SWL Week in Review - A Commodity Without Monopoly Power

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

3/14/2026, 1:01 AM

More or Less — Dark Pools and Commodified Intelligence

There is no question that developer demand more tokens… but do consumers? For what really? Is there any real margin in generic martix multiplication or is the market for ‘intelligence’ just the cost of power … and brutal competition in a world where there aren’t even local protectionist monopolies like cable analogy (or power without superconductivity?) — the gang gets into the state of things and if Anthropic’s revenue will eclipse OpenAI in the coming months… as well as brit’s sexy chatbots.

Hot Takes

The ‘Intelligence’ Business is kinda like Cable or Power… but So So Much Worse —at least cable is local / regional monopolies & power super conductivity doesn’t exist… you never want to play in a brutal global-race-to-zero… Riff in MOL

The Internet Brought Bigger Markets and Global Liquidity… AI is all about DarkPools — the internet matched more supply and demand in new market… but with AI collapsing those margins to zero - the future is all about darkpools and creating market NON-transparency… that is the irony of capitalism / and AI as hyper-capitalism… margin tends to zero fast. Riff in MOL

Developers Need More Intelligence… Do Consumers Really? — seriously… what are consumers gonna do with all that intelligence? It isn’t commerce let me tell you (especially if you take away all their jobs!) MOL

When Pivots are Free… Companies Never Die — there used to be only one thing to kill a company…. Running out of money… but now that you can operate with zero engineers… do companies ever really die?… or do they forever exist either as successes or marked to their last fundraising on VC balance sheets?

Is Hyper-Realism Over-Valued — Branching off of brit’s low-fi smut… this is the issue with the VR to hyper-realistic AI whole thrust… the brain is a powerful imagination machine… feed the narratives / no reason to go for hyper-realism (heck marvel realistic CGI explosions are just boring)…

Paying Humans with Tokens (instead of AIs) is Very Funny — I truly love irony… and the idea that the currency you pay humans with is tokens (which was supposed to be the machine currency) is honestly quite funny.

The Permanent Underclass of AI isn’t Complete, But It IS a real issue — I want to be clear, there is no glee here… I think it is a real problem… but this is just likely what happens…. And I also worry about the collapse of pride of knowledge -

The Toolchain for BOT Leverage — Claude is great… but honestly with like 4 more tools it is INSANE. Just give it an email account, a GitHub repo, a PSQL instance to use and some web cookies and it is insane what you can do (side-note best / most exciting meeting of my week was talking with our creators about how to get bot-leverage… the smart people who own communities are going to be the heroes of the next era)

Twitter’s APIs Are Comically Expensive … Which is Good — the company I hate the most that I respect right now is Apple with their CAPEX ‘users pay for computers’ stance… but twitter is becoming a close second… Everyone else is racing to make things cheap, while twitter’s APIs are comically expensive… good on them.

The Herd VC Flight to ‘Deep Tech’ Years Late and Dollars Short — the heard has figured out they can’t invest in software… and g-d bless the hubris.

If AI is Modern Gunpowder … Stop It With the Moats — I retweeted myself from a year ago… because it is just so much more obviously true now!

Cheap Tunnels Anyone? — shocked Elon isn’t out there promoting this solution…

Full More or Less iOS chat app in 20 min — it honestly took me longer to submit to apple’s review process (which obviously was immediately rejected).. then to build the whole app (which is shockingly good) — DM for TestFlight.

Buzzfeed for the cost of a small seed round?— who wants a public shell for $26M bucks… with no disrespect for Jonah personally … my favorite public market trainwreck from hype to … whatever this is…

Sincerely,
Sam

P.S. can Shaq run for president… seriously… would vote.

P.P.S. the best option is OPTION + SEVEN

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