Independent · Issue 16 Field notes on machine intelligence Jun 15, 2026
AI + Search

From “Alexa, Set a Timer” to AGI: How AI Changed, and What It Means for Search

From Alexa and Google Home to ChatGPT and Claude Code: how a decade of AI evolution is reshaping search, discovery, and what it means to be found.

Fig. 01 — discovery
13 stories
Fig. 04
Tools

A Field Guide to the New Agent Stack

Planners, memory layers, tool routers — the parts everyone ships and nobody names the same way.

Fig. 05
Opinion

Benchmarks Are Quietly Lying to You

A model that tops the leaderboard and a model that helps you are increasingly two different things.

Fig. 06
AI + Search

What SEO Becomes When the Reader Is a Model

Structured data, citations, and the slow, quiet death of the keyword.

Fig. 07
Research

Inside the Race to Index the Latent Web

Crawlers are being rebuilt to feed retrieval, not ranking. Here is who is ahead.