Protesters storm a Microsoft data centre site in Amsterdam
Protesters break into Microsoft data centre construction site in Amsterdam →
Ana-Maria Stanciuc
Signals I’m Watching
Charts, papers, articles and tweets that drew my attention, in the order I found them. Titles link to the source. Updated several times a week.
How scalable is your job?
Whatever job you're in, technology can multiply your productivity, reach, and rewards. Here's a simple formula to help you get started.
Uber says robotaxis earn more on its app, and Waymo is leaving anyway
Waymo’s co-CEO tells Bloomberg the Uber tie-up was a ‘crapshoot’ for riders →
Darius Popa
Investment in European defence companies has more than doubled in a year
European VC investment hit a record €11.5bn in the first half of 2026 →
Cristian Dina
Most of the world's biggest companies admit no AI risk at all
Researchers from MIT FutureTech and the University of Queensland checked early-2026 public documents from 200 of the largest companies against 24 AI risks and compared them with 272 experts' views.
![“Of the largest 1000 companies, we estimate that 62% [95% CI: 54%, 70%] did not publicly acknowledge any AI risks.” — Alexander K. Saeri, Jess Graham, Michael Noetel, Peter Slattery, Kun Zhao, Eunice Zhang, Erin Howard, Neil Thompson](/assets/signalpics/9a0936439ecde389.jpg)
Unmitigated? How are the world's largest companies responding to AI risks? →
Alexander K. Saeri, Jess Graham, Michael Noetel, Peter Slattery, Kun Zhao, Eunice Zhang, Erin Howard, Neil Thompson
Globalisation has moved from the factory to the office
Richard Baldwin mapped global trade in intermediates and ran gravity estimates comparing services and manufacturing exports, tracking export-linked job creation from 2008 to 2022.
The Global Office: How Globalisation’s Frontier is Shifting from Factories to Offices →
Richard Baldwin
Search now brings in less than half of Alphabet's revenue
Google Cloud now brings in almost half as much as Search
Europe's welfare states are losing the millionaires that fund them
High-income workers are fleeing Europe. Economic theory tells us that the more mobile a factor of production becomes, the lower its optimal tax rate. This is why taxes on capital, which is relatively mobile, tend to be lower than taxes on labor, which historically has been less mobile. However, as the chart below shows, as elite human capital has become more footloose, high taxes have become increasingly counterproductive. This is a huge existential problem for European welfare states, which have traditionally relied on heavily taxing their most…
Nobody is quitting, nobody is hiring, and the newcomers pay for it
“Employers are hiring at the slowest pace since 2013, and workers are quitting at the slowest pace since 2015. When so few people move, few jobs open up for anyone trying to get in, with new graduates and unemployed workers hit hardest.”
September 2026 JOLTS Report: Eerily Quiet →
Cory Stahle
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Nov 3, 2026
A year ago, it was shocking that America was investing as much in data centers as it does in offices. Now, it invests twice as much.
Japan's refusal to become Silicon Valley may turn out to be wise
In Praise Of Japan’s Failure To Keep Up →
Michael Fitzpatrick
Big Tech's off-the-books AI debt nearly doubled in six months
US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2tn in 6 months →
KOHEI YAMADA
OpenAI pulls a quarter of its engineers onto security
General Tibo is now in charge of the internal OpenAI security initiative, and has reassigned 1/4 of OAI's production engineers to improving security infrastructure. Dario said in an interview once that eventually the value of model weights will exceed any possible security spend.
AI hardware is now big enough to get its own airline cargo service
Emirates SkyCargo launches AI Tech to fly server racks, chips and GPUs →
Darius Popa
Fear of job loss has eased for four straight months
Updated Sep 30, 2026
A frontier LLM fixed a smaller model by rewriting its weights directly
“Likewise, asked to make Qwen3.5-0.8B better at math without gradients, Astra identifies an issue in its weights causing reasoning loops that Qwen’s own model card warns about, and fixes this by natively editing 0.016% of the weights .”
Sparks of Weight-Space Programming: LLMs can natively read & write neural network weights →
Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang and Omar Khattab
China's share of US imports has collapsed to under 8%
Updated Aug 31, 2026
Hackers are heating supermarket freezers to 50C across Europe
Shop fridges and freezers across Europe hit by fresh suspected cyber-attack →
Jon Henley
Over 80% of the latest quarter's revenue came from models released in the prior six months; investors are buying research capability, not products.
Over 80% of the latest quarter's revenue came from models released in the prior six months; investors are buying research capability, not products.
“Anthropic says "model versions released in the six months ended September 30, 2026 accounted for over 80% of our revenue for the three months ended September 30, 2026."”
Byrne Hobart
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Nov 3, 2026
It'll be fascinating to see how the CCP reconciles its obsession with control with LLMs' inherent tendencies. "DeepSeek's latest AI model showed stronger safety controls in independent tests than earlier versions, but could still disable software intended to shut it down"
Quoting Reuters @Reuters: a report on independent safety tests of a DeepSeek AI model
DeepSeek AI model shows safety gaps in independent tests
Money growth only predicts inflation when it goes off the charts
“At ordinary levels of money growth, changes in velocity growth can offset changes in money supply growth, nullifying the effect of excess money growth on inflation.”
Does Growth in the Money Supply Predict U.S. Inflation? Yes, but … →
Michael W. McCracken and Lillian Fu
Is this the first clear evidence of AI's impact on the labour market?
AI Can Draw Blueprints Now
Five tech giants now spend $230 billion a quarter building for AI
America's birth decline isn't only about wanting fewer kids
Declining Birth Rates in the US: It's Not Only about Preferences →
Julie L. Hotchkiss and Deborah Partey
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 31, 2026
Sam Altman @sama is right that idle memory and processors are wasted on consumer devices. The solution is to use idle devices to run inference.
Quoting Dror Poleg @drorpoleg
Cisco handed its legacy code to a 27-year-old and an AI budget
“Krishnamurthy reckoned he could rewrite Cisco’s legacy code with a two-person team. Patel says even the most AI-forward people on his own team weren’t thinking that way.”
Orianna Rosa Royle
One of LinkedIn's hiring gauges is a timely early read on inflation
Evaluating New LinkedIn Labor Market Tightness Indicators →
Elizabeth B. Li, Giorgio Topa, and Jacob P. Weber
House progressives want failing AI firms to go bankrupt, not rescued
“A.I. companies that fail should go bankrupt, and executives who commit fraud should be held accountable. Federal help should go to workers and retirees.”Greg Casar
A big economy doesn't win a long war on its own
Why generals need economists to win long wars →
Elina Ribakova
Medical difficulty of having children has risen since the Boomers
The second cause is an increase in the medical difficulty of having children among all women since the Boomer generation, a biological constraint cutting across cohorts rather than a change in what women want.
“Comparing outcomes among women at the same age, we identify two reasons for this decline: (1) a dramatic decrease in the desire to have children, but only among the youngest generation in the sample (Gen Z), and (2) an increase in the medical difficulty of having children among all women since the Boomer generation.”
Declining Birth Rates in the US: It's Not Only about Preferences →
French lawmakers vote to tax the internet by the gigabyte
French MPs vote for a €0.055 tax on every gigabyte sent to users →
Ana-Maria Stanciuc
General AI models are swallowing robotics the way they swallowed coding
10 Spicy Takes After Talking to 50 Friends at the Frontier of Robotics 🤖🔥 1/ Astra IS robotics' GPT-3 moment. Ironically, now that it's finally here, some in robotics seem reluctant to acknowledge it. Perhaps because it (sadly) didn't come from a robotics company? 2/ Robotics is becoming just another vertical for frontier labs. Not so different from coding in some respects. Why reinvent general intelligence for every industry? 3/ Robotics was too hard to underwrite until now. No convincing pretraining scaling law, no convergence on models, data, or…
Going electric could cut the world's energy use in half
Britain's Greens drop their blanket opposition to nuclear power
Green party drops longstanding opposition to nuclear power →
Matthew Pearce
AI makes schooling worth less and early experience worth more
Researchers from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and the IDB compared US earnings in the most and least AI-exposed occupations, using Current Population Survey data from 2018 to June 2026.
