Sidecar Blog

Top-down view of a green circuit board where hot dogs in buns replace copper traces, glowing in places, with labeled sections 'Memory' and 'Processing'.

4 min read

From 250,000 Hot Dogs to One: How Biology Will Transform AI Economics

Mallory Mejias: Aug 25, 2025 6:06:41 PM

In 1997, world chess champion Garry Kasparov sat across from IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer in one of history's most famous matches. Kasparov's brain operated on roughly 20 watts of power—about the energy you'd get from eating a single hot dog. Deep...

A car dashboard GPS display in dark mode shows three route options to “AI Success” from “Your Association”: a blue toll road (Proprietary APIs, fastest, $$$$), a green balanced route (Open Models as Service, 25 min, $$), and an orange scenic no-toll route (Self-Hosted, 45 min, $), with a glowing AI brain icon marking the destination.

8 min read

Big Models, Small Models, Open, Closed: Making Sense of Your AI Options

Mallory Mejias: Aug 20, 2025 6:00:00 AM

GPT-5. Claude 4.1 Opus. Qwen. Llama. The new gpt-oss models. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the avalanche of AI options, you're not alone. Every...

Artificial Intelligence Closed AI Model OpenAI Open Source Anthropic

Vintage comic book illustration of a magician pulling colorful ribbons of binary code and circuits from a USB stick, with the word “BEHOLD!” in a speech bubble and “WHOOSH” sound effects in the background.

4 min read

OpenAI Embraces 'Open' AI—What It Means for Associations

Mallory Mejias: Aug 19, 2025 6:00:00 AM

OpenAI—the company that arguably put the "closed" in closed-source AI—just released their first open models in six years. As HubSpot Co-Founder and...

Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Open Source

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5 min read

GPT-5: Revolutionary Leap or Overhyped Update? What Associations Need to Know

Mallory Mejias: Aug 18, 2025 1:02:03 PM

OpenAI's latest flagship model promises to "just do stuff"—that's how AI researcher and Wharton professor Ethan Mollick describes GPT-5's core...

Artificial Intelligence OpenAI

Sidecar Sync podcast Episode 95 cover image featuring co-hosts Mallory Mejías and Amith Nagarajan, with the tagline 'AI Knowledge for Associations' and images of phones showing 'Introducing GPT-5'.

36 min read

GPT-5 Has Landed & OpenAI Opens Up | [Sidecar Sync Episode 95]

Mallory Mejias: Aug 15, 2025 12:46:17 PM

Summary: In this episode of Sidecar Sync, Amith Nagarajan and Mallory Mejias dive into two groundbreaking releases from OpenAI: the long-awaited...

Artificial Intelligence Sidecar Sync Podcast OpenAI Open Source

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5 min read

Your Members Need an AI Authority. It Should Be You.

Mallory Mejias: Aug 12, 2025 11:46:09 AM

You get it. You're reading about AI, experimenting with tools, maybe even using GPT-5 already. But when you bring up AI education at the board...

Education Leadership

Low-poly geometric illustration of two hands shaking, left in dark gray tones, right in teal and purple, with warm gold highlights where they meet, on a light background.

5 min read

The Association That Bought the Future: AAPC's Bold AI Move

Mallory Mejias: Aug 11, 2025 1:00:29 PM

In November 2023, the American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) made a move that surprised many in the association world: they acquired Semantic...

Leadership AI Augmentation Innovation