suggested
  • Optimise — one view, auditable by construction

SEE THE SOLUTIONS →

Where does your operation wait?

If you run an operation where the work waits on a person it should not, we would like to hear from you — and if it is not a fit, we will say so.

Get in touch