I am fully booked for the rest of the year. For Q1 and Q2’27 bookings, please reach out. 🔮 39 charts on Anthropic, one-person biotech firm & cheap solar #608Your Sunday briefing on AI and exponential technologies
Hi all, Welcome to the Sunday edition. This week:
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We’ve just launched a new perk for members: EV Charts, a living library of 500+ data-rich charts on AI, energy, geopolitics and more, each linked to the original Exponential View analysis. If you’re not yet a member, upgrade anytime for full access. The unbounded firmEvery firm has its boundary. Back in 1937, Ronald Coase argued that the limit is defined at the point when the cost to do a task in the market is lower than doing it inside the firm. Most inventions- the ledger, telegraphy, copy paper, the internet- cut internal and external costs, so the boundary can move in both directions. Now, Alex Imas and colleagues ask what happens when we introduce AI agents in the mix. Unlike humans, AI agents could share the same reasoning patterns (the model weights) and the same working state. Nothing leaks in handoffs from one agent to the next (and nothing is angling for a promotion). This might give rise to “supercooperative firms”, where bigger becomes better at every scale, possibly leading to giant AI-run firms in deep, large markets.
Arguably, this trend is long underway, as Kwon and others point out. The largest 1% of American firms held 97% of corporate assets in 2018.
AI might amplify this. AI-capable firms will be able to enter many markets, as Anthropic is in coding, bio, legal, and finance, and be able to scale horizontally past the traditional Coasian boundary. AI is a technology more likely than not to accentuate this trend. We might need new rules for dealing with such enormous entities. See also: Microsoft is making way for the machines where I explore what be behind the tech company’s massive voluntary exit program. The solo biotechAI is also reducing the cost of contracting work, meaning solopreneurs can achieve extraordinary results. One of these is Cody Tranbarger, the only employee at Mithril Medicine, a biotech tackling rare forms of muscular dystrophy. Tranbarger ran experiments with 11 outside labs with eight paid consultants. Claude handled contracts, logistics and the paperwork. He took an idea to promising results in mice and 89 candidate molecules in under 18 months. And Anthropic just acquired his business. Tranbarger calls this “Pipeline-in-a-Person”. Most drug research isn’t go/no-go calls; it is process, bottlenecks, and paperwork. He delegated that to a mix of AI and consultants. He spent his time on the key decisions. Those were ‘decisions under uncertainty’. They weren’t decisions about risk, which you can price and insure. It is uncertainty with no known odds to bet against. This is what scientific research is about. And these types of decisions require judgment—which, for now, we humans can take. Who said tokenmaxxing is dead?And then we’ve got Jeetu Patel, president of Cisco, who has given a 27-year-old engineer, Paddy Krishnamurthy, a sidekick and unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of Cisco’s code. Cisco is a 41-year-old networking company with $63 billion of annual revenue. Its catalog runs from routers and switches to firewalls, Webex, and Splunk, all built on four decades of code. Ordinarily, this would be like licking an elephant to death: exhausting, time-consuming and with no guarantee you’ll succeed. Let’s see how it pans out with an infinite pool of tokens. For many, Patel’s mission would be crazy. But not at Spawn. The ten-person games start-up runs a fleet of AI agents that ships to its live product every hour. The token bill came to $3.1 million: about $40 per change, or $310,000 per human. The agents live in the game, and about 60% of their work starts when there is a crash or a bug report. They pick them up and fix the live game. Last month the fleet made 77,000 substantial changes. As Simon Willison points out, a game is a perfect place for “exploring the edges of what today’s coding agents can do.” But most companies are not like Cisco, let alone Spawn. Most traditional firms are still trying to get their AI mojo, but some might find it as we argue in Today’s AI laggards can become leaders. But beyond traditional incumbent firms, I also believe there is a new world of AI-pilled companies working at an altogether different clock-speed, and a clock-speed that is getting faster. Those companies may find themselves on a completely different trajectory. Sunrise in AmericaUS small-scale solar generation has grown nearly fivefold since 2016, reaching about 93 terawatt-hours in 2025. That category includes rooftops and some small ground-mounted systems. Growth has slowed since 2022, as policy has introduced many new costs.
Against that background, it’s wild that the inestimable Casey Handmer of Terraform has built the cheapest solar in the US – a 1.8 MW off-grid project in Southern California for $1.3 million. That works out to about $0.72 per watt. This doesn’t yet compete with utility-scale pricing in China or the UAE, but it is about 45% cheaper than a large-scale American solar farm.
Short morsels to be smart at dinner parties🌞 A single dose of a psychedelic nasal spray seems effective at tackling treatment-resistant depression. 💊 Lilly’s new GLP-1 drug sees more than double the weight loss of Ozempic’s highest approved dose in a phase 3 head-to-head trial in adults with type 2 diabetes. See our dive into GLP-1s here. Early humans in Arabia settled only where water and tool‑making stone were present. Young women and men are drifting apart politically in parts of Europe.
Scientists engineered tiny RNA archives inside cultured human cells. 🤖 MIT’s soft robot traveled about two meters through the small intestine in animal tests. A promising new solar material: bismuth sulfide combines strong light absorption with slower recombination of electrical charges – a useful combination for photovoltaics. Thanks for reading! FOR MEMBERS
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