Adam Bates

Microsoft just banned its own engineers from using AI. The tool was literally costing MORE than the humans it was supposed to replace. They lied to you about AI adoption and now the whole narrative is blowing up: Microsoft gave thousands of engineers access to Claude Code six months ago and encouraged them to use it. Engineers loved it and adoption exploded. But then the invoices arrived. Token-based pricing means every query, every code review, every debugging session costs money. At scale across 100,000 engineers, the numbers became so large that Microsoft issued an internal order to cancel nearly all Claude Code licenses by end of June and force everyone onto their own cheaper tool instead. The company that invested $5 billion in Anthropic just told its own people to stop using Anthropic's product because it costs too much. Uber's story is even worse... Their CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the budget he planned for the full year was "blown away already" by April. Uber had rolled out Claude Code in December 2025. By March, 84% of their 5,000 engineers were using it with 70% of all committed code coming from AI systems. Heavy users were burning $500 to $2,000 per month each. Naga himself spent $1,200 in a single two-hour demo session. The company had even built internal leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used. They literally gamified the spending and then ran out of money. Now look at what Nvidia's own VP of applied deep learning Bryan Catanzaro said to Axios last month. Direct quote: "For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees." This is a VP at the company that SELLS the chips saying that using AI is more expensive than paying humans. Think about what this means for the entire AI narrative. Every CEO on every earnings call for the past two years has said the same thing: AI will make us more efficient, reduce headcount, and cut costs. The stock market rewarded every company that said it. Fired workers, stock goes up. Announced AI adoption, stock goes up. But the actual companies deploying AI at scale are discovering the math doesn't work. The MORE employees use AI, the HIGHER the bill. Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030 as companies adopt AI agents. Gartner just published a report showing that even though individual token prices will drop 90% by 2030, total enterprise AI costs will go UP because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task than basic tools. Meta built an internal dashboard called "Claudeonomics" to track which employees use the most AI. Amazon started pushing engineers to "tokenmaxx," their internal term for consuming as many AI tokens as possible. Both companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure this year alone. And Microsoft, the company that bet its entire future on AI, just told 100,000 engineers to stop using the tool they liked best because the per-token bills got out of control. The companies building AI are telling investors it saves money. The companies using AI are finding out it costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace. And even the company that makes the chips just admitted it through its own VP. This is the gap nobody on Wall Street is pricing in. $725 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year across Big Tech. And the first companies to actually deploy these tools at scale are already pulling back because the economics don't work. What do you think?

So I’m walking to the office just now and unhoused man stops me and asks me to spare some change. I’m like sorry man no cash, and he just stares at me for a second and says you goin somewhere in such a hurry? I tell him yeah I run a company and i’m heading into the office. He nods real slow. Pulls out a half-eaten bagel. Takes a bite. Doesn’t break eye contact. “Product good?” I’m like, yeah, we’re building the intelligence layer powering AI and I think we’re— He cuts me off. “Doesn’t matter.” oh? “what’s your moat.” he asks I start to ramble about data sets. He cuts me off again “Tech is commodity. Compute is commodity. Models are commodity. You know what isn’t?” He leans in. Smells like Aqua Di Parma Mirto di Panarea, weirdly. “Eyeballs. Trust. The list. The fucking list, man.” He shakes my shoulders “Who’s retweeting your terrible tweets? Who makes the edits of you? Who is the trusted 100 that you seek? That’s the moat.” Then i see a tear run down his face “Distribution is the moat. Always was. You just couldn’t see it because YC told you product was the moat and you believed them because the hoodie was soft.” I try to say something. He raises a finger. “Stripe didn’t win on the API. Stripe won because the Collison brothers knew everyone. ChatGPT didn’t win on the model. They had a hundred million users before Claude finished stretching. Substack is just email with a haircut. The haircut is the distribution.” I go to hand him a twenty and he pushes my hand away. “Keep it. Spend it on a podcast tour. Build the list. Own the channel. Distribution is the new moat.” I walked away with powerful knowledge

Optimistic people tend to achieve their goals. Pessimistic people usually live in jealousy.

🇺🇸 The SEC is expected to release its "innovation exemption" for tokenized stocks, creating a new framework for trading digital versions of securities. The plan could reshape the American stock market as the Trump administration continues loosening crypto rules, per Bloomberg.

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT Music IP is set to be a $200B asset class. None of it is onchain. Today we're partnering with Musicow to change that with one of the largest tokenization efforts in crypto. Stay tuned as we reveal some of the biggest global artists in the coming months.

这个五一，把《币安人生》读了两遍。分享20条语录，希望对你有用。 1、到场是成功的八成。 2、学历只是一个工具。 3、我的沟通方式也变得极其直接：不再绕弯子，不寒暄，不闲聊，开门见山，直奔主题。 4、我真正挂念的，是人。我想念家人和朋友。我意识到，身边的人才是最重要的。 5、未来的机会，永远比过去更多。 6、不追求花哨的商业模型，只关注核心要素：产品、用户增长、营收与利润，以及团队的执行力。 7、保持简单，把时间花在更重要的事上。 8、每天想想你做过的决定，如果有基于核心原则的，就记下来。久而久之，你就会形成自己的原则。 9、没有收入，公司会破产。 10、过去的成功，不代表未来会成功。反而可能会让人懈怠、不够努力，阻碍成功。 11、现金流就是命脉。 12、时间本可做更有建设性的事。 13、对自身能力的信心，就是我的风控。 14、珍惜时间成了我的人生信条。我把这条原则执行到极致，哪怕因此得罪人也在所不惜。我的目标不是不得罪人，是高效率。 15、对新创公司而言，最可怕的不是负面报导，而是根本没人讨论你。 16、绝不说同行坏话。只专注做好自己的事。 17、面对用户，永远选择做正确的事，而不是做容易的事。 18、真正的财富，来自你为别人创造的价值。如果你能创造十分价值，只拿八分回报，财富自会找上门。如果你只拿五分，同时业务又能无限扩展，财富积累的速度会快得超出想像。 19、要专注于本质，别被花哨的概念带偏。 20、行业寒冬反而更适合踏实做事，留下来的人都怀著长期主义，不会被短期市场波动带偏。

TINDER x Blockchain Cardano founder just said blockchain shouldn't just be about trading coins. It should run EVERYTHING.: Social media. Games. Netflix. "I want Tinder on blockchain so you can prove how tall you are and how much money you make" No more 5'6" kings claiming 6ft No more "entrepreneurs" who are really unemployed. Everything verified. On-chain forever. Dating apps would either become brutally honest or completely empty. Charles might be onto something here.