Tech In Action / Proof of Technology. Evidence over hype. See what already pays today. AI • Robotics • Automation • Business
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LiveTechProof retweeted
About $1.2 billion just bought 30 Navy ships with nobody on board.
The US Navy ordered 30 crewless ships from three builders: Saronic, HII and Galliano Marine Services. Call it $40 million a ship on average, and these are production orders.
Somebody's getting paid, and the list is odd. HII builds America's aircraft carriers. Saronic is a Texas startup that says it took its Marauder from design to water in under a year.
The Navy isn't buying code here. It buys a hull with the autonomy already inside, priced per ship, and pays for production rather than prototypes. If you build autonomy software, that's how the biggest buyer on the water wants to pay, so price per finished boat or partner with somebody who welds.
Software margins don't survive a steel bill. Saronic's contract is firm fixed price, meaning it eats any cost overrun, so Saronic just agreed to learn that on its own dime.
Mark Zuckerberg lost his youngest self-made billionaire record to three college dropouts at Mercor. Their AI startup now says it pays experts who train AI about $5 million a day.
Brendan Foody, the co-CEO, said it in an interview. Asked to confirm $5 million a day, he answers "now well over that." Two years ago, he says, Mercor paid out about $1 million in a whole year.
Doctors and lawyers rate a model's answers, and AI labs buy the ratings, data as raw material for the next model. Mercor pays the expert by the hour and bills the lab for the finished data.
Bloomberg reported in October that Mercor's average is about $110 an hour. Recruiter postings in this market go up to $400 an hour for some lawyers.
My math, from his number: $5 million a day at $110 an hour is roughly 45,000 expert hours, every day. Call it 5,700 full-time jobs at eight hours each. Somebody's getting paid.
On November 10 Mercor raised $750 million at a $20 billion valuation, a bet that companies, not just labs, will keep paying people to grade AI.
If you bill hours in a licensed field, AI labs are already a buyer for your judgment, and Mercor's experts average about $110 an hour. That price holds until a model can check its own homework in your field.
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Bezos promised half-hour drones in 2013, and Walmart charges non-members $19.99 now.
That's the flat drone fee per order in Houston, as local coverage of the launch listed it, while Walmart Plus members get it free for a limited time. The deliveries are piling up: more than 2 million so far, per Walmart's Nov 5 release, with Zipline signed for 300 more sites.
On 60 Minutes in December 2013, Jeff Bezos showed off an octocopter and talked about "half hour delivery" for packages up to five pounds. Four or five years, he figured.
Amazon still flies from a short list of metros. Zipline says its median October order landed in 19 minutes.
Walmart and Zipline charge it per task, one drop at a time. McKinsey put the direct operating cost of a single drone delivery near $13.50 in early 2023, so my math leaves roughly $6.50 per non-member order for Walmart and Zipline to split.
If you run a shop that delivers in Houston, your customer can now compare you with a $19.99 drone.
What would Suno owe if a jury sided with Eminem's publisher on 269 songs?
Up to $150,000 a song, per the complaint. That's $40.35 million, and about $41 million with a smaller claim over stripped copyright info. No court has awarded a cent.
The song count comes from Eight Mile Style, the company that publishes Eminem's catalog. Elvis's rights holders sued the same AI music app the same day, saying that typing his name still gets you his voice.
Both suits landed in federal court in San Francisco on Friday. Suno says it has never allowed prompts for specific artists, and that it strips names out and steers the prompt toward the style.
In September, CBS typed nothing but "Jason Isbell" into Suno. The name was stripped, as promised, and the song came back as fingerpicked acoustic guitar, the sound Isbell is known for.
Suno's CEO said in February it had 2 million paying subscribers and was on pace for $300 million a year. My math: the full $41 million is about $20 per subscriber, or roughly seven weeks of that revenue.
Seven weeks is survivable once. If more catalogs file the same suit, the math stops working.
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Hospitals pay $495,000 for this robot, then $3,570 every single surgery.
PROCEPT Bio Robotics makes HYDROS, a robot that trims an enlarged prostate with a water jet instead of a scalpel. New units sold for about $495,000 in the US last quarter, per its Q3 release.
Each procedure needs a fresh disposable handpiece, about $3,570 apiece. They sell the robot once and charge per task after that.
The handpieces carry the company. In the quarter PROCEPT reported on November 4, US handpieces and consumables brought in $53.9 million, more than double what the robots themselves sold. My math, from their release: after about 139 procedures, a hospital has spent the robot's price again on handpieces alone.
Until a rival ships a cheaper handpiece, every urologist who picks water over a scalpel keeps the meter running.
If you run a urology practice, the number to negotiate is the handpiece, not the robot.
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What does a robot sprayer save a cotton grower per acre?
$366, in a demo near Los Banos, California, per Ecorobotix's own field report. ARA, its robot sprayer, ran $184.07 an acre against $550.15 for the grower's usual herbicide plan.
