Inference Is the Most Important Market in Software
AI inference will pass the $161b database market on its way to ~$350b in 2027, mutating every application into an inference reseller & upending classic software unit economics.
Read moreAI inference will pass the $161b database market on its way to ~$350b in 2027, mutating every application into an inference reseller & upending classic software unit economics.
Read moreVibe-coding is growing software in parallel petri dishes. State machines and formal verification design it. In this new era, we'll need both.
Tokenized real-world assets are compounding at 53% a month, more than twice as fast as Anthropic. Stocks & commodities now trade on blockchains 24/7, powered by …
Anthropic & OpenAI both re-rated their run rates in 2026 by segmenting : a mandatory enterprise repricing against an 80% price cut on the cheapest tier.
GPU rental prices doubled in six months while inference prices kept falling. The reconciliation is efficiency : the hinge that turns scarce silicon into cheap …
Software engineering has evolved into systems architecture. 37signals, Artemis & SpaceXAI all report the same shift : agents write the code, engineers design …
The AI market's center of gravity is mid-tier inference, & three forces are driving its prices down : lab rivalry, open weights & fine tuning.
Machine-native models replace human-facing text generation with zero-token typed execution, cutting inference costs by orders of magnitude for basic programming …
New Berkeley data shows the right harness cuts the cost of the same result by 71% with no loss of accuracy. Two startups selling that result at the same price …
Vercel took its inbound SDR team from 10 to 1.25, automated 90% of sales development, & runs the whole thing for single-digit thousands a year. The SDR function …
Dario Amodei asked the industry to pace itself. Five camps answered, each with a price for what a pause would cost & none with a number for how long it should …
OpenAI's data reveals researchers log 3.1 agent-workdays for every 8-hour shift, burning up to $2.5m annually on inference. Software engineering is shedding its …
On February 6, 2026, agents consumed more tokens than humans & never gave the lead back. AI consumption arrives in three waves, each an order of magnitude …
AI data center buildouts will require an estimated $4t in debt financing over the next five years. Here is how that credit demand compares as a percentage of …
Meta's dual-tier AI pricing introduces an explicit barter : a 92% discount on inference in exchange for your data. Applying Michael Mauboussin's insight that …
AI doesn't just save time. It raises the ceiling of what the same effort produces. Will we accept the old baseline or push for the higher bar?
The frontier AI market is picking teams like a schoolyard : Salesforce chose Anthropic, OpenAI expelled Cursor, & governments ration who may use the frontier. …
AI model companies buy wholesale electricity by the megawatt and resell it as cognitive work. The unit economics of turning power into intelligence.
NVIDIA guided Q3 to $108b, but hyperscaler growth slowed to 13% sequentially. The buyers making up the difference need financing, so DSO jumped 15 days to 60 & …
Should a calendar agent run for your entire five-year company tenure or reset every day? Why perpetual sessions fail & how to design agent lifespans.
AI infrastructure shortages do not hit simultaneously. They cascade in multi-year waves across the server rack & into the physical grid : GPUs in 2023, memory & …
Local models now answer 89% of everyday chat & reasoning queries as well as frontier models, & their efficiency per watt has improved 5.3x in two years.
Software's hidden cost is learning its grammar. AI lets a founder speak English & use CAD to make a dress once previously unmanufacturable.
A local model that generates tokens 2.2x faster than the incumbent finished later in wall-clock, because it emitted 3.1x more tokens. Tokens per second is the …
Today's AI doesn't learn after it's trained. Test-time training changes that, & the tradeoff it creates, one model per user instead of one model for everyone, …