Today is a good day to build.
South Africa
Joined June 2026
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How's your Black October going? We're fine (promise), frantically patching everything we can get our hands on while every risk indicator in the world lights up. Also, the age of personal super-negotiators is here!
youtube.com/watch?v=5_yu50ES…
Dario is trending right now for saying that maybe tokens should be charged based on the output value, since some tokens might be "worth more" depending on what they're used for.
And he's right, of course, in that some uses of a commodity (like charging a phone to watch cat videos) is ultimately worth less than others (like powering up a CNC machine to make expensive parts). Same electrons, different market value.
But that's just an argument for Anthropic being a vertically-integrated technology company: They have the models, they're acquiring the compute, they can charge based on output value for absolutely anything they want.
They could defeat Office, Google Workspace, Salesforce, NetSuite, and any other software product by simply building and hosting their own - AI makes that possible, right?
They could defeat manufacturing by designing better factories with AI, programming the firmware with AI, building the backoffices and distribution with AI, going to market with AI.
They could defeat pharmaceutical companies by researching better drugs using AI, building their own supply chains, even doing their own last-mile with self-driving/drone delivery, if they want.
They could defeat pretty much all of banking, investing and financial services, 90%+ of which is digital work by now. They could build better banking apps, better banks, better insurance models, better everything.
They could *definitely* defeat social media, marketing and advertising - the software for hosting platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, QQ and the rest isn't technically sophisticated, you just need tons of infrastructure, and they have the money for it.
So why don't they?
Why is Anthropic's S-1 94 pages of existential risk, questionable numbers, and a requirement to raise more capital even though they have large amounts of cash on hand?
Why aren't they just rebuilding entire industries? They could ship a world-class operating system, world-class productivity software, world-class business systems for (as their "country of geniuses" argument would suggest) a fraction of what it costs humans to do the same.
Because if it makes sense to charge for compute based on the output value, you're going to have a hard time finding customers for your product - AI compute is already a commodity, and even if it weren't, you'd have to have commercial terms that put you at risk of not getting paid if the output tokens wind up being worth nothing (fruitless R&D, zero-ROAS campaigns, etc).
Which means it makes way more sense to take on that risk yourself. If you believe your tokens are potentially worth more than you can charge for them, then you should be the one building the valuable final products with them so you can capture all that upside.
So why isn't the S-1 a detailed plan on how Anthropic will upend the entire digital ecosystem using AI? Why aren't they promising a better Facebook, a better Google, a better Microsoft, a better Steam?
They make vague references to being a civilizationally-transformative company, that this is a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity, yet they leave the most obvious low-hanging fruit off the table?
Unless, of course, AI can't actually do any of these things.
Not in an absolute sense - AI can definitely write software, manage infrastructure, run digital marketing campaigns, and all the rest. X is a carnival house of desperate marketing that proves this.
But in a relative sense - relative to humans, relative to experience, and relationships, and networks, and trust, and brand. Maybe that's the challenge.
Maybe that's why Dario wants a world where Anthropic's customers pay more for tokens that yield greater upside, because the part that yields the greater upside is the geniuses that Anthropic could never put in their datacenter.
You know, the geniuses. Us. The people that actually think, and make, and argue, and buy and sell and form opinions and make exchanges and produce what economists classically refer to as "the economy". The ones that generate the never-ending treadmill of shifting taste consensus and regulatory burden and hot-headed competition and races to win new territory and demand for entertainment unlike anything we've seen before.
Maybe - and this is a wild concept, but you've read this far - maybe it's the other way around. Maybe Anthropic needs us more than we need them. Even after the massive internet scraping and book burning and tut-tutting.
Maybe it takes more than a country of geniuses in a datacenter to build a business that adds value to the economy, and produces products that loyal customers pay for.
Maybe - just maybe - Anthropic hasn't quite figured that part out yet.
I understand the sky is falling and we’re in the middle of a worldwide everything shortage and everyone is panicking and not even SSL is trustworthy anymore but did it *really* have to break Mr Delivery this evening? Blank menus everywhere 😭
Really loving the stability of Microsoft Defender right now, at this particular moment in time, in the month of October, in the year of our Lord 2026.