The machine photographs the row and sprays only the weeds, a 2.4-by-2.4-inch patch at a time. Less herbicide on the field is good news for anyone living next to it, but the grower mostly cares about the bill.
In a 2023 Farm Innovations interview, an Ecorobotix rep counts 5 machines in the US. The company now says more than 1,000 are working in over 20 countries, and on October 29 it added a model that spots yellow nutsedge, a weed cotton growers hate.
They sell the hardware, but the grower's math runs per acre. Call it 500 acres of cotton: my math says $183,000 a season, if the field behaves like the demo.
The weak link is one demo, scored by the company that sells the machine, and the report never prices the machine itself. Without it, payback is a guess. If you farm a few hundred acres, get that price from a dealer before you believe the per-acre number.
$366 an acre is the company's number. The machine price is still blank.
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$1 a ride is what one Philadelphia councilmember wants from robotaxis.
Jim Harrity's bill charges driverless taxis $1 a ride or 5% of the fare, whichever is greater. Delivery robots would owe 50 cents or 5%, per the bill as introduced on October 29.
Call it the city's cut of every robot trip. Operators would register, file quarterly reports and start paying in January 2028, if Council passes it.
My math, from Waymo's average San Francisco fare of $19.69: 5% comes to 98 cents. So the $1 floor wins on every ride under $20.
The money goes to Zero Fare, free SEPTA rides for low-income residents. Robots would be paying for the bus.
If it passed today, one fleet would owe it: Avride, the company behind the sidewalk robots carrying Uber Eats orders in Center City since March. Waymo is testing here, but driverless service isn't permitted yet.
The 6abc clip has the line that makes this funny: you don't tip the robot. This bill would tip it anyway.
If you run delivery robots in any city, put 50 cents a trip in the model now. Rules like this tend to travel faster than the robots do.
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Sources: Elvis lyrics suit against Anthropic, ABC News and MusicTech, Oct. 26, 2026. Bartz v. Anthropic settlement, approved July 2026, AP. Video: "AI company sued over use of Elvis Presley songs", ABC News on YouTube, Oct. 26, 2026
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Anthropic settled at about $3,000 a book, and Elvis's owners ask $150,000 a song.
The $150,000 is a ceiling, not a price. It's the most allowed for one work, per the copyright statute, and a court only goes there if it finds the copying willful.
The $3,000 is settlement math. Anthropic's $1.5 billion deal with book authors, approved in July, covers roughly 482,000 books, and that's before lawyers take their cut.
The Elvis suit landed Oct. 23 in federal court in San Francisco, brought by the companies that hold his publishing. It covers the lyrics of 274 songs, Can't Help Falling in Love and All Shook Up among them. Anthropic says it will defend the case fully.
My math at the book rate: 274 songs come to $822,000. At the ceiling, $41.1 million.
What the court is really setting is a royalty per unit, with the unit being one work inside a training set. My bet, and it is only a bet, is that it lands much closer to the book rate than to the ceiling.
If you write lyrics or own even a small catalog, that price is getting set for you whether you show up or not.
The ordinary minimum in that same statute is $750 a song.
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LiveTechProof retweeted
$280K. IT FOLDS INTO A PLANE.
No pilot doing the work here. The aircraft runs its own takeoff, hover, route and landing. You drop a pin, it flies there and comes back.
The clip is real. XPeng's Land Aircraft Carrier – a six-wheel van splits open at the back and a two-seat eVTOL rolls out and unfolds on the street. Pre-production units are already leaving the Guangzhou line. No render.
The numbers:
$280k for the full set, van and aircraft together.
7,000 refundable pre-orders and over $600M already invested.
A factory built for 5,000 a year, climbing to 10,000.
China certifies these in about 31 months. The FAA takes 5 to 7 years.
here's the uncomfortable part. America has the airspace, the capital and the pilots. China just built the car.
And the gap is the business.
China won't sell you a certified passenger eVTOL in the US, the FAA won't clear one before 2027. But a single-seat aircraft under 254 lbs flies today under Part 103, with zero FAA sign-off. That door is already open.
You don't build the aircraft to earn from this.
The map around it is empty. Landing pad operators. Charging spots. Low-altitude insurance nobody has underwritten yet, in the largest insurance market on earth. An AI agent scans a county, finds legal landing sites, prices the routes, runs the booking page and answers customers overnight. That's a local business, not an aerospace company.
The flying car got solved.
The country that figures out where it's allowed to land wins the decade.
About $140 a day to rent a humanoid robot in China.
Some offers on China's rental platforms are now under 1,000 yuan a day, per China's financial press, down from five figures in yuan in early 2025 and 2,000 to 3,000 at the start of this year. A few listings on Xianyu start at 289.
Buying a Unitree G1 Plus starts around 95,000 yuan, call it $13,400. Rental shops price it by the day, and that starting price doesn't always include the person who runs it.
