mchusma

This is also the type of thing that makes space based data centers more viable. I was previously more skeptical on the concept but have come around.

I do think ground based centers will have better economics when they can be built though, and this addresses noise and water complaints which are the big 2 regional complaints.

It seems like lots of bottlenecks are getting solved quickly, except for maybe memory.

Following up on the Snapchat Specs launch: Its almost like this is a spite product. Like the product is designed specifically to demolish Snapchat Specs.

I know its not. Obviously Meta has been involved here a long time, but this is basically what Snapchat should probably have launched.

And these do seem cool, I would consider these for $299 even as a fun purchase.

I guess AI images only for me from now on. Why open yourself up for the hassle?

For those not following the debate of X, there have been a surge of doctors who are saying that full body scans are net negative.

The argument is that current full body scans often have false positives, and our treatment of false positives is bad including risky biopsies. Some have gone so far as to literally state early detection does not lead to better outcomes (simply not true - genuine early detection is very helpful but what they mean is it is outweighed at the population level by false positives).

The counter argument is that more information is always good but that you must learn to handle the noise, and we should focus on improving how we handle false positives. Including, but not limited to more frequent and abundant scans of various types.

The reason this is trending is because it both includes the argument and feels nice that someone changes their mind.

Personally, I think a lot of the issues here come down to the fact that we lie about the statistics instead of just show them. A test is neither positive or negative. It’s x% updated probability that you have something.

Incredible. I wonder if they can make progress on survivability of regular drowning.

Bravo for this vision. I wish them well and hope they succeed. I look forward to the first real technical reports.

I do love the Frontier carbon removal effort, but I think Anthropic is in a fight with the Trump administration and probably shouldn't be doing things like this right now. I am not sure of Trump's position though, and he could favor this effort because it is pro-industry a pro-growth/abundance approach.

The reason desalination hasn't happened in california is because of political entities like the coastal commission, which blocked a desalination plant that would serve most of LA's water.

You are right. These outcomes also skew heavily towards the easy stuff for LLMs to get. So tickets that take a human 1 min to respond to now cost you $0.99 ($60+/hour) and you are stuck only doing the hard tickets.

I agree with you 100%. Fin and products like this simply do NOT solve the hard part of providing support in 2026. Basically, the hard parts are (1) coming up with the tools for agents to use, like searching for data, making updates, etc. (2) reviewing the logs of actual usage and adjusting prompts, docs, tools based on the real feedback. (3) tuning human escalation procedures.

This process is an ongoing effort, with an upfront engineering commitment which depends entirely on the product, but can be months of work. But if you have your own backend, I would argue this hard works is made HARDER by implementing something like Salesforce/Fin, because you have to now pipe a bunch of data and structure over to them, which is a pain.

LLM models capable of doing this are a commodity, the UI for customers and support teams is pretty trivial, the database/backend is trivial.

Outside of some cases, if you have your own app, and you have a given support volume, build your own.

I’ll just say that AI companies need to be pounding the table more about the necessity of AI. The US (and most other countries) have zero idea how to pay for its deficit spending. The only hope is massive GDP based growth and the only idea how to do that is AI.

This is rarely discussed, and while I agree we should be spending non-zero effort on safety, stopping progress is not an option.

I like "Proverb" as smaller than Haiku too, Aphorism is also good. But seriously I want Anthropic to up its small model game. Haiku is not competitive, Deepseek v4 flash outperforms my uses for about $0.10 / $0.20. Whereas Haiku 4.5 is $1/$5.

IMO Anthropic should just play the game at all the price tiers because it otherwise forces people to go elsewhere. I would probably pay for a "Proverb"/"Aphorism" class model that was worse than Deepseek at the same price just to stay in the ecosystem, if given the option.

(Note: I also see Google seem to make the same mistake, they actually do have competitive models in Gemma family but they don't make them available via the API. So there may be some reason for this.)

It’s on openrouter. We just noticed performance was worse in a specific agentic app usecase. It’s possible we made an implementation mistake, my main point though is Google is really silly not hosting their own models.

Gemma 4 31b outperformed Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite in our app benchmarks (agentic tool use via api in our application as a part of various workflows). But google won't let you pay to use Gemma models, you have to go elsewhere, I think this may be because it would cannabilize Flash-lite.

I think its even more puzzling because you can't even run Gemma 31b on google cloud, they only let you test it with a rate limit. No way (I can find) to actually pay them to use it.

We saw great results in our usecase using google direct. Moved to Openrouter because google wouldn't let us use it beyond a test.

