New blog post: Cursor, Devin, and every app effectively are RL environments. Every session is "free" rollout for training. Serious AI cos will start training their own models soon. Not just for margin but Token Factor Productivity - economic value provided to users per $1 spent; which is why CC and Codex on sub plan is so good and retains well. Hard to do for apps not running inferencing at-cost. More: sdan.io/blog/training-impera…

Solving the science of asset selection in a future (or indeed the present) where every company is a "Context Acquisition Company" is the real frontier. I love that everyone is getting around to the idea that the secrets (scarce context) currently illegible to/hidden from computers (human or machine) are everything. Now the next leap for people to make is that the science of sourcing, selecting, and monopolizing that context (really THE ASSETS that produce it) is everything. If AI progress is a function of compute and data (most algorithmic progress is really just data progress; h/t @BerenMillidge, @_kevinlu, @mentalgeorge, @GarrettLord, etc.), then every company is going to have a context desk just like they will (or already do) have a compute desk. The difference is, CONTEXT IS NOT FUNGIBLE. Most context (both that exists right now and that will be created in the future) will be completely commodity beta. Winning will be about getting to and instrumenting the right asset (context production factory) first. And yes, there are right and wrong answers. To do this kind of asset selection well requires an extremely scarce meta-capability: the ability to coordinate the right kind of access and the right kind capital at the right time. These assets (and the secrets within them) are structurally difficult to access, evaluate and instrument. They are not floating around in banked processes, to be frictionlessly purchased on listed exchanges, or willingly coming through Mercor or Handshake's expert portal. (Yes, a context production asset can be (very often is) a single person or collection of people.) When @WillManidis talks about a Deal Guy Yuga, what he means is that there are people who have deeply internalized the fact that at the limit, in a world of infinite intelligence, access to/monopoly on the right permissioned data streams is all that matters. Getting yourself to a position (meta-access, meta-capital) where you have the ROFR on those permissioned data streams, means being a generational Deal Guy. This is a very different and specific kind of "Deal Guy" though. Knowing which asset(s) are going to give you the right context to create, compound, and commercialize the best vertical world model now and into the future is the new form of security analysis. But the triple-exceptional combination of domain expertise, meta-access, and technical ability that’s required to execute this new security analysis effectively is scarcer than the talent at quant firms, YC combined, and dare I say, the labs, combined. Palantir understood this and it's why they focused on getting root-access (or something close) to the "highest-status" institutions, and the data streams they produce, first. If you have the talent that can get access to and create value within those institutions, everything else should be a forgone conclusion. If you want examples of the teams that (I believe) actually understand this new science of asset selection and long term value capture in a world of infinite intelligence, study Long Lake and @formationbio. They know and have known that it's all about being able to get the right asset (context), in the right market, with the right team (machine and human) first. These two companies are very far ahead on the scientific frontier of context acquisition. GC backed Long Lake last year. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Long Lake chose to work with General Catalyst? My bet is that Long Lake knew they wanted to acquire Amex GBT before they partnered with GC, and that they partnered with GC because Ken Chenault (the ex-CEO of Amex) is General Catalyst’s Chairman. That gave them the right access at the right time to a very valuable context asset (Amex Global Business Travel) A superhuman vertical-specific Elon operating every company means market leading monopolies in every single slice of the unstructured economy. The thing is you have to build this superhuman Elon while flying the plane. You can't build this superhuman Elon without the very specific context that operating specific assets in the real world gives you. In fact, there's only one stream of context that was able to produce human Elon! Knowing which context stream is likely to do the same a priori is so extremely difficult, but probably possible. I’ll let you intuit why Amex GBT is both most likely to be the market leading monopoly if it were operated by the superhuman Elon of business travel and why it’s also the most likely to produce the context to build that superhuman Elon. The labs of course are very large acquirers of context at present and I think they will continue to play and improve their capabilities here. Through their deplyoment companies, they have already chosen the PE funds that they deem to be the best Context Acquisition Funds. Through in-house deployment focus on Life Sciences they have chosen the vertical they see as containing the most valuable context producing assets. They will acquire very seemingly unrelated companies and will acquihire very interesting people just to get tokens, they will create a Context Acquisition Fund of Funds. But it's not a foregone conclusion that they become the best performing context acquisition companies. Or that they even view it this way. And that presents an opportunity for anyone that does.