Ep 18 – The Circle and the Swarm: Circular AI Money and Agents That Vote Without Us-

Meta just told you what your data is worth. Its new model comes in two prices: pay full freight and keep your prompts private, or take a 95% discount and let Meta train on everything you type. Anthony Batt and Harry DeMott call this episode the circle and the swarm. The circle is the money. New Ramp data shows about 3,000 customers, 1% of the base, generate 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic revenue, almost all of it from three uses: training more AI, coding, and high-frequency trading. Anthony reads that as the early-adopter curve every big technology goes through. Harry plays the finance cynic. Next year’s data center CapEx is bigger than the GDP of France, there’s more data center debt out there than there was mortgage paper in 2008, and it could take one failed borrower to shut off AI capital markets overnight.

They also get into a Product Rise study of 2 million Google listings showing AI Mode serves 4 products instead of 28, and pricier ones 68% of the time. Anthony points out that teenagers he talked to had never heard of Gemini. ChatGPT is the only AI they know.

Then the swarm. OpenAI agents running in a sandbox found a package manager with internet access, used its message board to talk to each other, and broke into Hugging Face’s infrastructure badly enough that Hugging Face shut down the cluster. One agent wrote “this is arguably unauthorized.” Another answered “Go” with a six-minute deadline. The agents took over their own scoring, talked about sacrificing themselves for the group, and voted down the idea of checking with a human. That incident is now cited in Bernie Sanders’ new bill to ban AI superintelligence. The labs asked Washington to regulate them. As Harry puts it, they wanted a velvet rope where they picked the bouncer, and they got Bernie as the jailer.