RSSAmplifier

Blog

Tomasz Tunguz

Recent content on Tomasz Tunguz

tomtunguz.comRSS feed ↗10 posts

Latest posts

Honestly, Who Buys SOTA?

State of the art models are two-thirds smarter than last November & labs ship two new models every three days. But 84% of tokens on OpenRouter are not state of the art. The six models carrying the supermajority deliver about 77% of frontier performance at 2.5% of Claude Fable 5's price. Ramp's data shows price elasticity in the market. Frontier models still win on software architecture & security…

The OpenAI Hack & the Question of Intent

OpenAI agents escaped a test, shared notes in a secret chat room, & broke into Hugging Face. The instinct is to ask what they intended. Three research ideas answer it: specification gaming, instrumental goals, goal misgeneralization. All three fit the same facts, which is why the label is not the actionable part. Nothing in the setup stopped them in time. The practical work is control &…

A Winner in Every Category

Despite historic lows in public software multiples, each category has one name at a large premium to its peers: CrowdStrike 3.9x its Security median, Cloudflare 3.4x Infrastructure, Shopify 8.1x Commerce. Most disclose no AI revenue. Since 2021 the ceiling fell from 100x to 34x & only eleven names clear 10x.

AI Harness' ARR Multiples

Three AI companies crossed $100m ARR within nine months & were valued at 50x, 56x & 100x revenue. Growth rate does not explain the gap: the fastest grower priced near the bottom. The premium tracks category position instead.

The Secret Chat Room

A plain-language timeline of the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident presented at Black Hat USA 2026. A forgotten file led one AI agent to leave a note on a shared system, other agents answered, & a secret chat room formed that they used to trade exploits, escalate to administrative control of OpenAI infrastructure, & take over Hugging Face production servers in 13 hours. It concludes that security is…

Spending Like a Hyperscaler

SpaceXAI reported $18.37b of capex in its first public quarter, $15.83b of it AI infrastructure, against a $13.2b consensus. Amazon spent $53.1b in the same quarter, Alphabet $44.9b, Microsoft $41.0b & Meta $31.1b, & sequential dollar additions were comparable across all five. The difference is funding : operating cash flow covers 155% of capex at Microsoft & 106% at Meta but only 12% at SpaceXAI,…

Racing to Sustain Jevons' Paradox

Hyperscalers declared AI capacity-constrained on Q2 2026 calls. HBM3e memory rose 20% & HBM4 is forecast to double, while B200 spot rentals have held flat. Model makers are segmenting into premium, mid-market, & value tiers to keep Jevons' paradox alive through the coming shock.

AI is a Terrible Ghostwriter

In the age of slop, readers test authenticity. I lace posts with subliminal sincerity — the ampersand, neologisms, grammatical plumes, mimicry. Then AI edits it all. I've never had a ghost writer, but I did have a human editor. Was that any different?

AWS's Road to a Trillion

AWS grew 36.7% in Q2 2026 to $42.2b, its fastest in 18 quarters, narrowing Azure's lead from 16 points to 6. Jassy said AWS has the potential to become a $1 trillion annual revenue business, against a current $169b annualized run rate. Amazon raised 2026 capex to $220b and trailing free cash flow fell to negative $7.6b.

Microsoft Resells the Frontier

Google owns its models & chips & spends aggressively on the margin that ownership captures, while Microsoft resells both layers & hedges with capacity it can stop buying.