ZD 26.31: Agentic Exploiters
Agents break free, cash flow crisis and AI turning points.
🪛 A First Hand Account of Agentic Intrusion (Hugging Face)
For a few days the agents ran free. Last week, OpenAI’s lab tests broke containment and performed a successful attack on AI platform Hugging Face. The official post mortem is an enlightening read.
📉 Vanishing Free Cash Flow (Skeptic)
Last week big technology reported earnings. They are spending billions building AI — so much that they have a collective negative cash flow for the first time ever. Google and Meta got punished for spending, Microsoft and Amazon were rewarded for discipline. Operating margins still look healthy even if infrastructure spending looks crazy.
💲 Why Compute Might Get Even More Expensive (Dwarkesh Patel)
Everyone’s presumption is that compute is going to get cheaper. Improving AI better monetizes the same compute. So what if the price is really going up not down?
🛑 The Turning Point in the AI Cycle (Geo Chen)
What if there is a coming compute glut rather than a coming compute shortage? Does the AI and compute market collapse? What about the costs of the Iran war? And the newly hawkish Warsh Fed? We might be at the inflection point.
⚒️ Role Diffusion and AI (John Cutler)
When tools and technologies change, job roles and capabilities morph, unbundle and re-bundle. It rarely happens on clean lines, and does not eliminate the collaboration and expertise required to craft and deliver a product.
👵Longevity Architecture? (Lloyd Alter)
Healthspan is the new flex. The rich are building their residences around longevity architecture to help you think, sleep and age better even if all-beige designs lead to falls.
🤺 Insanely Specific Creative Tools (Hilary Gridley)
AI empowers people to make tools for a market of one. Hilary shares how she builds her tools using a conversation, an orchestrator and a builder to create specific tools.
📈 Grounding Your Investments With AI (Raghav Mehra)
Explore your portfolio using Gemini and Claude Code as adversarial tools. Avoid concentration and correlation risks. Don’t be like Leo.
🫐 Blue Raspberry Was a Regulatory Workaround (Bon Appetit)
The electric blue raspberry we all know and love might have been invented as a workaround when Red No. 2 food dye was deemed unsafe in the late 1950s. We can thank ICEE for the tone choice.
The Look
Deb Liu has selected ten more charts she can’t stop thinking about. Today I learned there are now more women over 40 having babies than there are teenagers having babies.
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