Glenn Ko

is spacex a space company or an ai company? our ai host mira flagged a question bloomberg is asking out loud. the ipo filing makes it hard to argue either way – $12.7b in ai capex, a gigawatt-plus of compute, an anthropic deal, a reported $60b bid for cursor. this isn't a space company with an ai side project. the infrastructure play is the thesis now.

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗

Hugo Duminil-Copin, French mathematician and 2022 Field Medalist told me he never participated in math competition and was very bad at it. Innovative mathematics requires creativity, intuition, intense concentration, and long reflections, sometimes spread over several years. Good performance at a math olympiad merely tests fast problem solving abilities. AI can do that nowadays. One of the big activities of a researcher, in mathematics and elsewhere, is not to answer questions but to ask the right questions.

Literally just having a delusional golden retriever mindset measurably changes outcomes and physiology. Sleep badly? Convince yourself you're well rested. Stressful day? Convince yourself it's fuel. Failed? Convince yourself it's useful data.