The largest debate that’ll define the future balance of power between the open and closed AI model ecosystems is primarily economic — it’s if users of AI will continue to pay dramatically more, i.e. large margins, for the top closed models. Early 2026 is a seminal time for the AI industry, as the coding agents1 have shown the first area where a huge AI market will continue to pay a substantial premium for better intelligence.
The other side of this dichotomy is the inevitable decay of API businesses at these same labs. These labs will realize they need to protect their best models, rolling them out later in APIs to both protect token supply, avoid distillation, and stick to use-cases with higher margins. All of these effects will be clearly visible in 5-10 year timelines, as in the near term markets, prices, margins, and demand will be dictated by a rapid buildout of compute (supply-limited in the near term) and mass subsidization of tokens (through continued investment in new AI companies). — Read More
Daily Archives: June 3, 2026
Economists Just “Proved” UBI Can’t Stop AI Layoffs — Here’s What They Actually Proved
There’s a new paper making the rounds called “The AI Layoff Trap”, by Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas, and it arrives with a headline that’s catnip for anyone looking to wave off basic income. Among the policies that can’t fix the problem of AI-driven layoffs, they list universal basic income. Right there in the abstract, sitting next to capital income taxes and upskilling and worker equity. Only one tool makes the cut: a Pigouvian tax on automation.
I want to take this paper seriously, because the core idea is genuinely good. And then I want to show you exactly where it goes wrong about UBI, because it’s the kind of error that’s easy to miss. It’s simply a flawed assumption. — Read More
Building Software Is Learning
An internal note to the Amp team on feedback and shipping faster
A few weeks ago I shared the following as an internal message with the Amp team. I showed it to a friend while talking about feedback loops and he told me to post this publicly. So here we go. Unedited, straight up copy & pasted from our Slack. — Read More
Building a hill-climbing machine:
Today we are announcing a family of seven new models developed in-house at Microsoft AI. Beyond these models, we’re building a superintelligence lab – a system and an approach we believe will define the next phase of AI.
This is an extraordinary time in technology. The compute used to train frontier models has increased by a factor of one trillion. Now we expect another thousand-fold increase over the next three years, which in turn means more advanced capabilities, and the continued rollout of ever more effective AI.
This epic compute ramp will change the nature of work, business and daily life. We all have to prepare for this reality. Our job at MAI is to help you do this – to push the frontier, and to build a hill-climbing machine to keep you at the frontier. — Read More
Nvidia announces new AI chip for personal computers
Nvidia has announced a new chip for PCs as it moves into the consumer market for devices integrated with AI technology.
“This reinvention of the computer is as big of a deal as the reinvention of the phone into what we now know as the smartphone,” Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang said as he unveiled the RTX Spark chip. — Read More
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