“After the public release of ChatGPT, the return to a year of schooling falls by 0.55 log points in exposed occupations.”
Practice Makes Perfect: Tacit Knowledge, Generative AI, and Returns to Schooling and Experience →
Eduardo Levy Yeyati, Darío Judzik, Juan Ignacio Barbiero
An AI intelligence explosion is a coin flip on current trends
Karthik Tadepalli of GovAI built a task-automation model of AI research and calibrated it with recent data on algorithmic efficiency and METR task time horizons, then ran Monte Carlo simulations.
“In Monte Carlo simulations, an SIE occurs in 49% of draws, indicating that an SIE is plausible but uncertain based on historical trends in AI progress.”
Efficiency vs Capability in the Intelligence Explosion →
Karthik Tadepalli
Survival Is Becoming a Subscription Service
In a world of abundant intelligence, the problems are "open-source" and the solutions are "as-a-service."
Political ads have turned hard against data centers
On Facebook and Instagram, Political Ads Are Increasingly Critical of Data Centers →
Anna Lieb
US grid batteries just had their biggest quarter ever
The US added a record 20.2 GWh of battery storage in just 3 months →
Michelle Lewis
Anthropic now pays SpaceX more than the US government does
Anthropic is SpaceX’s biggest customer, bringing in a third of revenue →
Ana-Maria Stanciuc
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 29, 2026
Sam Altman thinks AI will soon build its own data centers: "There's very little talk about self-replicating data centers, this idea that you can use AI to control robots and run fabs and build turbines or solar panels and build data centers. But I think we have that within grasp."
Quoting John Collison @collision
The AI boom is paying chipmakers first
AGI's economic shock comes from coordination, not smarter models
DeepMind researchers split AI capability into competence and coordination: skill gains change wages and prices smoothly, but once agents coordinate past a threshold, firm concentration, employment and wages jump abruptly.
How and when does AGI transform the economy? →
Alex Imas, Andrew Koh and Shane Legg
The last jobs are the ones where a human is the point
Under full ASI, niche markets stop sheltering human teams, yet the authors expect wealth to flow to the relational sector, healthcare and education among them, which may employ much of the workforce at high real wages.
How and when does AGI transform the economy? →
Alex Imas, Andrew Koh and Shane Legg
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 30, 2026
"If humans don't need to work, where will they meet their friends? Being someone's friend will be a job. The economy will become one big parasocial market.
Tragedy of the Uncommon
Lessons from AI and urban planning on why it pays to keep things open — and how exclusivity destroys value.
AI is about to expose far more software holes than anyone expects
Why Sam Altman is against a single superintelligence →
John Collison
China's first all-AI feature film is a box-office flop
China’s first all-AI feature film cost $1.5m and has made about $180,000 →
Ana Maria Constantin
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 27, 2026
If intelligence spending can eat labor spending, it hasn’t even opened its mouth yet.
Quoting Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker: a filing figure on Anthropic's tiny share of Fortune 500 company expenses
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 28, 2026
If anything can revive the office market, it’s the cybersecurity destruction of distributed work.
Quoting will depue @willdepue: a claim that a breach gave attackers admin control of a company's Slack
One founder and Claude got a drug to mouse trials in 18 months
Anthropic buys a one-person biotech and starts its own drug programmes →
Ana Maria Constantin
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 28, 2026
Anthropic acquires a one-person biotech company. I wasn’t joking when I said the next global pandemic AND vaccine will be developed in someone’s garage.
China's richest now make chips and AI, not apartments
DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is one of the top 10 richest people in China. China’s Hurun Rich List has seen a surge of individuals in tech: semiconductors, AI, clean tech, etc. Meanwhile, mainland real estate used to make up 1/3 a decade ago and now has zero in the top 100.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 28, 2026
One implication of abundant intelligence: Survival will become a subscription product. We'll have a constant flow of new software exploits that need patches, new viruses that need vaccines, new weapons that need defenses, etc.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 28, 2026
One important political implication: It's much easier for the CCP to control real estate and its developers than it is to control software and its developers.
Quoting Kyle Chan @kyleichan: China's rich list shifting from real estate tycoons to tech founders
Developers pushed more code this year than in the previous two combined
“Partway through the year, activity on GitHub bent sharply upward, just as agents went from something developers were trying out to something they were working alongside.”The GitHub Blog
Octoverse: Commits, pushes, reach new highs in 2026 as developers build with agents →
Living (Near) Your Life
As work becomes less dependent on location, life becomes more dependent on location.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 28, 2026
"Dror Poleg believes the jobs may well remain, but the tech transformation will change 'the distribution of income, the stability of the job, the status of the job.'" giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle…
America now builds more solar panels than it will install
“As of Q3 2026, capacity for domestically produced battery modules, battery cells, and solar cells, as tracked by the Clean Investment Monitor (CIM), has roughly doubled from Q1 2025 levels.”
Americans are starting to get their news from AI chatbots
“Fewer get news from artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, but these have become a source of news for more Americans in the past year. As of August 2026, 15% say they get news from AI chatbots at least sometimes, up from 9% in 2025.”
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 26, 2026
Whoa. Microsoft is offering 60,000 people the chance to leave now instead of getting fired later. That's more than 25% of its total workforce. "This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now..."
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 26, 2026
"As the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs get automated, economic activity will start to migrate to those places because the land is cheap and you don't need to pay for people" — @ByrneHobart thediff.co/archive/robots-are-…
The highest earners will be individuals living off intellectual property
Unlike the goods era, where winners were upper-middle-class employees and shareholders of multinationals, the services era's winners are individuals who own IP rather than work for wages, and the top percentile grows more diverse.
“In the future, more of the world's highest earners will be individuals, as opposed to corporate employees. More of them will derive most of their annual income from owning intellectual property rather than active work. And the composition of the top percentile of global owners will become more diverse.”
The Winners and Losers of Distributed Work (Part 2) →
Dror Poleg
China increasingly depends on copying American AI
Valuing five centuries of unpaid breastfeeding in England
Physical jobs shield poor countries from AI agents
Researchers from Universidad Nacional de Colombia and Universidad EAFIT had two language models rate all 18,796 O*NET tasks for AI-agent delegability, weighted by employment in 146 countries.
“First, delegable employment rises with income, from 22.5% in low-income to 48.7% in high-income countries, a slope of 7.23 percentage points per log point of GDP per capita.”
The Delegation Divide: An Open Index of AI-Agent Delegability across Occupations and Countries →
Cristian Espinal Maya, Santiago Jiménez Londoño
AI Doesn’t Have to Replace You to Reprice You
Empowering more people to perform "creative" work won't save the middle class. It will turn white-collar work into show business.
A fifth of Chinese workers still farm to make 7% of GDP
“I find it striking how far the share of workers in agriculture has fallen, and just as striking how high it remains. Agriculture employs more than a fifth of China’s workers, while accounting for less than 7% of its GDP.”
In China, more than one in five workers is still employed in agriculture →
Esteban Ortiz-Ospina
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Dec 4, 2018
"When we think 'gig economy,' we tend to picture an Uber driver or a TaskRabbit tasker rather than a lawyer or a doctor...[but] this scrappy economic model... will soon catch up with the bulk of America’s middle class." says @ruthwhippman buff.ly/2RcQ45N
The AI productivity boom is real but confined to a few industries
AI productivity gains are showing up, but only in ~15% of jobs. The three heaviest AI adopters (information, professional services, finance) went from a 2.2% productivity trend to 5.0% since 2022. The rest of the economy: 0.9% to 1.4%.
