Profile 10 min read

Lessons from Percy Liang

Percy Liang, a Stanford computer science professor and Together AI co-founder, defined foundation models and built HELM to evaluate them, advancing transparent, open-source infrastructure while probing language understanding, evaluation systems, and the limits of machine reasoning.
Profile 9 min read

Lessons from Regina Barzilay

Regina Barzilay, an MIT computer scientist, redirected her research after breast cancer from natural language processing to healthcare, building models that detect cancer years earlier and discover new antibiotic classes while confronting medicine’s broken data infrastructure.
Profile 9 min read

Lessons from Richard Hamming

Richard Hamming, a Bell Labs mathematician and inventor of error-correcting codes, asked why some brilliant people produce historically important work while equally smart peers do not, turning the question into a guide to choosing and solving consequential problems.
Profile 7 min read

Lessons from Russell Ackoff

Russell Ackoff, an operations researcher and systems thinker, argued that organizations fail when they isolate problems and parts, overlooking the interactions that define a system, create institutional “messes,” and let bureaucracies undermine their stated goals.
Profile 8 min read

Lessons from Sara Hendren

Sara Hendren, a design researcher, artist, and professor, uses disability to examine friction between bodies and the physical world, exposing hidden biases in built environments and reframing accessibility around the ways people depend on one another.
Profile 7 min read

Lessons from Sebastian Thrun

Sebastian Thrun, who led Stanford’s winning DARPA Grand Challenge team, founded Google X, and launched Udacity, pushes autonomous systems into active use while studying how massive engineering bets can augment human capability and scale technical education.
Profile 8 min read

Lessons from Stafford Beer

Stafford Beer, a British cybernetics theorist and management consultant, developed the Viable System Model and Project Cybersyn, using POSIWID to show that systems reveal their purpose through results and clarify why structural autonomy matters when traditional hierarchies fail.
Profile 8 min read

Lessons from Teresa Torres

Teresa Torres, a product management coach and author of Continuous Discovery Habits, created the Opportunity Solution Tree to connect business goals with customer needs, continuous interviews, and assumption testing, keeping teams focused on outcomes rather than output.

Choose your reading rhythm.

Start with a weekly briefing, add daily notes, or hear only when a durable essay or research update is ready.
You've successfully subscribed to Antoine Buteau
You've successfully subscribed to Antoine Buteau
Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.
Press ESC to close.