The models work. Now what.

I'm Spencer. I work on everything else. The integration, the ownership, the operating model that decides whether AI actually gets used. This site hosts some projects, writing, and assorted reference materials that I tend to come back to.

Writing→

Projects→

Writing

everything

Outsmarting AI
Synthetic content is everywhere now. The skill we used to call 'can you spot it' is becoming 'what does it mean that you can't.' A note on detection, skin in the game, and harm reduction.
May 20, 2026
Making Tokens, Pt. 5: The Forward Pass
All of the upstream chemistry, physics, and capital comes to rest on a single computation. One forward pass through the trained network. Out the other end: one token. The whole supply chain priced out per unit.
April 30, 2026
Making Tokens, Pt. 4: A City's Worth of Power
A frontier training cluster is a small city of compute, with the power draw and water demand of a small city to match. The siting decisions are quietly reshaping the US power grid.
April 7, 2026
Making Tokens, Pt. 3: Photolithography
Eighty rounds of printing patterns thinner than a virus on a single piece of glass, in a room cleaner than any operating theater on earth. The most complex object humans make at scale.
March 10, 2026
Front Row at the Changing Economy
Why I want to spend the next decade inside the rooms where AI is being deployed into the real economy, and what it looks like from there.
February 15, 2026

featured project

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The Science of Making Tokens

hover a step to explore.
deep dive available for each.

Five real unit operations between a quartz mine and the next word a model gives you.

step 01Siemens process

read the breakdown→

Turning quartz sand into the purest commodity humanity produces.

Energy intensity: ~110 kWh per kg of poly-Si
Output purity: 99.9999999% (9N)
Global output: ~600 kt / year
Electronics share: ~10% (rest goes to solar)

A roughly 200x value-add by mass: quartz sand at $0.10/kg becomes polysilicon at $20-30/kg.

Polysilicon producersWacker · GCL · Hemlock · OCI · Tongwei

Projects

all projects

Agentforce

Spencer AI

An assistant that knows my work, my writing, and my calendar. Built to test the patterns I deploy with real businesses.

Value creation

The Value Machine

An interactive catalogue of the levers businesses can pull to create real value with AI. Less hype, more operating manual. Live at thevaluemachine.com.

WebGL

Future Lag

A GLSL shader exploring perceptual delay. Distortion fields rendered on the GPU at sixty frames a second.

this site, but conversational

Ask it anything. It knows me.

The little pill in the corner is an AI that knows my background, my writing, and my calendar. Cold email is dead. Ask the website.