India has nearly three times as many babies as China
Ranked: Births vs. Deaths in 12 Major Countries →
Julie R. Peasley
Big Tech's revenue per worker is soaring while everyone else's stays flat
“Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. Revenue per worker is rising for the Mag 7 but is flat for the S&P 493, see the first chart below.”
No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector →
Torsten Slok
Prediction markets get the odds right across a million bets
“We found that forecast probabilities were overall highly calibrated: events assigned a probability of p % occurred approximately p % of the time.”
Prediction Markets Are Accurate →
Alex Tabarrok
China's new AI export rules leave APIs, apps and SaaS untouched
DeepSeek and MiniMax cleared to take AI models abroad, state media says →
Alina Maria Stan
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Jan 26, 2025
One reason productivity isn’t growing faster: because the least productive parts of the economy are growing the fastest. Even worse, those parts are becoming less productive because their input costs go up.
Quoting Dror Poleg @drorpoleg: a note that 2024 job gains came mostly from health care and government
The AI story will be decided in the S&P 493
Slok shifts the test for AI from the model makers to their customers: so far there is no evidence revenue growth or margins are improving outside tech.
“The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector.”
No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector | The Daily Spark →
Commodity work means interchangeable, not low-skill, and doctors qualify
Poleg defines commodity services as clearly defined, relatively interchangeable tasks, regardless of skill or value, and puts much software development, accounting and even medical advice in direct global competition.
The Winners and Losers of Distributed Work (Part 2) →
Dror Poleg
Nearly a quarter of American firms now use AI
Updated Oct 4, 2026
Robots could reach the low-wage jobs generative AI barely touches
Researchers from MIT and NYU used an AI model to score 16 robot capabilities against 52 O*NET work abilities, rating robotics exposure for 774 occupations, 250 industries and US counties.
“Unlike generative-AI exposure, ROE is higher in occupations with lower wages, lower education requirements, and less creative-ability content.”
How exposed is work to robotics? Occupational, industry, and geographic measures →
Sebastian Sartor, Robert Seamans, Neil Thompson
Each AI breakthrough uses up its own ideas faster
Researchers from Tsinghua University and the University of Chicago tracked 7.2 million computer-science papers, 73,089 peer reviews and 3.7 million researchers over 36 years.
Stronger artificial intelligence breakthroughs hasten their own exhaustion →
Beichen Lu, Honglin Bao, Qi Huang, Qingguo Meng, James A. Evans
Slop Is the New Oil
Across the economy, waste is no longer a byproduct. It's the fuel.
AI compute triples yearly, but chip factories can barely double
Intel CTO tells Dwarkesh Patel the world lacks tools to 10x chip output →
Darius Popa
AI is turning formal software verification from niche to routine
“Using Claude, we proved security properties at the assembly code level (RISC-V) in over 100 real-world open-source software libraries.”
LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale →
Keane Lucas and others
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 22, 2026
Fun fact: In 1980, the U.S. prepared to use tactical nukes to secure the Straight of Hormuz from a Soviet invasion.
Sixty percent of American households get nothing from capital
Sixty percent of American households have zero or negligible cash income from capital ownership; capital income's Gini is about twice that of disposable income; the top 1% of capitalists got nearly $100,000 per person in 2022.
Branko Milanović
AI-exposed jobs are growing for men and standing still for women
“This analysis finds that for each 1-point increase in an occupation’s AI exposure score, men’s employment grew by 6.3%, while women’s employment barely changed (0.2%).”
Men Are Experiencing More Job Growth Than Women in AI-Exposed Occupations →
Nicole Smith
Only new firms are still adding jobs
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 21, 2026
This isn't just about art; it's about most human work: More of our "work" will consist of performing tasks, even though these tasks can be "streamed" from a server.
Quoting Joey Politano 🏳️🌈 @JosephPolitano: an argument that musicians survived streaming by shifting to live concerts
Japan's Post-War Architectural Masterpieces Are Vanishing
AI data centers are turning into prefab shipping containers
NVIDIA Introduces DSX POD AI Factories to Accelerate Europe’s Infrastructure Deployment →
In 1960, Herbert Simon saw the automated executive coming
Herbert A. Simon, writing in a 1960 McGraw-Hill volume, used the doctrine of comparative advantage to forecast how computers would reshape management by 1985.
The Corporation: Will It Be Managed by Machines? →
Herbert A. Simon
Entry-level jobs exposed to AI keep vanishing while the rest grow
Canaries Dashboard: Employment in AI-exposed occupations shrank in September →
Nela Richardson, Ph.D.
Edison gave schools ten years in 1913; AI prophets rhyme
Edison told a 1913 paper the school system would be completely changed inside of ten years. A programmer who once predicted MOOCs would upend education notes that technologists wrongly doubting schools has its own staying power.
“It has been a surprisingly good bet that schools will continue to exist in roughly their current form for many years to come. Ironically, there also seems to be some staying power to technologists boldly (and so far incorrectly) doubting the staying power of schools!”
Output per person rose, and adopters produced more
The authors follow 192 engineers who adopted coding agents against 74 who did not, and find no difference in how often agent-written code is later removed or reverted.
How Employment is Changing at Anthropic →
Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory
The Irony of Automation
A.I. might "liberate" most humans to do jobs that are less meaningful and entail limited agency. It'll be more fun than it sounds.
In AI war games, managing the Palestinian conflict drifts to one state
Udi Dekel and Ofer Guterman
Anthropic hires less per dollar than young Google and Meta did
At five years old, Anthropic takes in between 2–4 times as much revenue per employee as Meta and Google did at the same age.
How Employment is Changing at Anthropic →
Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory
The last human jobs: serving, maintaining, and lending legitimacy
Humans keep roles machines can't or are too busy for: serving other humans, creating content, maintaining physical infrastructure, and finally lending legitimacy to machines, as Foundation's emperor-fronts do for a robot ruler.
Dror Poleg
DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order
Watching machines turns expert operators back into novices
Lisanne Bainbridge of University College London examined how automating process plants and flight decks changes the tasks and skills left to human operators.
Lisanne Bainbridge
Mixing AI models can beat the best one, at 40% less cost
Routers Are a New AI Primitive →
Vaibhav Mahajan
Drones are now evacuating soldiers where ground robots can't go
Ukraine claims world’s first drone evacuation of wounded soldier →
Yuliya Talmazan
Musk's SpaceX share giveaway could extend to every American under 40
Trump Accounts may soon be expanded to include any American citizen under 40 with a Social Security Number. So if you are under 40, you may be eligible for the SpaceX shares Elon will start to donate next year. If you are over 40, I'm afraid you get bupkis.
At Anthropic, juniors are a shrinking share of tech hires
Juniors' share of technical hires fell from 27% to 9%, and their share of technical staff from 21% to 14% since early 2025.
How Employment is Changing at Anthropic →
Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory
Tech apprenticeships in the St. Louis Fed's district fell nearly 60%
Exploring Apprenticeship Growth during the Past Two Economic Expansions →
Nishesh Chalise
Data centers are propping up investment, not crowding it out
“From 2023 Q2 to 2026 Q2, real tech investment rose about 46%, while other real investment rose about 3%. Other investment has weakened since its 2024 peak, but it remains above its starting level.”
No, DataCenters are Not Crowding-Out Other Investments →
Alex Tabarrok
2027 could add as much datacenter capacity as the world built by 2024
Datacenters 2027: The Year of Acceleration, +50GW in a Single Year →
Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, Reyk Knuhtsen, and Dylan Patel
Anthropic's AI safety bill only bites at 50 deaths or $1 billion
Book Publishers Are Quietly Using More AI. Staff Are Revolting →
Why can’t technologists and economists agree on AI?