One operator's platform data once showed about 10 bookings per robot a month, back when a booking averaged 2,500 yuan. My math, if that volume holds at today's 1,000: the robot earns back its price in roughly nine and a half months, before you pay anyone to run it. Holidays still pay: during Golden Week, CrossDimension's flagship took about 150,000 yuan, reports said.
More than 300 robots run at Chimelong's park in Hengqin, in Zhuhai, with roughly one operator for every three machines, by the ratio an AgiBot executive gave.
If you run events, price the human first. Three robots per operator today, and the company's target is ten.
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Viral AI race memes skip the only number your accountant sees.
Mistral's new Large 4 lists $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.10 per million output, according to its launch post. A million tokens is roughly 750,000 words.
If you run a support desk, take last month's tickets and run them through two models. Grade the answers yourself, then multiply the tokens each one used by its price.
Cheapest model that passes wins.
Leaderboards reshuffle every week, while your cost per ticket is the number that stays on the books.
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Disney offered $20 million for tech from bankrupt chatbot Character AI.
That's the opening bid in Character AI's bankruptcy, per court filings: $20 million for a non-exclusive, permanent license to some of its tech. Disney isn't buying the company, only the right to use what it built, and the chatbot stays open while the auction runs.
Character AI spends $8 million to $9 million a month, and my math from the bankruptcy coverage puts Disney's whole bid at about 2.4 months of running costs, cheap for a license to the tech the company built.
A rival needs $21.7 million to knock Disney out, $1.7 million over its bid once the break-up fee and the minimum raise are added. Bids close November 20.
They're selling it per unit, like movie tickets: one license at a time, and the same code could go to the next buyer. As I read the filings, the lawsuits don't travel with a license, so the buyer gets a license to the tech and the liability stays where it is.
If you run a studio or a brand with characters to protect, the opening price for a license to an AI company's tech is now on a court docket, and you can bid against Disney until November 20.
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20,000 preorders for a $399 robot duck nobody has received yet.
Microduck is a 10-inch walking robot from Hugging Face's Pollen Robotics that gets back up from most falls on its own. Preorders passed 20,000 per TechCrunch, citing Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue on X.
Call it about $8 million in orders, my math, if all 20,000 pay the full $399. That's a lot of duck. Pollen's press kit doesn't say whether the preorder charges the whole price or a deposit.
The jump came after Nvidia's GTC Berlin keynote on October 21. Jensen Huang knelt next to four ducks, told them "You're sold out," and asked everyone watching to go place an order. Nvidia agreed in September to buy Hugging Face, so that was a CEO selling a toy his company is lined up to own.
The model is plain per-unit hardware. Pollen gets paid once per box, and the open-source software owners write and share costs it nothing.
If you run a kids' robotics class, 20,000 copies of the same $399 kit are about to ship. A course on teaching it new tricks skips the hardest sale, the hardware.
Huang guessed out loud that the startup is "like 10 people." My bet is the first boxes land before Christmas and the next batch slips into 2027, because a legged robot at that volume is a factory problem long before it's a software one.
LiveTechProof retweeted
In 2010 Jobs showed a laptop touchscreen onstage and called it terrible.
Apple holds its Pro and Tell event in Los Angeles today, and the expected star is its first touchscreen MacBook Pro, according to Bloomberg and Macworld. Jobs is about to get quoted a lot.
At Back to the Mac in October 2010, he said Apple had done tons of user testing and a vertical touchscreen wears you out until your arm wants to fall off. That's the part people have repeated for 16 years.
Seconds later he gives the rule: "Touch surfaces want to be horizontal." Then he goes straight to the multi-touch trackpad, which is where Apple actually put touch on the Mac.
My reading, which he never spelled out: Jobs's objection was tired arms. A laptop screen is still vertical, so his own test still applies, and Apple has to pass it.
A manager who writes the reason into a no, the way Jobs did, can reverse it years later by showing the reason no longer holds.
So the question for every review tonight is the one Jobs wrote: after a while, does your arm want to fall off?
Amazon raised GPU block prices twice, then promised not to squeeze anyone.
Rent one H100 chip for an hour through AWS Capacity Blocks, its reserved short-term rentals, and you pay $5.970, per its public price list. That price has gone up twice since June.
AWS sells this per unit, by the GPU-hour, and by my math a week on one 8-chip P5 box now costs about $2,200 more than it did in June.
Andy Jassy explained why on a16z's podcast last week. "27 is largely sold out," he said, and a good chunk of 2028 is gone too.
Two minutes later he promised: "We're not going to squeeze our customers." The episode came out two weeks after the second increase.
AWS said in July that its other EC2 prices weren't changing. Capacity Blocks are how small teams rent GPUs for a few days or weeks, so the increases likely land hardest on budgets too small for multi-year deals.
If you run fine-tunes on rented chips, budget 2027 at today's block rate or higher and book your weeks before a bigger contract books them.
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