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That makes sense. A single large hydroelectric turbine could generate 500MW. That’s a whole lot of power compared to a 3MW wind turbine.

Yes. Literally AI is being used by actual nation state adversaries to compromise bits of infrastructure that companies rely on to run their services. They are compromising this infrastructure specifically because they seek to gain advantage against their adversary (us).

Fortunately, interconnects cannot go out of phase easily. If one region is out of phase with another, massive currents flow down the transmission lines within milliseconds, causing generators at one side or the other to slow down or speed up. I have seen this effect live at a hydroelectric dam. We were watching the turbine shaft spin at the moment they switched on some giant interconnect. There was a phase-alignment dial and it just instantly pinged up to 0 while the spinning shaft shuddered, slightly altering its rate of rotation in the blink of an eye.

Uber Eats in my area is usually faster than DoorDash. I look forward to the ongoing competition. But, Instacart provides delivery services behind the scenes for Costco and Walmart; having less competition between DoorDash and Instacart will surely lead to higher prices charged to the big box stores. Hopefully Uber steps into the fray to keep them on their toes.

That team was mostly hired away by NVIDIA.

That is correct. The gpt-6 models are strange.

We're so far beyond lines of code improvements. Agents are building entire features with mergeable PRs that we now deploy with confidence. That was impossible six months ago and unimaginable a year ago.

So, my measure is not just line of code. It's deployable features. And yes, by that measure, we have gone from zero to "lots" in a very short time.

I don't see why a payoff would have appeared yet. Many (but certainly not all) software companies have increased their output without hiring more people. But having software with more features doesn't necessarily drive immediate productivity gains in the rest of the economy. It will take time for those benefits to percolate. We've only had access to models good enough to majorly accelerate code writing since early-2026. I feel like we're in the very beginnings of the first part of this wave.

For sake of comparison, consider e-commerce. As a proxy for "impact on the economy", we can use Amazon's revenue. They went public in 1997 and that year had revenue of $148M (just 0.14% of Walmart's revenue that year). By 2000, revenue was $2.76B (1.65% of Walmart). Bricks and mortar didn't start feeling anything until probably 2011, when Amazon crossed 11% of Walmart's revenue. And it wasn't until 2025 that Amazon finally surpassed Walmart.

But, if you worked in tech in the e-commerce business, things were already feeling pretty hot by 2007. And at that point in time, the e-commerce sector was still miniscule compared to traditional retail (~4%). Software is very exciting these days and the most fantastic things are happening. They will eventually percolate out to the rest of the economy. But it will take many years before everyone notices the difference.

These full-duplex models are getting very "Her"-ish lately. gpt-live-1 is fantastic. Dessa, though, seems to be aiming at full human parity. There's a huge market for AI girlfriends that they should be looking into in earnest...

From the site:

Q: Do the iServices like iCloud, App Store, etc work? A: No, at least not yet. They possibly require something iOS refers to as the “Legacy FairPlay Key Descrambler” AES (hardware) command.

Extremely subtle hint. Well played.

Pack it up and go home, everyone. The alpha-release doesn't chart. Time to throw in the towel. /s

Grok can be fast because X.ai does not worry about gross margins yet. They can tuck those nasty secrets away deep inside SpaceX…

I suspect that Dots and Duet are very high margin drivers for the labs. Personal assistant chat sessions don’t have to be realtime, so workloads can be scheduled on low priority batches and be waited if higher value work comes into a queue.

Inference providers are always trying to fill inference batches and having a stream of low priority requests can help pack batches that might have gone empty, without raising the latency of higher priority requests such as live chat sessions.

While Dot and Duet certainly need to be useful to work out as products, I think the gross margin mechanics are just as interesting.

I find it is okay if I tell the agent that running the formatting step is required before every commit.