Just gonna cycle this post near a South African audience and mention "farm murders" and "disbanded commando units" to see what happens.
Purdue University's IDEAS Lab built an autonomous drone that tracks runners through dense forests completely without GPS or cloud networks.
By running 3D LiDAR mapping and obstacle-avoidance AI entirely on-chip, it can weave under tree canopies and predict target movement through blind spots in real time.
Massive implications for next-gen search & rescue and edge AI.
Breaking news! The system built inside a computer as a combination of software and data can be precisely modified to alter its behavior in deterministic ways.
Probably not the breakthrough they're gonna want to advertise, though.
Just realized what my decades of experience in business systems is actually good for, and it's the exact same skillset that's been winning the day since we put computers to work: Persuading stakeholders NOT to do things 😂
There's a BRICS/wall joke waiting to be made here, but for the life of me I can't find it.
Your life is ultimately the balance of your circumstances with your agency.
I've seen too many people achieve too many things to believe that it's all a happenstance of birth. But I've also seen too many people give up because circumstances didn't prepare them for the work.
Sure, I’ll pitch in!
The entire notion that online conversations about AI safety are being fed raw and unfiltered right into pre-training is wrong.
So we can all relax 😇
I think we desperately need more people to critique popular AI safety work that is bad faith!
Unfortunately there's quite a bit of work that overclaims, or maybe even just got overhyped and misunderstood by the media and general population.
It's our duty as understanders to bring nuance and clarification in these situations. Otherwise we might end up with people saying that good AI behaviors are actually bad and this could be very confusing for future AI models in pre-training!
It takes 2nd-grader brainpower to compare the vehicle license number showing in the app, to the car you’re climbing into.
I don’t know what brainpower it takes to get scammed, but it must be terrifying.
Tourists arriving at Cape Town International Airport have allegedly been scammed out of R25,000 for a single cab ride by people pretending to be Uber drivers.
mybroadband.co.za/news/motor…
I should probably write something a bit more long-form here, but: yes. The teens are not wrong.
Right now, the dominant story is that AI is about to end things. Everyone is waving the red flag, trying to warn us of the dangers of “out of control technology”.
It’s a misdirect.
What’s happening is several orders of magnitude larger. It’s the second generation (third, even?) of connected humans in a globalised landscape, with complex interconnected economies.
War already changed: campaigns are now staged around election and market cycles. Impossible to imagine in 1942, our reality in 2026.
Education has changed: even without AI, tertiary eduction (and beyond) stopped being a guarantee of a better life quite a while ago. The systems remain brutally competitive, but produce a surplus of intelligence that AI is simply squeezing further.
National allegiance has changed: American gamers weeping about the loss of BioWare haven’t said much about it being part of Saudi Arabia’s diversification strategy. A cultural icon got nuked by a foreign power’s balance sheet.
The world of 2050 looks very different than the world of 2000, and it’s not just the gadgets: it’s civilisation itself.
I think current-day American teens are waking up to a world where being born American is no longer a guarantee of any advantage. H1-B is only part of the drama - the rest is that the “developing world” is catching up on every metric.
And that makes the story the most painful part, especially if you’ve gone your formative years with the belief that you wouldn’t have to compete for the world’s resources against billions of people someday.
I’d feel betrayed too.
This is exactly what it looks like when you start competing globally, but think you’re still only competing locally.
There are electricians buying houses on a single income in my area (literally, my next door neighbour), meanwhile you keep seeing posts like this.
I'm in my 40s. I'm a lawyer. My wife is a lawyer. We both work full time.
We cannot afford the house my parents purchased on a single electrician's income in their 30s.
We cannot afford the house my immigrant grandparents purchased on a single MTA bus driver's salary in their 30s. They had SIX CHILDREN.
For 30 years, politicians in Washington & their oligarch allies convinced regular people that this was just about avocado toast and fancy coffee.
In reality, this is end-stage capitalism. Everyone is stuck in place. It's impossible to buy a home. It's too costly to move. We work too much to have passion projects. We don't have enough savings to start our own businesses. We can't afford to go without healthcare to do it.
Thanks for writing this article @troy_closson. Would be very happy to discuss further.
nytimes.com/2026/10/25/nyreg…
