Thoughts

I recently received a panicked message from my girlfriend. She’d been following the news about Jacob Coxon’s resignation from Anthropic, and was rightly concerned about the flood of news articles repeating the “end of the decade” timeline for the AI-powered apocalypse. The purpose of this essay isn’t to dive into the AI safety debate; I do want to highlight one implication of this prediction, one that has largely slipped under the prevailing narrative. Whilst it’s unsurprising that the general public are unnerved by the exponential increases in LLM performance and capacity over the last few years, the assumption that digital text-based chatbot and agentic knowledge work performance increases will mirror across into rapidly scaling capabilities for embodied AI in the physical world ignores a problem that researchers in robotics have been grappling with for decades: in purely digital tasks, advances in reinforcement learning and feedback loops produce new, improved iterations within days; embodied, physical AI’s timescale is glacial by comparison. ...

On 12th June, SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the largest Initial Public Offering (IPO) in history. The rocket/social media/AI/compute company’s stock opened at $135 per share, closed the day at $161, and went on to hit a peak of $225.64 on 16th June (Yahoo! Finance). Since then, the stock has dropped to $159.72 (at the time of writing on 29th June), a 29% pull back. That still gives the firm a total market cap of $2.08 trillion, trading at a P/S multiple of around 111x. ...

’“That’s all there is about the raising of Lazarus,” she whispered sternly and abruptly, and stood unmoving, turned away to one side, not daring to raise her eyes to him, as though she were embarrassed. Her feverish shaking still continued. The stub of the candle had long been guttering in its crooked candlestick within that wretched room, shedding its dim light on the murderer and the prostitute who had so strangely encountered each other in the reading of the eternal book.' ...

Looksmaxxing, careermaxxing, Londonmaxxing – I am not online enough to understand the latest internet discourse du jour. One trend, however, that has not escaped me, is tokenmaxxing. In particular the criticism levelled against the practice as a symptom of just how performative and superficial AI rollout in the enterprise has become. Whilst those criticising seemingly pointless token consumption are right that, obviously, tokenmaxxing does not drive direct commercial value, and is yet another apathetic workplace practice couched in the ironic language of social media, I’m keen to push back on the idea of it necessarily being ‘valueless’ – reframing it as such, just requires us to understand the fundamentally emergent, unstructured and messy, nature of agentic AI adoption in the enterprise. ...