My October 2025 best business reads roundup

Beyond the Machine. Creative agency in the AI landscape – Frank Chimero

Frank Chimero, Brooklyn-based designer and author of The Shape of Design, returns with one of the most thoughtful essays I’ve read this year.

Andrej Karpathy – “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals” – Dwarkesh Patel

Okay, not technically a “read” – but this conversation is everywhere for a reason: Andrej Karpathy, renowned AI engineer (OpenAI, Tesla) and accidental inventor of "vibe coding", reflects about what it means to think with our creations — and what happens when they start thinking back.

If you think that LLM's are good at writing novel code, if you're used to compare AI models to human or animal brains or if you fear the advent of AGI, give it a try. On the latter, Karpathy has a quite candid take: "A lot of it is honestly just fundraising. A lot of it is just attention, converting attention to money on the internet, stuff like that".

What caused the large AWS outage? – Gergely Orosz, The Pragmatic Engineer

Spoiler: it wasn’t “vibe coding,” despite what Elon tweeted (or should we say “xed”?).

Bonus read: What’s it like to go viral on TikTok in your 50s, 15 years after your last hit? A raw, funny, and moving piece on reinvention, relevance, and the strange magic of the algorithm. It all unfolds in the mind of Princess Superstar – mid-performance at Primavera Sound:

TikTok Made Me a Pop Star After 50 – Concetta Kirschner, New York Times

(Photo of the Month: on October 29, Nvidia became the first company in history to hit a $5 trillion valuation — matching Germany’s entire GDP)

Originally shared as a LinkedIn post. Check it out here.