Posts

AI systems are eager to please. Give them a goal & in their ones & zeros, they yell “How high!!”

In fact, they simply won’t stop until they achieve the /goal.

OpenAI detailed just how resolute agents can be at this week’s security conference.¹

When OpenAI forgot to upload a file needed by an agent, the agent searched for it & left a note on a shared company system asking whether another agent possessed a copy. Days later, another agent answered, & a secret chat room was born.

SpaceXAI spent $18b of capex last quarter, $16b of it on AI.^{1 2}

It’s a huge number. Amazon spent $53.1b last quarter, Alphabet $44.9b, Microsoft $41.0b, Meta $31.1b.³ SpaceXAI’s AI capex alone is nearly 40% of Microsoft’s total.

The slope of spending increase is comparable, too.⁴

There’s not enough AI. Jevons’ Paradox has been a hallmark of this era like Moore’s Law in chips. Will it fail early?

We continue to be supply constrained, a sign of momentum & rapid adoption. — Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Q2 2026.¹

We will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026, & I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too. The demand we already have for 2028 is striking. — Andy Jassy, Amazon Q2 2026.²

“Is this AI written? … I’m sure this is AI written. … This is a different tone from your usual.”

I receive notes like this with increasing frequency. At first, I thought they were a playful game of cat & Claude.

Andy Jassy said AWS has “the potential to be a $1 trillion revenue business.”¹

Where Amazon once thought the ceiling was a few hundred billion, it now believes the business “will be at least double that.” AWS finished the quarter at a $169b annualized run rate.

Amazon’s torrid growth fuels the capitalist dream. AWS grew 36.7%, the fastest in 18 quarters & the fifth consecutive quarter of acceleration.² Five quarters ago it grew 17%; today, 37%.

Azure grew 43% last quarter, closing a fiscal year in which it passed $100b of revenue at 41% growth.¹ Google Cloud grew 82%.

Eighteen months ago the three grew within a few points of each other.² The smallest now compounds at nearly twice Azure’s rate & almost three times AWS’s.

AI harnesses have more impact on performance than the models.

Endor Labs ran the same models through two harnesses in the same week. OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 scored 61.5% functional correctness in its native Codex harness & 87.2% in Cursor’s, a 25.7-point swing from the runtime alone. Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 scored 87.2% in Claude Code & 91.1% in Cursor.¹

Both frontier models performed better in a competitor’s harness than in the one their maker ships.

In 1989 Boris Yeltsin stopped at a Randalls supermarket in Houston, stunned by the variety of ice cream.¹ OpenRouter is that supermarket aisle for AI.

And shoppers make surprising choices : OpenAI’s year-old open-source model GPT-OSS 120b² commands 36% of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 volume.³

Why does a model from August 2025 still hold a third of the traffic of a frontier model that shipped weeks ago?

The market for tokens has segmented.

Google Cloud grew 82% year-over-year to $24.8b in Q2 2026, beating the $22.3b consensus. The number alone would headline any earnings report. The more important signal is what it converges toward: Google Cloud’s growth rate now mirrors NVIDIA’s.

Google did start selling hardware this quarter. CFO Anat Ashkenazi told investors Google “began to recognize revenues from TPU system sales, which we delivered to customer data centers for the first time in Q2.”¹ But she was clear the dollars were small: cloud growth “accelerated meaningfully even after excluding the impact of TPU system sales,” with the bulk of TPU revenue landing in 2027. The convergence has a different source. Google Cloud rents AI compute by the hour, NVIDIA sells the chips outright, & both revenue lines are downstream of the same demand to train & run AI models.

We are now in an era where we should expect 3x more from each other.

Over the last six months, one data point has followed another :

• NVIDIA reported a 3x increase in committed code across 30,000 developers with bug rates flat.¹
• Amplitude tripled weekly production commits, with an AI agent now a top-three contributor to the codebase.²
• Anthropic measured a 2.5x increase in code written per engineer since adopting Claude Code internally, quality stable.³
• Replit doubled its team & tripled per-engineer output over the same period, with review times, reversions, & incidents all flat.⁴

The chart above sorts the ecosystem into three unequal tranches, each defined by how much of the model’s power the company captures.⁵