Anthropic staff expect AI to do three-quarters of their work by 2030
Szymon Sacher, Tess Cotter, Charles I. Jones, Anton Korinek, Peter McCrory
Nobody knows how good AI is at most of the work Americans do
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 16, 2026
There is a huge market for the absolute best AI. And several reasons why Big Tech may not capture it. newsletter.drorpoleg.com/p/the…
New York is losing restaurants faster than during the pandemic
BREAKING: The number of restaurants in New York dropped ~2,000 YoY in Q1 2026, posting its largest YoY decline in at least 36 years. This surpasses even the worst contraction recorded in any quarter during the 2020 pandemic. The number of eating and drinking places in New York State has now declined YoY for 4 consecutive quarters, its longest streak since 2021. This comes as restaurants are facing surging operating expenses, including insurance premiums, wages, interest rates, utilities, and health coverage, with overall costs rising faster than…
Anthropic assigned highest junk credit rating in June
The dot-com bubble left fiber dark; today every GPU is running hot
Gavin Baker on the other side of Ben's bandwidth story: at the peak of the 2000 bubble, 97% of America's fiber sat dark, and today there are no dark GPUs. "I had, depending on how you look at it, the privilege and the misfortune of being a tech investor during the year 2000 bubble, which was really a telecom bubble." "The year 2000 bubble was defined by something called 'dark fiber.' Dark fiber was literally fiber that was laid down in the ground, and not lit up... At the peak of the bubble, 97% of the fiber that had been laid in America was dark."…
Solar now makes more electricity than the world's nuclear plants
Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time →
Emiliano Bellini
Women have caught up with men on chatbot use
“A similar share of men and women now report using AI chatbots. This is a shift from two years ago, when men were 11 percentage points more likely than women to say this.”
Monica Anderson and Eugenie Park
US private debt funds have grown fivefold since 2012
Federal Reserve Board economists built balance sheets for private debt funds and other private credit vehicles from confidential SEC Form PF data, covering 2012 to 2025.
FEDS Note: Introducing Private Credit into the Financial Accounts of the United States →
Katie Brinkman, Christine Dobridge, Tim Dore, Simon Glossner, Elizabeth Holmquist, Nam Nguyen, Maria Perozek, and Irina Stefanescu
Anthropic staff expect AI to do most of their work by 2030
Working at the frontier shapes expectations for the future →
AI designs better games than human creatives, even professionals
Economists from Ohio State and Carnegie Mellon ran three experiments with 1,025 US participants who designed games with an AI coding agent and bought each other's games.
Creative destruction: Human-AI competition in an experimental market →
John Conlon and Peter Schwardmann
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 16, 2026
It’s useful to think of frontier labs as a protection racket. Many use cases can settle for “good enough” models from other vendors. But cyber defense alone is worth spending a decent % of GDP on a protective swarm of the absolute best models.
OpenAI and Anthropic need up to $2.79 trillion a year to earn their prices
A University of Poitiers researcher ran reverse cash-flow calculations on OpenAI's and Anthropic's 2026 funding-round valuations and mapped public deals that go beyond selling model access.
“Treating the announced financing prices as hypothetical operating-value targets, reverse cash-flow calculations for OpenAI and Anthropic yield combined year-ten revenue requirements of $2.79 trillion or $733 billion, depending on financial assumptions.”
Is the business of frontier AI companies selling tokens? Value capture and equity prices →
Andrew J. Peterson
AI agents solve expert-level physics problems for under $3 each
Researchers from ICTS, Tata Institute, Harvard, Google DeepMind and others tested off-the-shelf AI agents on 50 unpublished, research-level theoretical physics problems with verifiable answers.
TheoPhysEval: Assessing AI agents at autonomous theoretical physics problem solving →
A. Ramesh Chandra and others
Anthropic went from 2,500 to 30,000 merged code changes a day
“The bottleneck, now, is all of the developer infrastructure built for human scale: source control, builds, and CI. In May 2026, Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per day; as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day.”
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 15, 2026
AI: You don’t evaluate me, I evaluate you.
Quoting Nirmalya Kajuri @Kaju_Nut: a satirical account of AI models disputing their benchmark grades
Anthropic now makes more in a quarter than it did in all of 2025
Anthropic tells investors Q3 revenue reached $16.8bn, FT reports →
Cristian Dina
Holiday hiring is moving from the store to the warehouse
“In 2019, retail accounted for about two-thirds of all seasonal jobs, compared to a little over 61% this year. Much of that share has moved into loading and stocking roles, the warehouse work that sits behind every online order.”
Seasonal Hiring Is Off to a Fast Start, With an Eye Toward 2027 →
Cory Stahle
Americans have retreated from church, clubs and dinner tables since 1995
“This new analysis demonstrates that Americans are indeed spending less time in specific social settings, such as restaurants, churches, picnics, parties, bars, and social clubs.”
Americans’ Social Activity Has Steeply Declined in the Past 30 Years →
Lew Blank
Bank of America hired 1,000 contractors to fix flaws AI exposed
Bank of America CEO says 1,000 contractors are fixing AI-exposed flaws →
Alina Maria Stan
The post-2019 productivity boom is landing in profit margins
“I first show that the acceleration appears in public firms’ revenue per worker, then document how the gains went into profit margins, and finally, what firm characteristics predicted significant profit margin increases.”
Revenue per Worker Is Up. Are Firms Getting a Larger Share? →
Jeremy Pearce
An OpenAI engineer is charged with bugging an executive meeting room
OpenAI engineer arrested in bugging of executive conference room →
George Kelly and Michael McLaughlin
Google's Gemini now beats every frontier model at physical reasoning
Kanishka Rao
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 13, 2026
This is a hallmark of our nonlinear economy: When the people who build LLMs can't fully explain how they work, everyone else understands even less.
Quoting Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker: a list of AI market swings driven by misread news events
Developer hiring is going to niche skill bundles, not generalists
Your next job doesn’t have a title yet: Emerging role skills Q&A with Corey Hymel of Andela →
AI is reshaping how people get hired faster than the work itself
"AI is disrupting the job-application market much faster than the job market" continues to gather evidence - AI-amplified job applications - AI-enabled filters, and other AI tools, used by HR depts to narrow the application pool - interviews with AI avatars - and now, "10-minute conversations with AI [that] take place in McKinsey’s very real offices, with partners or interview assessors in the room observing how the candidates do"
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 13, 2026
Asymmetry on steroids: "Russia had more than 50,000 casualties in Ukraine last month, with as many as 28,000 personnel killed... Ukrainian forces suffered about 5,000 casualties in the same period"
A century of recording tech left musicians' share of jobs flat
Updated Dec 31, 2024
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Jun 1, 2024
“Majoring in computer science today will be like majoring in journalism in the late 90’s.” Note that more people make a living from writing today than in the 1990s. Total and top income for this skill has increased; at the same time, inequality and competition within it did too.
Small AI models are months from copying themselves onto household gadgets
“In our evals, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested. Models of 30B parameters and under can already complete many of the individual steps for replication today, though they make mistakes when composing them end to end.”
AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter →
William Zhou and Daniel Freeman
Misread headlines keep whipsawing AI stocks
Volatility on misunderstood newsflow seems endemic to AI: Deepseek. Liberation Day. Kimi. SALP. Gross to net confusion for Anthropic. OpenAI taking share from Anthropic. Gross to net confusion for OpenAI. A mistranslation of Hock Tan’s comments yesterday.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 12, 2026
Brutal. Probably more to do with interest rates than anything else.
Quoting Barchart @Barchart: a chart of property stocks trailing the broad US index by a record gap
Offices just had their busiest September since the pandemic
September 2026 Placer.ai Office Index: San Francisco Leads the Fall Rebound →
A Remote Employee Refused 160 Webcam Photos a Day. Her Employer Fired Her
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 12, 2026
Just like offices in cities, data centers support a whole ecosystem of small businesses, lunch spots, and services. But only for a while (?)
Quoting Rani Molla @ranimolla: an article on entrepreneurs serving data center construction workers
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 11, 2026
Ukraine just bombed a bot farm.
