Setareh Lotfi
Dispatches

Seasonal letters on whatever has kept me up at night.

Spring, 2026

Dispatches

Seasonal letters on whatever has kept me up at night.

April 2026

The Achilles’ Heel in the Matrix

On the particular humiliation of watching a trillion-parameter model lose its composure over a 14×14 grid of letters.

There are few Sunday rituals quite as grounding as perfecting a V60 pour-over in a quiet New York apartment and cracking open the first-of-the-month Jane Street puzzle. In the breathless age of generative AI — where neural networks are passing the bar exam and writing functional code before we have finished our morning coffee — there is something wonderfully humbling about watching a trillion-parameter model completely lose its composure over a fourteen-by-fourteen grid of letters.

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April 2026

On the Art of Outsourcing Your Own Nervous System

A dispatch on enterprise AI deployment, consulting-grade security failures, and the structural gap between capability and governance.

A disclosure, before we get into it: I spent a non-trivial portion of my career adjacent to the world of enterprise AI deployments, and I still managed to be surprised by how fast this unraveled. In my defense, I assumed the firms advising Fortune 500 companies on digital transformation would have, at minimum, locked their own doors.

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March 2026

On the Etiquette of Building Gods

A dispatch on alignment, fragility, and the particular discomfort of reading one’s own species’ risk assessment.

There is a genre of academic paper that one reads the way one reads a letter from one’s doctor: with the growing suspicion that the news is not, in fact, routine. I have been spending my spring in this genre, and I would like to report that the weather inside it is overcast, with intermittent existential clarity.

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