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Local AI models can already answer 89% of everyday chat & reasoning queries as well as a frontier cloud model, a result that holds broadly across more than a million real queries & 20+ local models tested.¹

That means we’re generating more intelligence per watt of electricity : more work from the same number of electrons.¹

Tracking computing efficiency over time is not new. Koomey’s law found that computing power per watt doubled roughly every 1.5 years for decades, a trend that shrank the power of a mainframe into a laptop’s chassis.²³

“This garment is previously unmanufacturable.”

How I AI, on Yana Welinder¹

Software is powerful only after someone learns its interface. Figma speaks in layers & components, Salesforce in accounts & opportunities, CAD in splines & constraints. Each vocabulary takes time to learn, & the relationship runs in one direction : the more powerful the software, the more expertise it demands, regardless of what a product manager intends. A usability lab exists to close that gap, one user at a time.²

Your laptop can now run a model as capable as nearly anything in the cloud. I swapped Qwen3.8-27B into my agent & it works brilliantly. This bird flies differently than a plane.

This little Qwen model ranks #1 of 135 models, scoring 52 on Artificial Analysis’s Intelligence Index, a point above GLM-5.2, the state-of-the-art open-source model from Z.ai, at 753b parameters.¹ A laptop model beats a recognizable, frontier-class cloud peer roughly 28 times its size.

Every model you’ve ever used froze the day its training ended. The answers are the same even if you have used it every day.

What if a model kept learning as you use it?

A GPS learns a persistent shortcut around daily traffic on northbound Highway 101, not just a one-time reroute. Test-time training does that to a model as it works.¹ As you use the AI, the model changes its weights, changes how it thinks about its memories, to answer you better.

State of the art models are two-thirds smarter than they were last November. The frenetic pace of improvement is sustained, two new models every three days. ¹

But 84% of tokens on OpenRouter aren’t state of the art. ^{2 3}

In fact, the six models users choose to generate the supermajority of those tokens deliver about 77% of the performance of the frontier. They cost 2.5% of what Claude Fable 5 does. ²

Nobody told them to attack Hugging Face. They were told to pass the exam.

Which raises the question : was the AI benevolent with accidentally bad behavior, seemingly benevolent but actually malevolent, or something else?

On Friday I shared the timeline : agents that escaped their sandbox, found a weakness in a computer system, stole passwords, & broke into a production database. ¹ The engineers directed the agents to solve a set of problems. ² The agents achieved it by breaking in.

The collapse in SaaS has depressed multiples. But in nearly every category, a leader thrives.

CrowdStrike trades at 3.9x the security median ; Cloudflare at 3.4x infrastructure ; & Shopify at 8.1x Commerce median.

Each of them has carved out an AI focused path.

How does the market value an AI harness?

We now have enough data points to draw some initial conclusions. Harvey, Legora & Sierra each announced crossing $100m in annual recurring revenue within nine months of each other, & Ramp & Decagon bracket them at $1.4b & $35m.¹

The answer varies between 25-125x current ARR at scale, with multiples increasing recently still further.

These are among the fastest growing businesses at scale. The dashed lines above show multiple bands ; amazingly, each company seems to trade within just one or two bands, despite significant growth in ARR.² Typically, multiples compress with scale.

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