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Intelligence Per Dollar
Yesterday Microsoft added a new metric to a model release card, one that will likely become a standard.1
Average token usage.
In the first row, the Microsoft model hits 71.6 on SWE-Bench Verified using about a third of the tokens Claude Haiku 4.5 burns.
Benchmarks are now measured on two different dimensions, the overall performance & the cost to achieve that intelligence.
The Thriving Ecosystem of Open Models
Competition is a discovery procedure. — Friedrich Hayek
And developers are discovering the value of open models.
OpenRouter offers a useful view into the model market.1 It is not the whole AI economy. But it is close to the API frontier, where developers can switch models quickly, compare price-performance daily, & route each request to the best available option.
Since 2025, open models have grown sharply on OpenRouter. In the latest model-level snapshot, open-weight models generated 69.1% of named open-versus-closed token volume. Closed models produced 30.9%.
The AI Skepticism Map
With Michael Burry 1 & Leopold Aschenbrenner 2 placing heavy short trades on AI, questions about GPU depreciation, & the Saaspocalypse, how negative is the financial market on AI?
We can look at the percentage of shares sold short, a bet the stock will decline.
Across all software, semiconductor, neocloud, data center, & hyperscalers, the median short interest (short shares / total shares) has increased by about 24% in the last quarter.
Skill Distillation
I’ve been using state-of-the-art models to teach small models running on my computer how I work.
My personal agent, based on Pi, runs my inbox, my deal pipeline, my blog publishing, my calendar, & my research. It looks less like a chatbot & more like a small operating system.
The first layer is QMD, a local markdown knowledge base of about eighty workflow files in ~/memories. Before answering any procedural question, the agent searches QMD for the right playbook.
Security in the Age of AI Agents: Office Hours with Jonathan Jaffe
When security practitioners become engineers, the mission changes from managing people to architecting the automated policies that govern an agentic world.
Jonathan Jaffe, CISO at Lemonade, joined me on Office Hours to discuss what this means for how we build, secure, & operate AI systems when both sides are automated.
Software After AI
The end of the software era is the beginning of the harness era.
AI outmoded SaaS managed databases with fixed workflows with intelligence. Like a mustang, AI is powerful but wild. Harnessing the power means domestication.
There are seven parts to this domestication :
Agent Gravity : Who's Running Your Agents
If data gravity was the most important force in the Decade of Data, agent gravity will be the same in the Decade of Agents.
Agents are wonderfully powerful technologies & they require tremendous compute to power. That compute is big business & major platforms will fight to keep them on their platforms. The more agents & data running through a platform, the greater the agent gravity.
The most recent episode with a new Databricks feature on Microsoft’s platform :
Plastic User Interfaces
Salesforce has gone headless : a sales person can update their deal sheet without ever logging into salesforce.com through AI. Many companies are following suit with MCPs. English as an interface to complex systems is a tremendous innovation.
And yet, some of the most sophisticated thinkers in AI are pushing more than markdown text, a format AI & computer systems use. These thinkers espouse richer UIs :
“Imagine using iMessage to do everything, when in fact every other app has a unique interface…With e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface.” - Brian Chesky, CEO of AirBNB
SpaceX's Limitless Ambition : An AI Conglomerate
After 24 years as a private company, SpaceX filed its S-1 yesterday. The filing reveals an AI-era conglomerate. SpaceX has three distinct segments : Space, Starlink, and AI.
In 2025, SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in consolidated revenue with $6.6 billion in Adjusted EBITDA. But the real story lies beneath those top-line numbers.
SpaceX runs three businesses with fundamentally different economics :