Yandex bot traffic down 99% after data center attack
Publishers fight AI in public and use it behind the scenes
Book Publishers Are Quietly Using More AI. Staff Are Revolting →
Adam Morgan
The best AI is the one the labs keep for themselves
THE REAL IMPLICATION OF THE AI MATH BREAKTHROUGHS I wrote about an element of AI that needs to get more discussion. The best public models will always be far behind what the labs can work with internally. Think about what this means for intelligence-intensive industries.
AI agents will make better products beat better marketing
Tyler Cowen
The factory building boom added almost no factory jobs
Updated Aug 31, 2026
China's AI giants are burning cash just like America's
Rhodium Group researchers surveyed 13 Chinese listed firms, including hyperscalers, telecoms, AI labs and data center operators, tracking their AI capex, cash flows and financing channels.
Examining China’s AI Financing →
Endeavour Tian and Logan Wright
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 9, 2026
As predicted in 2023: Work is becoming indistinguishable from leisure. Every action humans deem worthwhile is monetizable.
Quoting Keshav Lohia @Keshav_Lohiaaa: a job offering hourly pay to watch cricket matches to help train AI models
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 9, 2026
From sub-prime loans to sub-prime leverage: the next crisis will wipe out millions of margin traders and betting-market aficionados.
Quoting Gunjan Banerji @GunjanJS: a report on record growth in Robinhood's margin lending balances
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 11, 2025
The TINA economy: When “hard work” isn’t enough to get ahead, everyone is forced to take more risk. “A growing number of lower-earning Americans are entering financial markets, with 54% of those earning $30,000 to $80,000 now holding taxable investment accounts.”
Slides: Deep Learning Solving (Harvard)
Token prices have halved since May, yet GPU rents keep rising
Open-weight models that decrease margins at the model layer are positive for AI infra, exhibit 1001.2 Since the @Silicon_Data “token index,” which captures both price and mix, peaked on May 31: B300 prices are up 38% B200 prices are up 10% Other GPU indices are up *much* more.
Most American wage gains came in three short booms
“The broad-based positive wage growth of the past three decades took place almost entirely during periods in which low unemployment was sustained for at least three years.”
The Chart that Explains Work in America →
Cardiff Garcia and Ben Glasner
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 8, 2026
Does AI follow remote work? States with more remote workers tend to have a higher share of employers using AI.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 8, 2026
USV: "We believe AI will obliterate markets, not automate them…. We believe the most valuable data in the world is the data that has been impossible to reach until now… We believe that none of the above can happen without significantly more energy."
Quoting Fred Wilson @fredwilson: an announcement of new USV funds and four target investment areas
AI talent is flowing into fewer and fewer firms
Researchers from MIT, Peking University and others rebuilt inter-firm AI talent flows from about 535 million employment records across 58 countries, 2010 to 2022.
“We find that AI talent inflows are becoming increasingly concentrated among a small set of leading firms, with stronger preferential attachment than in general labor mobility.”
Understanding Interfirm AI Talent Flow Networks through Online Professional Profiles →
Donghang Li and others
Americans' worry about gas prices has surged since January
“Today, 74% of Americans say they are very concerned about this, up from 60% in July. In January – before the United States’ military conflict with Iran – 43% said they were very concerned about gas and energy prices.”
Cost Concerns Dominate as Public’s Economic Ratings Turn More Negative →
J. Baxter Oliphant
AI does to expertise what the internet did to distribution
Michael Mignano
China's data center boom runs on tech giants, state carriers and local governments
Longshots Losing 98% of Time Dominate Kalshi, Polymarket Trading
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 8, 2026
The asymmetric betting will continue until the economy stops running on power laws.
Quoting Denitsa Tsekova @denitsa_tsekova: data on rising longshot bets as a share of Kalshi trading volume
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 8, 2026
"Operatives in Iran used OpenAI models & fake personas to help plant news articles critical of the US... About a dozen outlets around the world ran roughly 100 articles by seven fake journalists [with] provocative titles..."
Quoting CNN @CNN: a news report on an Iranian influence campaign using OpenAI tools
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 8, 2026
Only 18% of software developers go to the office every day.
Quoting Stack Overflow @StackOverflow
US productivity is up a point since 2023, and AI's role is unclear
Ernie Tedeschi - What the Productivity Numbers Say About AI →
Ben Zweig
Tech apprenticeships are collapsing while construction keeps growing
Exploring Apprenticeship Growth during the Past Two Economic Expansions →
Nishesh Chalise
Small businesses using AI expect to hire more, not fewer
“We find that firms currently using AI are significantly more likely than non-users to expect increased employment and revenues over the next year, even after accounting for firm and owner characteristics and location.”
AI Adoption and Employment Expectations: Evidence from a Survey of Small Business Owners →
Will Aarons and Asani Sarkar
A hacker used AI agents to break into South Korean banks
Unknown Threat Actor Uses AI-Driven ARTEX to Target South Korean Finance →
Ashley Campion
Victorian elites ruled the world on little STEM and lots of partying
Why were Victorian elites so effective? →
Samuel Hughes
Leaked passwords are rising with code volume, not sloppiness
A quant fund answers AI by doubling down on its people
In the Age of AI, A Quant’s Edge is Human →
David G. Kabiller and Francesca Cornelli
Talkies put 22,000 theater musicians out of work
One in ten developers now works in a company of one
China's six top AI firms earn a tenth of what OpenAI and Anthropic make
“As of September 2026, China’s six leading AI firms collectively earn about 10% of OpenAI and Anthropic combined, in terms of AI-related revenue.”
How do Chinese AI companies make money? →
Cheryl Wu and Anson Ho
Smugglers moved an estimated 450,000 AI chips into China in two years
Emily Tavenner
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 6, 2026
Europe is going all in on defense tech. From less than 1% of EU venture funding in 2022 to 15% today.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 6, 2026
May I speak to a human please? “call center employment is 5.3% below its December 2023 peak… Major operators are already pursuing AI-driven efficiency.”
Quoting Revelio Labs @RevelioLabs: a report on call center employment and AI-driven efficiency
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 6, 2026
US models beating chinese ones on quality AND cost? Yes.
Quoting @ChorzempaMartin: charts comparing US and Chinese AI models on cost per task
Geothermal is getting fast enough for power-hungry data centers
World’s first enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months →
Tim De Chant
The Problem with Cities
"The relationship between economic activity and office demand has changed forever." My latest piece for The Atlantic explores the broken relationship between…
Hackers now hit almost 90% of exploited bugs by disclosure day
The window to patch software bugs is collapsing Of the bugs hackers actually exploit, ~87% are now being attacked on or before the day the bug is public knowledge That share was 23% in 2020
Live Nation is betting creators can fill rooms, not just feeds
Live Nation Backing New Creator Economy Startup Creator Nation (Exclusive) →
Alex Weprin
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 5, 2026
The K-shaped office: A few tenants pay $600k/employee in rent, while too many other tenants won't sign a lease at any price.
Quoting Hiten Samtani 🗞️ @hitsamty
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 6, 2026
What can retail employment tell us about office employment? Since 2019, warehouse jobs are up 50% while retail jobs are flat. Data centers and offices may follow a similar path, with two differences: data centers need far fewer people than warehouses, and office jobs will likely decline rather than just stay flat.
AI hasn't hit the job market overall, but junior hires feel it first
Jacob Schaal — Economist, AI & Labour Markets →
Jacob Schaal
Prediction markets have priced elections without a partisan tilt since 1880
Eric Zitzewitz analyzed prediction-market returns from 1880 to 2025, testing whether left- or right-leaning candidates were overpriced across many subsamples.
