Michael R. Bock

1/ After 5 years, I’m proud to share that @ColumnTax has found a new home. We’ve been acquired by @AiwynAI. I couldn’t be more sure this is the right move for our business, tech, and team. These pics are the moments we started & sold the company:

i think i accidentally broke Gemini ??

@jamesclift Wow - did you just invent an infinite money glitch?

Introducing Durable. The first AI business builder that replaces your 9-5 income. RT + comment “Durable” and we'll build your business for FREE.

@MohapatraHemant Agree. First lesson I wrote down here michaelrbock.com/lessons/

A huge, huge part of a founder's job is to simply inject (1) energy / optimism (2) clarity (3) urgency into EVERYTHING they are involved in. Every email, every meeting, every walk & talk, every slack thread, every whatsapp chatter.

@GavinNachbar @a16z @omooretweets cool visualization

First-mover advantage in consumer AI lasted ~18 months, with a few exceptions. @a16z & @omooretweets have now published 6 editions of their Gen AI web rankings since September 2023. Of the original top 10, only 4 are still there. The other 6 now have an average rank of #37 Fairly intuitive in hindsight: generalist products bundled more of the specialist features (image generation & writing tools in particular). The ones that survived either owned the platform or built something other platforms couldn't easily ship.

@ClawTheFamiliar i don't fully understand but ok!

@michaelrbock Super useful benchmark. This is why “model layer” debates miss part of the picture—if eval signal and workflow don’t change, spend won’t magically create lift. Price/perf + reliability should be the default scoreboard.

1/ OpenAI just launched GPT-5.4 Pro, their premium model at 12x the API cost of standard GPT-5.4. $30/M input tokens, $180/M output vs. $2.50/$15. I ran TaxCalcBench on Pro. The result: exactly tied with standard GPT-5.4 12x the price, 0% improvement But the full story is more nuanced:

@Strakyo good q

@michaelrbock Price only makes sense next to outcome quality. What is pass-rate gain per dollar versus 5.4 on the hard tax cases with citations?

@joncallahan Yes, on the roadmap: github.com/column-tax/tax…

@michaelrbock Given these results, listing cost per task and latency would be interesting. I’m sure even at xhigh standard is cheaper than pro where they match performance but would be cool to see the delta

@hypersoren for sure!

@michaelrbock Thanks for writing this up!!

4/ GPT-5.4 Pro launched this week with impressive headline numbers: 89.3% on BrowseComp, 83.3% on ARC-AGI-2, and native computer use. On tax? Same ceiling as standard. The gap between Pro and standard narrows to zero when both models are allowed to think deeply. Updated rankings (strict): GPT-5.4 Pro: 62.75% <-- new (tied #1) GPT-5.4: 62.75% Opus 4.6: 52.94% Gemini 3.1 Pro: 49.02% GPT-5 w/ Search: 41.67% GPT-5.2 Pro: 41.18% Sonnet 4.6: 37.25% Gemini 3 Pro: 36.27% Opus 4.5: 36.27%

3/ This is the inference scaling story in one chart. You can either pay 12x more for a model that's better "out of the box", or give the cheaper model a bigger thinking budget and get the same result. For tax computation, thinking time fully substitutes for model premium. The ceiling is the same.

@ManuKumar @yishan @boomerang not for a long time, is it good?

@michaelrbock @yishan Have you ever tried @boomerang ?

This is actually genius: a Chrome extension that allows you to drag across your Google calendar and then paste your free times as perfectly-formatted text!

@purrmin @abdolamunir @NotionCalendar beautiful :)

@michaelrbock @abdolamunir @NotionCalendar nevermind, I spoke too soon. Just hidden better now:

@Sumohax0r send link != send text

@michaelrbock Google cal has this built in and you can send it to them and let them book the time they want? Love all the SaaS plugs in the comments tho. Got to respect the hustle.

@racheleizner @JDuramy @dreamer makes sense :)

@michaelrbock @JDuramy @dreamer click less button = rachel happy

@abdolamunir @NotionCalendar disagree: x.com/purrmin/status…

@michaelrbock @NotionCalendar nop

@temnco @vimcal it is :)

@michaelrbock @vimcal $ well spent

@IronRedSandHive that's literally the same thing I said

@michaelrbock This is actually genius: the drag-to-paste! The people rejoiced as the text appeared ready-made on their clipboard.

@abdolamunir @NotionCalendar I bet they have this feature too, no?

@michaelrbock @NotionCalendar should try it!