AI Shifts From Hype to Real Value Management
New newsletter: THE GREAT AI COST FREAKOUT There have been several distinct phases in the brief history of AI, each one epitomized by a simple question: 1) Where’s the demand? (the post-ChatGPT age of scaling, 2022-2025) 2) Where’s the supply? (the post-Claude age of agents and tokenmaxxing, Q4 ‘25 -> ?) 3) Where’s the value? (We are here.) One way to see the freakout over AI value is that it’s a sign that a bubble is finally popping. I’m not ready to rule this out. But as Doug O’Laughlin at @SemiAnalysis_ tells me, it’s just as likely that we’re passing thru a normal and healthy phase along the tech adoption curve, from “chatbots can’t do anything valuable” to “agents can do anything measured in tokens” to “this is a tool whose utility and spend we have to think about as a line item to manage alongside labor and traditional IT” We also talk about: - the units economics of inference - is ChatGPT doomed? - how supply constraints helped Anthropic focus https://t.co/v3SyVRNWaW
Anthropic's Compute Crunch Caps $44B Run Rate, Potential $100B
Anthropic just had a profitable quarter at a $44 billion annual run rate with a fairly enormous compute shortage that's forced them to ration service and pushed some customers (perhaps just in the short term) into the arms of competitors. I...
Mythos Boosts Firefox Bug Fixes: April Beats 15 Months
Skepticism of corporate marketing and AI boosterism is always warranted, but I think the folks who accused Anthropic of overrating Mythos should check out this post by Mozilla developers indicating that the Firefox team fixed more security bugs in April...
Musk Masters Scaling, Struggles with Frontier AI Breakthroughs
I don’t think I’ve seen this take before but I like it. Musk has been world-leading at compressing money, resources, and time to make “known/hard” things at scale—make an electric car, make batteries, make a cheaper bigger rocket, all...
AI Compute Shortage Pits Musk's Hardware Against Anthropic's Model
Wow. The AI supply crunch is real. Frontier labs are desperate for compute. Musk has compute capacity but a meh model, and Anthropic has a fantastic model with weak capacity. Now I wonder if Elon continues to refer to his...
Demanding Reporter's Phone Reveals Hypocrisy over Fabricated Stories
“One last question, sir. If, as you say, the reporter ‘fabricated’ those stories about you without talking to anybody from your department, why are demanding to search her phone … for leaks … from your department?” https://t.co/1nRIB4EQfw
Fitness Replaces Nightlife as GLP‑1 Fat‑Melt Era Arrives
The future of leisure is fitness, running clubs are replacing night clubs for young people, alcohol consumption is falling, and oral GLP1s are going to melt literally billions of pounds of visceral and subcutaneous fat in the next decade in...
AI‑driven Layoffs: Real Productivity Boost or Convenient Excuse?
Coinbase is the latest tech company—including Block, and Salesforce—to announce big layoffs and cite AI coding productivity as a driver. I've attached those companies' recent stock performance bc I think it is ... relevant. But a few things can be true at...
AI Agents Spark Startup Surge, Outpacing Job Losses
Stripe data shows (A) startups incorporations way up, and (B) startups in AI seeing faster-growing revenue than is historically normal For now, AI agents are better at creating firms than destroying jobs
Rent Controls Backfire Without Pro‑Supply Tradeoff Policies
I'm glad that the author of "Rent Control Is Fine, Actually" calls themself Unlearning Economics, bc it's good to just state things clearly, such as the open animosity that many left economic populists have for the field of economics and...
AI Policy Contradicts Itself: Exporting Chips, Declaring Danger
I can understand a plan to treat AI as a "normal" technology and let Nvidia export powerful chips to China. And I can understand a plan to treat AI as an "abnormal" technology that compels the govt to stop private companies...
Modern Dads Spend Four Times More Time Parenting
New newsletter: MODERN FATHERHOOD WOULD BE UNRECOGNIZABLE TO A 1950'S DAD Compared to their Boomer parents, childcare time among Millennial dads has more than doubled. Compared to their Silent Generation grandparents, it’s nearly quadrupled. You will be hard-pressed to find any part...
Schools Turn YouTube Into Classroom's Endless Distraction
EVERYTHING IS TELEVISION, Chapter XXVII WSJ: "American public schools are awash in YouTube. 94% of teachers have used YouTube. Schools’ overreliance on the Google-owned platform for educational content has created a gateway for students to get sucked into an infinite scroll...
AI Splits: Everyday Tool, Emerging Existential Security Threat
Between Mythos, Anthropic v Pentagon, and the drumbeat of biosecurity concerns, I think we're entering a period where (a) AI as a consumer product (chatbot + coding assistant) will continue to behave like a "normal" technology—a very powerful tool that...
Tech Frees Labor, Humans Keep Creating New Jobs
People will accuse me of being sarcastic but I mean this sincerely: These 2 posts are why AI's never going to replace everybody's job. Tech reduces the labor intensity of existing sectors, freeing up cash for other stuff, and ppl...