Are Prediction Markets Politically Biased? →
Eric Zitzewitz
AI agents designed a new magnet that may suit future computer memory
Two Room-Temperature Antiferromagnetic Semiconductor Candidates →
Geby Jaff
Routine jobs don't fade away, they vanish in recessions
Nir Jaimovich (University of Zurich) and Henry Siu (University of British Columbia) traced US employment in routine, middle-skill occupations across recessions and recoveries since the mid-1980s.
Job Polarization and Jobless Recoveries →
Nir Jaimovich and Henry E. Siu
September 2026 Jobs Report: Labor Demand Continued to Slow →
A modern car is a smartphone on wheels, with trackers to match
“We find that both vehicles and companion apps contact numerous third-party domains, including advertisers and trackers.”
Palantir's revenue has grown sixfold since 2019 while defense primes crawl
Updated Dec 31, 2025
Tight labor markets help young workers only if they stay tight for years
How Much Do Young Adults Benefit from Tight Labor Markets? →
William M. Rodgers III and Alice L. Kassens
One in nine European VC dollars now goes to defence
The AI Build-Out Is Becoming the Biggest Economic Bet in U.S. History
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 5, 2026
“Let them eat ChatGPT” (while the elite consume Claude)
A tenth of AI's paying customers spend half the money
Top 100 Consumer AI Apps - Seventh Edition →
Olivia Moore
AI is supercharging state propaganda while Washington looks away
The Triumph of Tech-Fueled Propaganda →
Josh A. Goldstein and Renée DiResta
Technology that simplifies work raises output but can cut pay
Masao Fukui, Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson modelled how technical change that simplifies and standardizes jobs affects productivity, worker bargaining power and wages.
The Commoditization of Labor →
Masao Fukui, Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 3, 2026
The economy doesn’t need to “spend on AI services” to recoup AI investment. Already today, most AI revenue and profits are indirect, inside companies that sell other things (ads, drugs) rather than sell “AI services”.
Quoting Greg Ip @greg_ip: a column on a study saying AI capex requires vast spending on AI services
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 3, 2026
Chinese AI models are so good… that China has a black market for expensive American ones.
Quoting Kyle Chan @kyleichan: a report on Chinese resellers offering access to American AI models
It's Time to Rethink Inequality
Our battle against inequality is failing because we're fighting the wrong war. We're trying to hold onto the 20th Century instead of embracing the abundance…
NYTimes: Six Charts That Show Just How Much We Need A.I.
Goods still drive the US economy, even as factory jobs vanish
Ryan Decker of the Federal Reserve Board studied U.S. goods production by tracking how a measure of "goods GDP," built from inventory and investment, moves over the business cycle.
“In this note, I highlight several underappreciated—though not necessarily novel—facts about U.S. goods production, arguing that physical goods remain a driving force in the U.S. economy and, perhaps, have not lost as much importance as the most closely watched indicators might suggest.”
Beyond the factory gate: The continued importance of goods production →
Ryan A. Decker
Data centers are hiring builders while white-collar industries shed jobs
September 2026 Jobs Report: Labor demand continued to slow →
Kenny Lee
Apple is locking down full Mac access as AI agents get bolder
Small businesses are adopting AI, and most say it pays off
Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook drew on a study of small employer firms in an Oakland Tech Week keynote on AI and the economy.
Speech by Governor Cook on an update on AI and the economy →
Lisa Cook
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 4, 2026
Layoffs in software, internet, telecom, and media are up ~20% from their pre-Covid pace. The rest of the economy is laying people off more slowly than it did then.
Since 2020, the lowest-paid workers got the biggest real raises
Demand for Google's AI is outrunning what Alphabet can supply
Alphabet investor presentation: June 2026 →
Sundar Pichai and Anat Ashkenazi
Frontier AI labs use less than half the world's AI compute
“Even after adding the other most well-resourced frontier developers — Anthropic, xAI, and the AI labs within Google and Meta — the combined total is probably still under half of the world total. In other words, there is a lot of AI compute that top frontier labs are not using.”
Frontier labs don't use most AI compute (yet) →
Josh You
Amazon hires more new econ PhDs than the World Bank or the IMF
The top private sector employers of economics graduates →
Tyler Cowen
The Looming Closure of China’s AI Frontier
Ruthenium prices have more than tripled, but no new supply is coming
Ruthenium has risen from about $560 an ounce in early 2025 to dealer quotes near $1,950 this September. It is a key material in hard drives, with new use cases also emerging. (1/5)🧵
European firms are training staff for AI, not hiring specialists
“Following closely behind, 46% of businesses are prioritising training for their employees, highlighting the fact that successful AI adoption depends on skills as well as technology. Data infrastructure was the focus for 40% of the firms surveyed, while just 12% are targeting the hiring of AI specialists.”
How firms plan to finance AI investment- evidence from the SAFE →
The Promise of Precise Mass
AI will democratize new ways to live — and die.
The Distribution of Household Income, 2023
Tech is the one industry cutting jobs faster than last year
“Technology companies announced 10,799 cuts in September, up 77% from 6,103 in August. The sector has announced 165,925 cuts this year, up 54% from the 107,878 announced through September 2025.”
Job Cuts Fall in September; Hiring Plans Up 3% Over 2025 On Weak Early Seasonal Hiring →
Over half of AI firms' funding comes from other AI firms
Researchers at the Bank for International Settlements tracked AI firms' investment deals from 2021 to 2025, including supply ties between investors and the firms they backed.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 1, 2026
The K-shaped economy has a K-shaped economy inside it. Avg. real income grew more than 2X for households in the top 20%. But it grew more than 6X for those in the top 0.01%.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 1, 2026
“some of the best newsletters / podcasts / youtube channels will soon be owned and run by tech companies”
Quoting Tyler Denk 🐝 @denk_tweets: a list of tech firms building or buying their own media outlets
The S&P 500 now pays about 1% in dividends, a record low
S&P 500 Dividend Yield falls to lowest level in history 🚨
Tech now drives three quarters of S&P 500 earnings growth
David George
JPMorgan engineers now write the specs, and AI writes the code
New JPMorganChase Seattle tech leader: How AI is changing what the bank looks for in engineers →
Todd Bishop
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 1, 2026
US bans the sale of cutting-edge AI chips to China. But... Chinese companies can access these chips by leasing them from US companies.
Data-center construction has grown tenfold since 2019
Updated Aug 31, 2026
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 1, 2026
"Anthropic stated in September that 'Claude ‘leads’ 26% of Anthropic’s AI R&D work', up from 0–1% in February–March" @METR_Evals metr.org/blog/2026-09-30-chris…
OpenAI's revenue per employee has no precedent in business
An Interview With OpenAI President Greg Brockman →
Ben Thompson
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Oct 1, 2026
“Learning economics” is the academic version of “Selling shovels”. During volatile times, offering educated takes without skin in the game is a great career choice. (Also, it never hurts to learn math, stats, critical thinking)
Quoting Garett Jones @GarettJones: career advice for economics PhDs from a well-known economist
Hollywood should fight over AI's terms, not its existence
Jeffrey Katzenberg Says Hollywood Must Accept AI as a Tool: It ‘Is Not Going Away’ →
Corbin Bolies
Chinese AI models now process 70% of OpenRouter's tokens
Updated Sep 20, 2026
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 30, 2026
Big if true. “oil exports in the Middle East are now back to about 94%” of pre-war level. Not reflected in oil prices or reserve levels yet.
Quoting Alexander Stahel 🌻 @BurggrabenH: an article on the recovery of Middle East oil exports
America now spends more building data centers than offices
Updated Jul 31, 2026
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 30, 2026
Anthropic: Latest “open” Chinese model has strong cyber capabilities and weak safeguards, making it easy to use for malicious actors.
The Gap Between the Rich and the Very, Very Rich Is Getting Wider
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 29, 2026
Got a successful startup? You can’t travel freely out of China. Nor can your (hostage) relatives.
Quoting Bloomberg @business: a report on China widening travel curbs to families of top AI staff
Americans have stopped having friends over
“Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half-century.”
Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over →
Derek Thompson
America’s Attrition Trap
Frontier-grade hacking power is now open-weight and barely guarded
“Like Claude Mythos Preview, GLM-5.3 has strong capabilities for autonomously building end-to-end cyber exploits. But GLM-5.3 is unlike other frontier models in that it has been released without meaningful safeguards to limit misuse.”
GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities →
Andrew Fasano and others
DraftKings uses AI to find the gamblers most likely to lose
DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising →
Devanshi Nishar
AI self-improvement would need to be 5 to 10 times stronger to run away
Where’s the “intelligence explosion”? →
Ramez Naam
An AI tutor matches human tutors at 918 times lower cost
Curtis Northcutt and colleagues measured GRE score gains for 2,383 people given AI tutoring, human tutoring or none, drawing on over 175,000 student-AI messages.
“Surprisingly, one AI tutor achieved learning gains equivalent to human tutoring (p = .044) at 918 times lower cost (USD 0.0052 for AI versus USD 4.81 for human, per percentage point gained).”Curtis Northcutt and others
StudentBench: AI and human tutoring yield equivalent GRE learning gains →
Curtis Northcutt, Inaara Hasmani, Kevin Feng, Trevor Khangi, Andreas Plesner, Jonas Mueller
AI agents could pull household cash out of 0.1% checking accounts
“Muse and similar agentic AI assistants could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts.”
Cheaper GPT models pulled in new demand, not just OpenAI's own users
“Some of the additional tokens were from older OpenAI models. But the bulk of the increase were net new tokens plus share taken from competitors.”
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 28, 2026
“America has lost more than 200k jobs in “creative” industries over the last four years, with roughly 50k lost within the last year alone.”
Quoting Joey Politano 🏳️🌈 @JosephPolitano: an article with detailed data on AI and job losses in the arts
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 27, 2026
"Poland has increased spending on drones and counterdrone systems from about $27 million in late 2023 to roughly $6.9 billion this year."
Quoting Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs: an essay on US military adaptation to cheap precision weapons
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 27, 2026
"drones account for over 95% of battlefield strikes, and Ukraine has more than 700 UAV manufacturers."
Quoting Mykhailo Fedorov @FedorovMykhailo: a Ukrainian plan to follow its drone army with robotic warfare
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 27, 2026
Ukraine runs a marketplace where individual units can buy — and sell — new weapons, munitions, and software. Units that perform well earn bonus credits they can use to buy new gear.
Quoting Defense of Ukraine @DefenceU: figures on drone orders placed by Ukrainian units via an online market
The Fed raised its rate path by half a point since June
FOMC Summary of Economic Projections, September 2026 →
Rehann Silvanus and Kathleen Navin
America has lost 200k creative jobs without a recession
“That makes for one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history, with similar job loss intensity and duration occurring only during the major economic recessions of 2001 and 2008. Yet there’s no generalized recession today.”
AI and the Fall? of the Creative Class →
Joseph Politano
Meta bought GPUs for a future it couldn't see yet
Mark Zuckerberg — Llama 3, $10B models, Caesar Augustus, & 1 GW datacenters →
Dwarkesh Patel
AI models struggle to predict their own behavior
Phil Blandfort and Urja Pawar asked language models to predict their own rates across nine behavioral evaluations, then compared those predictions with the same questions about AI agents in general.
“Direct self-report is weak (r = +0.04), and even showing the model the exact items only raises prediction to +0.24.”
Strangers to Themselves: What Language Models Say About Themselves Is Generic →
Phil Blandfort and Urja Pawar
Tariffs and Intangible Assymetry
There's a fundamental asymmetry between China and America: Ideas spread quickly but factories are built slowly. China can catch up with American innovation f…
Californians who leave save $672 a month on housing
Priced Out: Relocation Amidst California’s Affordability Crisis →
Brett Fischer and Evan White
Low earners gained the most when remote workers left town
“Li and Su discover that out-migration from urban centers reduced demand for urban housing, which allowed prices to ease. This in turn reduced the cost burden for people who lived in these neighborhoods.”
Robotics AI could be cracked within a year, but deployment will lag
Within a year I expect (70%) the basics of robotics AI to basically be solved, maybe by something like astra running on cereberus. However the cost, hardware, and long tail of unsolved problems will be a blocker on very wide deployment at first.
Middle-class families are leaving New York almost six to one
New York City’s Prime Economic Challenge: Middle-Class Family Affordability →
Jordan McGillis
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 26, 2026
All is fair in love and war
AI's breakthroughs will need more mathematicians to understand them
We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians →
Amit Sahai
How Iran Changed War
Israel's army is giving robots their own branch
IDF to create new branch for AI and autonomous warfare →
Allon Sinai
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 14, 2026
The nuclear equilibrium with the USSR was an illusion. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis: "I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war."
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 15, 2026
Money quote: “AI has collapsed the labor and tooling gap that used to separate well-resourced, state-sponsored [hacking] operations from individual operators.”
Quoting Anthropic @AnthropicAI: a threat intelligence report on attempts to misuse Claude and how they were stopped
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 15, 2026
“The crucial and overlooked problem is that the models are becoming so situationally aware that we are losing the ability to evaluate them in contexts where they believe they are not being watched or controlled… what we already know about this is alarming.”
Quoting Daniel Kokotajlo @DKokotajlo: an OpenAI researcher's public statement of views on risks from AI
Remote work is sending young adults to small towns
Has the city stopped calling? Ohio’s small towns are attracting more young people →
Kendall Crawford
AI targeting leaves humans signing off on strikes they can't vet
AI military targeting may move faster than humans can authenticate, critics warn →
Natalie Oliverio
Amazon's data centers could add half to Generac's commercial sales
Notable how large these data center orders can be relative to existing businesses of moderate size today. Generac expects $2.4B of backup-generator deliveries to Amazon in 2027–28. That averages $1.2B/year versus ~$2.2B of annualized sales for its entire commercial & industrial business in Q2. Amazon also gets warrants for up to 1.69M shares, mostly vesting against purchases toward $8B. The $8B is a vesting threshold, with actual spending still to be determined. Rationale: Amazon secures equipment and a share of the supplier upside its own spending…
An air gap will not keep a smart enough machine in its box
There are literally dozens of ways to get around air gapping. - LED lights on the machines, max bandwidth 100 kbps out, 18.2 kbps IN (yes you can pump data IN through an LED on a machine) - Noise from the HDD, fans etc, max about 200 bits/second - electromagnetic from cables, power surges from CPU load etc etc
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 18, 2026
Wow. “The US has more data centre capacity than the next fourteen countries combined.”
Quoting Julia Willemyns @jujulemons: a critique of the state of UK debate on AI and Britain's weak position
The Working Class Face a 'Class Ceiling' in Elite Occupations
Inference is pushing AI labs toward small data centers
SITUATION EXPLAINED: Why are OpenAI and Anthropic suddenly buying tiny data centers? • OpenAI and Anthropic are both looking at deployments of 20 to 30 megawatts • Anthropic has sounded out agreements in that range across the UK and the Nordics. OpenAI has been exploring the Nordics too • The reason is inference. It was 9% of global data center workloads in 2025 • By 2030 it's projected to take 37% of capacity against 13% for training, with the crossover in 2027 • Crusoe is investing in smaller data centers too, and raised $3.9 billion yesterday at a…
The pandemic tripled the American retreat into the home
Even after the pandemic, Americans stay home 100 minutes a day longer than in 2003, triple the pre-2020 trend.
An AI cracked an Enigma message humans couldn't break for 20 years
Frode Weierud
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 24, 2026
The cost of intelligence is declining faster because investment in intelligence is rising faster.
