Rich Sutton wrote The Bitter Lesson in 2019. In 2025 he came back and said LLMs aren't actually following it. Three thoughts on what's been written between his two chapters.
Three labs in 2026 are independently calling their LLM 'time-aware' and meaning three different things. The framing problem nobody is naming, the cognitive deficit they all describe, and three falsifiable bets on what comes next.
A six-week investigation into the $1B middleman economy where 45.83% of audited providers serve fake models, 9 routers actively inject malware, and Anthropic's January 2026 OAuth attestation killed the arbitrage gold rush in 90 days.