Then Openrouters performance looked worse, not sure if there was a quantized version or something. So we instead looked at Deepseek v4 Flash, and opted to go for that.

This model would probably be great for a super low cost cloud model, would love to use it in the cloud, Google makes you go elsewhere.

If we define product market fit as profitable with a trillion dollar valuation, I think the term has lost its helpfulness.

I do agree with the author that these companies seem much stronger financially recently though.

I can’t read the full article, but the snippet (6%gdp/$2T) seems not that expensive? And you could read that either way ”cheap so we should do it” or “if we end up needing to do it, we can do it”.

I am pretty convinced that friendly fraud is about 90% of chargebacks. I have seen some genuine fraud, but dwarfed by friendly fraud over time across 3 companies.

I think it does bear that out in general, although it is slightly more complicated. What seems to happen 1. Low-wage workers, as a collective group, experience an increase in earnings (Dube & Zipperer, 2024). 2. Total job losses do take place, but are minor and teens/part-time/new entrants workers lose more often (Belman & Wolfson, 2014; Redmond & McGuinness, 2024). 3. Lost hours & increased prices - businesses primarily absorb the cost by slightly reducing weekly hours worked & increasing prices for consumers (Redmond & McGuinness, 2024)

I would agree that modest minimum wage increases are far from the worst thing the government does, compared to other government interventions.

There are also home warranties or tech solutions/concierges like tidy.com.

The issue historically is that these concierge things are expensive (should be solved by tech/ai) and the warranties create their own class of problems (claim frustrations etc).

But home ownership is expensive, no way around it. But the work in coordinating etc doesn’t fundamentally need to be.

The poor have dramatically more children than the rich on average, you don't need to be rich to have kids. Kids don't need to have rich parents to have a good live/upbringing.

I have long wondered why these companies have only one model? Why not many models, letting the user choose? Why not let users tune what they want to see? It seems like a better user experience and safer from this type of (IMO valid) concerns. I’d want nothing to do with picking a users feed if I were them.

highly irritating. HIPAA was originally designed to be a "portability" standard (meaning easier to share). It has done the opposite. Health data is important to developing a cure, and privacy is unimportant to many people. The world would be better if there we were zero regulation here at all.

I actually do think token maxing is good, but they should have limited it per user. I find it reallly hard to get people to max out the Claude $100 plan, let alone the $200 plan. I understand the enterprise plans are different and more expensive, which is how you get these kinds of issues. But encouraging people to try things with AI is very important, and some amount of token maxing is importsnt.

Everything I read seems to suggest that RAM capacity is going to grow at 20-25% a year, which just doesn't seem good enough. Even in consumer use cases, phones and laptops would benefit greatly by double the amount of RAM. And then obviously, the AI need is gigantic.

I don't see it going away. I mean, it may not grow as fast as now, but I don't see it growing away either. I get why the memory makers do not want to bankrupt themselves, but it feels like there's got to be some way to push that risk off onto model providers and other people in the ecosystem to allow us to grow ram capacity more like 50% per year.

I don’t see any specific mention of Conductor, is this confirmed?

I just left the google I/O feeling less confident about google's execution here. - Gemini 3.5 flash is strange. Old cutoff, basically better than 3.1 pro at soem things worse at others, sometimes cheaper, sometimes more expensive than 3.1 pro. - Antigravity had seemed abandoned, and people speculated them cutting it off, and they kind of did migrating everyone to a new antigravity - Google "shipped the org chart" and they have so many AI products and none seem best of breed (e.g. the Gemini integration in google docs is worse than claude)

I was actually hoping for "Opus level intelligence at Haiku costs" model or "Sonnet level performance in Gemini 3.0 pricing", either of these would have been a workhorse, plus a competitor to Claude/Codex (1 app to do things). I got neither.

I've looked like a dozen places, I don't see anything. :(

I have thought about this and I think overall, this was a disappointing release from Google. I'm not sure the sentiment, but this feels like a miss.

What they did do in the keynote was spend a lot of time talking about their distribution advantage, and how they can own the consumer in search. But not a lot that will benefit partners or developers.

Basically, they released something broadly competitive with Sonnet 4.6, a new Omni model that seems interesting but unclear yet. They have completely ceded the frontier to OpenAI / Anthropic, and are saying "look for pro next month".

The best release since nano banana pro from Google has been Gemma.

Never mind, after looking at more benchmarks, seems closer to sonnet level intelligence at slightly lower cost. Speed is great for latency sensitive applications, but if this was 1/2 the cost it would have been priced to win.

If this is the big model release out of google, its a disappointent.