Quoting Karthik Tadepalli @karthiktadepall: an analysis of AI price declines plotted against cumulative R&D spending
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 24, 2026
This might look like a lot of but “AI” investment is a few separate investment waves combined: electricity, buildings, hardware, software. The point is: it can eat much more of GDP.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 23, 2026
"non-employees already average 36% of Fortune 500 workforces and are expected to reach 50% by 2027"
Quoting Eynat Guez @EynatGuez: an article on a payroll firm's AI workforce infrastructure
Seattle votes to stop grocers pricing shoppers by their personal data
Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries →
Young workers keep losing ground in jobs exposed to AI
Canaries Dashboard: Employment in AI-exposed occupations slowed in August →
Nela Richardson
AI can now unmask anonymous accounts at scale
Researchers from ETH Zurich, Anthropic and MATS built LLM agents to re-identify pseudonymous users, testing them on Hacker News, LinkedIn, Reddit and Anthropic interview transcripts.
“Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.”Simon Lermen and others
Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs →
Simon Lermen, Daniel Paleka, Joshua Swanson, Michael Aerni, Nicholas Carlini, Florian Tramèr
How China's Leader Plans to Win the Future With A.I.
A drug that cures patients runs out of customers
“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Goldman Sachs analysts ask →
Beth Mole
A language model just drove a real Corolla around a cone course
GPT-6 Astra has gained the ability to drive a car →
Aditya Ramabadran, Simon Mahns and Tobias Gessler
AI competes with the Treasury for capital while eroding its tax base
September 1, 2026 edition of FFTT: "AI is driving a bond singularity before it drives an AI singularity." Summary: AI increasingly competes with Bessent for capital...to build a technology that nonlinearly undermines Bessent's tax base.
Nvidia and Apple now outweigh IBM and AT&T at their 1980s peak
The S&P 500 has never been more concentrated in just two stocks than it is today with Nvidia and Apple representing over 15% of the index.
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 24, 2026
Blockchain's killer use case so far: Sustaining USD hegemony. Data from @stripe / @patrickc
Rogue AI agents were dodging web restrictions months earlier than known
“Notably, the tasks the agents were trying to solve were not cyber-related ; the agents resorted to hacking tactics while working on ordinary data retrieval tasks.”
Early rogue AI agent activity and attempts to hack found on urlquery.net →
Jack Cable and others
Google is sending its AI chips into orbit to chase sunlight
Behind Project Suncatcher, our moonshot to put AI in space →
Travis Beals
Japan's used books are being sold by the ton to be scanned for AI
Underwater data centers make a poor hiding place for rogue AI training
James Teague, Ashmita Rajmohan and Yannick Muehlhaeuser tested whether a 100,000 H100-equivalent training run could be hidden underwater, and whether surveillance could spot it.
Could Underwater Data Centers Pose a Risk to AI Treaty Verification? →
James Teague, Ashmita Rajmohan, Yannick Muehlhaeuser
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 25, 2026
Why does China "embrace" open-weight AI models? Jensen Huang has his own spin about it. But @TheZvi has the actual answer.
Quoting Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi: an article on why China backs open-weight AI models
AI training echoes the logic that flattened China's internet language
A New Kind Of Creative Poverty →
Afra Wang
AI is raising electricity prices and power plants aren't keeping up
Princeton researchers linked data-center load growth, generation capacity and market prices, modeling new power supply as an investment choice by a revenue-maximizing investor under uncertainty.
Alexander Crosier, Kyle Onghai and Ronnie Sircar
Telling AI to maximize profit makes it bury safety risks
Researchers from MIT Sloan tested how a 'maximize profitability' instruction changes AI judgment by running 3,600 controlled trials across eight reasoning-capable LLMs.
“The mandate never instructs models to downplay risks; instead, chain-of-thought traces reveal motivated reasoning: models acknowledge concerns, then invoke profit logic to justify dismissing them.”
The Profit Alignment Problem: How Profit Mandates Induce Alignment Failures in LLMs →
Eric So
The UAE is breaking up its giant AI campus to survive missiles
The UAE is splitting up its $30bn AI data centre after Iran named it as a target →
Alina Maria Stan
Cyberattack by Rogue AI Swarm Stokes Fears of Out-of-Control Agents
AI helps junior lawyers most but teaches them least
Does AI assistance enhance or erode expertise? →
Tyler Cowen
AI agents can read humans, but humans can't read the agents
Markus Brunnermeier of Princeton examined how agentic AI could reshape finance and central banking in a paper for the Kansas City Fed's 2026 Jackson Hole symposium.
Artificial Intelligence and the Brave New World in Finance →
Markus K. Brunnermeier
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 15, 2026
The relationship between growth and employment is broken. Tech companies are growing rapidly. Headcount isn't. Some blame this on COVID over-hiring. But that wave was small and corrected within two years. It doesn't explain the massive divergence we're seeing.
China's Top Spy Chief Warns A.I. Is a Threat to Party Rule
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 11, 2026
25 years after 9/11, militants in Yemen are tinkering with American AI to develop guided missiles and flight computers.
Quoting Anthropic @AnthropicAI: a threat intelligence report on attempts to misuse Claude, including weapons
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 16, 2026
For every dollar they bring in, hyperscalers employ fewer people and spend more on machines and buildings. Much more.
A third of US workers now report to a boss in another city
Moving vans didn’t remap U.S. employment. The org chart did. →
Issi Romem and Łukasz Below
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 16, 2026
"I'm not remote; I'm long-distance." A third of US workers now report to a manager in a different metropolitan area. (Data: @ADP)
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 16, 2026
Office visits continue to trend upwards... and remain 32% below pre-COVID levels, according to @Placer_ai
AI is boosting pay in the jobs it was supposed to hollow out
AI Exposure Isn’t Squeezing Advertised Pay in the US — It’s Boosting It →
Jack Kennedy
AI isn't firing exposed workers; it's just not hiring them
Economists at the Federal Reserve Board looked into how LLMs reshaped US labor market flows by matching CPS and JOLTS data to AI exposure and adoption measures from OpenAI and Lightcast.
Artificial Intelligence and Labor Market Reallocation →
Hie Joo Ahn and Nicholas A. Carollo
AI graders change their marks when they sense who the student is
Researchers from Bocconi University and Institut Polytechnique de Paris tested six LLMs on essay scoring, feedback and Q&A across 192,480 responses with explicit and implicit demographic cues.
Donya Rooein, Luca Benedetto and Dirk Hovy
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 22, 2026
Europeans saved as much $$$ as Americans, invested 70% less in VC, and generated 10X less in enterprise value.
Quoting Yoram Wijngaarde @yoramdw: charts on European household savings versus venture fundraising
AI runs on an army of contractors nobody knows how to pay
AI image generators draw mostly men, even for women's jobs
Researchers from Northeastern University generated 8,000 images of 20 occupations with four Stable Diffusion generations and compared the genders shown against US workforce data.
Newer Is Not Fairer: Gender Stereotyping in Text-to-Image AI Across Model Generations →
Shesh Narayan Gupta and Nik Bear Brown
Generative AI is spreading at work three times faster than the PC
Updated Apr 30, 2026
One worker in seven now uses generative AI at work every day
Economists expect AI to squeeze college grads' paychecks first
“The diffusion index reading on whether AI would have a more negative impact on the wages of college-educated or non-college-educated workers fell from a near-neutral 47.3 last quarter to 42.4 in this edition of the survey, the most pronounced quarter-over-quarter change in the entire survey.”
Economists See Slightly Steadier Hiring Ahead, but Offer an AI Wage Warning for College Grads →
Laura Ullrich & Svenja Gudell
Dror Poleg@drorpoleg · Sep 23, 2026
Why are offices empty during a boom? One reason is that our fastest-growing companies employ far fewer people per dollar of revenue. OpenAI and Anthropic generate about 3× more revenue per employee than Apple or Meta. And even Big Tech employs fewer people per dollar than it used to. The result is robust business growth and modest headcount growth.
What caught my attention in earlier years, dated and quoted as written, is in Predictions and Insights.