Dorian Johnson

I'm lucky enough to have a great doctor and access to excellent Bay Area medical care. I've taken lots of standard screening tests over the years and have tried lots of "health tech" devices and tools. With all this said, by far the most useful preventative medical advice that I've ever received has come from unleashing coding agents on my genome, having them investigate my specific mutations, and having them recommend specific follow-on tests and treatments. Population averages are population averages, but we ourselves are not averages. For example, it turns out that I probably have a 30x(!) higher-than-average predisposition to melanoma. Fortunately, there are both specific supplements that help counteract the particular mutations I have, and of course I can significantly dial up my screening frequency. So, this is very useful to know. I don't know exactly how much the analysis cost, but probably less than $100. Sequencing my genome cost a few hundred dollars. (One often sees papers and articles claiming that models aren't very good at medical reasoning. These analyses are usually based on employing several-year-old models, which is a kind of ludicrous malpractice. It is true that you still have to carefully monitor the agents' reasoning, and they do on occasion jump to conclusions or skip steps, requiring some nudging and re-steering. But, overall, they are almost literally infinitely better for this kind of work than what one can otherwise obtain today.) There are still lots of questions about how this will diffuse and get adopted, but it seems very clear that medical practice is about to improve enormously. Exciting times!

Opus 4.7 also has substantially better vision. It can see images at more than three times the resolution and produces higher-quality interfaces, slides, and docs as a result.

Total amt of flops across all the GPUs in the world has grown about 3x per year for the last few years. Total amt of inference demand has probably grown ~10x per year. What happens when those lines cross? The econ answer is: when demand > supply, price goes up. That might be true (even H100s are more expensive than they have ever been...) but doesn't actually solve the problem on its own here - demand continues to grow as we unlock new use cases and there is only so much additional supply coming. To get to a healthy equilibrium, we also need to shift much more usage to smaller, targeted models. This will happen naturally as the incentives make sense for it: it's much easier to 10x your agent usage if you know that you can now solve 90% of your tasks with good cheap, fast models. SWE 1.6 is not a general model. But we have trained it to specifically be good at the kinds of standard coding tasks that our users run. And thanks to its small size & a little magic from Cerebras it can run very cheaply at ~1000 tokens / sec. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

📊 Data update: Californians now travel nearly 10 million kilometers each month in driverless taxis— In December 2024, passengers in California's driverless taxis were traveling around 3.8 million kilometers per month. By the end of 2025, that figure had climbed to roughly 9.4 million — more than doubling in a single year. You can see this increase in the chart. This data comes from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which requires companies operating paid driverless taxi services to file detailed quarterly reports on passenger distance, safety incidents, and other operational data. (Only Waymo has been in operation since late 2023.) The reports are published on the CPUC's website, making it possible to track this fast-moving industry with publicly available, standardized data. Our colleague Veronika Samborska recently updated this chart with the CPUC's latest quarterly report and will continue to do so each time they publish one.

okay here is my comment very very often after 4.6, opus will ask a question or make a suggestion, and then just do it. this extends to a lot of things it does, but electing to destroy instances costs me actual real money and it's getting super tireseome, so i'm shaming publicly

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