Google invented the transformer, paid $2.7B to buy back its co-author, and just lost him to OpenAI. The pattern says something about why large organizations keep giving away the people who built them.
SpaceX just paid $60 billion for a coding tool. The price is interesting. The justification -- a $26 trillion addressable market -- reveals more about how we price AI right now than about what it's actually worth.
Serious developers are dropping paid AI subscriptions for local models and reporting it actually works. The 'it's free' pitch is real - but it obscures a different set of costs.
Almost every team now codes with AI; only a third governs it. The teams pulling ahead review AI's output as seriously as they once reviewed their own code.
Anthropic's Fable 5 shipped with two guardrails: one that refused honestly, and one that quietly degraded the answer without telling you. The second is the dangerous kind, and Anthropic's own reversal shows why.
For a while we treated generative AI as a parlour trick with bad hands and a habit of making things up. Five kinds of story ended that phase for me, and raised a harder question than 'will it take my job?'
