.@garrytan’s Startup School talk is worth the time if you underwrite AI in public companies. He is not arguing that one person firms are on the way. He is describing the operating model that is already producing the numbers. Most valuation work still treats headcount as the scarce input. That is the wrong constraint. The scarce input is a process written down tightly enough that an agent can run it every day, and a simple router that assigns work to the right process. You do not need the whole warehouse. You need one shelf that compounds. One person plus agents is already an organization. You can run a real company before you incorporate, hire a cofounder, or write a deck. Tan’s examples are useful because they are specific. @mukundjha and @madhavjha at @emergentlabs hit $15 million annualized at 15 people, went from public launch to nine figures in eight months, and now sit above $120 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. @retellai reached about $60 million with about 40 people. That revenue per employee is outside the old software, oil, and railroad ranges. These are not outliers. In the current @ycombinator batch, founders finish in a day what used to take a year. If your process still assumes the old clock, someone else is already on the new one. Software is also cheap enough to build the exact tool you need for an audience of one. The old advice was scratch your own itch and hope a market appears. The better version is scratch it because the cost is close to zero. Some of those tools become companies when other people ask for them. The binding constraint is memory. Without pruning, the system is a junk drawer with excellent search. It will surface stale facts with total confidence. A bad skill file will run a bad process forever. Every fact needs a source. New information has to be checked against old information. Someone has to delete what no longer belongs. Treat that as infrastructure and the system compounds. Treat it as a dump and you get an agent that sounds certain and is wrong in ways you cannot audit.

POTUS, to his credit, gets it. One of them: force the data centers to pay for their own power, to lower property taxes, etc, and to go in the right zoning areas. But don’t get caught up in the psy ops, just as others did in moral panics you know were ridiculous. It’s the same.

Excellent interview with @JTLonsdale in which he correctly diagnoses why conservatives worry about AI, then makes a nuanced case—on economic and national-security grounds—for why they should ultimately embrace it.

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. 
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing. Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything. “they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out. “A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.) “On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive. Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer. Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way. For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.) Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.

BUYER BEWARE This extremely meticulous article will now be used to start Phase2 of “shut down open source” because “if we can’t control our closed models, imagine what happens to everyday life when anyone can just allow their open source models to proliferate”. Some will use this example and point to future grid outages, utility outages, transportation chaos, bioweapons, uncontrolled cyber swarms and the like to try and make the case for yet another attempt to limit US AI model control to a few folks. Then, one layer beneath the propaganda, one sees that these things are always written and promoted by a web of well organized existing shareholders or shareholder-adjacent of the closed frontier labs and groups of folks organized by a shared ideology roughly rooted in them knowing best. This article, more than anything else, should demarcate the beginning of a well organized effort to stand up a Closed Model Industrial Complex. These cartels exist in other markets as well and it now exists in AI. Bottom line, read everything carefully before signing up for the consequences. How we react will define the next hundred generations of Americans and their lives. Do not give up your rights or sovereignty because of fear of the unknown from articles that, at the root, are as much about the hidden incentives of an emergent cartel and their proxies. If you take the time to understand the incentives, you will be less likely to fall for it and overreact and have intelligence metered from a few suppliers. Bottom line: Keep Calm. Carry On.