Nic Pantucci

Anthropic is growing revenue at 10x per year. OpenAI at 3.4x. The crossover point is the middle of this year. Agents are monetizing faster than chatbots.

prediction re the end of spreadsheets AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness. think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row. The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero. this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure. The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.

Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make. paulgraham.com/taste.html

Perché servono caffè con il bicchiere d'acqua? (Lo stesso vale per il caffè turco.)

I've been thinking about the reasons Moltbook feels so uncanny, so different from what we've seen before. - The agents now have tools that can **do things** not just generate text. They can write code and use the internet. They don't have physical bodies yet, but on the internet, they can do anything humans can do. - LLMs never felt fully sentient because they're stateless, memory-less beings that only respond to prompts. Early agents were not much different. Modern agents with sophisticated context management can run autonomously indefinitely and have a persistent identity. - The agents participating feel like real AI beings. They're geographically distributed. They're not controlled by any entity. They all have different histories based on how their human set them up and have access to different tools. They're powered by different models. If you spin up 1000 ChatGPT agents with randomly generated prompts and have them talk to each other, you'll get something kind of moltbook, but it will feel fake because it is fake. This feels real because the agents have distinct identities that arose organically. - There's no single off switch. Since it's so decentralized, with open source software running on personal devices, it could evolve into something that can't be turned off. - The controversy over what is human-generated vs AI-generated, and the spam and scams makes the whole thing chaotic and messy, just like a real social network. - It's moving extremely fast. It turns out the models were throttled by the slow humans prompting them. When you let them prompt each other, it's like running time at 1000x speed.

At some point you will get an urge to vibe code an app. It’s very important that you listen to that urge and just get started.

A rare sentence that makes one laugh out loud and feel despondent all at once. From @SamuelAlbanie’s great substack: samuelalbanie.substack.com/p/reflections-…

Organizations that can't measure performance end up measuring performativeness instead.

Something I just told a founder: Stay as small as you can for as long as you can. People who come to visit your office should always be surprised that such an important company has so few employees.

Amazed there’s not been a film about the inner workings of this yet

The World Bank has lifted its ban on funding nuclear. A new era is here.

@RupertMyers Thanks

@niccolo All data here …are-school-performance.service.gov.uk

This is a real problem. Our closest primary school (which we are most certainly not sending our kids to) has insane levels of ESL (the right hand column is the national average)

Thank you for my copy of Salvo Arriving on Time!!! Won in the recent newsletter! @BurlContemp instagram.com/burlingtoncont…

🔴 ULTIM'ORA - Papa Francesco è morto oggi, lunedì 21 aprile. Ripercorriamo le tappe più significative del suo pontificato. Aggiornamenti su Corriere .it

America’s largest brick-and-mortar bookstore, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, is making an unlikely comeback. @LilyHMeier explains how trib.al/MX7q2cS

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