2026 / Free online book · Points of View
First Principles for a Hype Cycle
Points of View, Volume VII
Access
Free
Chapters
9
Read time
109 min
Alpesh Nakrani
CRO at Devlyn · former CTO & COO
How to keep your footing when every quarter brings a new revolution. The handful of fundamentals that don't move.
This edition is free to read onsite. Each chapter has its own URL, so readers can bookmark, share, and return to the exact section they need.
Table of contents
INT Introduction: New Claims Are Allowed in the Room A hype cycle is not a reason to ignore new technology, it is a reason to slow the claim down until it becomes testable. 8 min 01 Why Hype Carries Both Fraud and Signal The dangerous thing about hype is not that it is false, it is that it is partly true. 10 min 02 How to Slow a Claim Down Slowing a claim is not delay, it is the work of converting a feeling of urgency into a question you can answer. 12 min 03 Demos Are Not Deployments A demo proves a capability can happen once, a deployment proves it happens reliably at cost, and the distance between them is where most AI strategy goes to die. 10 min 04 Benchmarks Are Not Business Cases A benchmark number tells you how a model did on someone else's test, and translating it to your business is work that the leaderboard will not do for you. 10 min 05 The Cost of Strategy Churn The most expensive thing a hype cycle does to a company is not a bad bet, it is the steady tax of changing direction every time a new claim arrives. 10 min 06 The Hype Budget Attention and experiment capacity are scarce, so treat them like a budget you allocate on purpose instead of one the feed spends for you. 10 min 07 The Reversibility Ladder Match the size of your commitment to the reversibility of the decision, so that being wrong is cheap and being right is still available. 10 min 08 Reading a Frontier Release Without Flinching A model release is an input to your process, not an interrupt to your roadmap, and vendor categories are claims to be decomposed, not facts to be adopted. 11 min 09 When to Move and When to Wait Timing is not a feeling about momentum, it is a calculation about whether the cost of waiting has finally exceeded the cost of being early. 11 min END Conclusion: Fast at Converting Noise into Testable Claims A mature organization is not the one that ignores hype or the one that chases it, it is the one that converts noise into testable claims faster than anyone else. 7 min