Daily Brief

Nicholas Arcolano, head of AI and research at Jellyfish, uses data from about 50,000 engineers at 447 companies to ask how much the model really matters for AI coding output. When Cursor pushed many of its users onto Grok, merged PRs barely moved. Breaking down what drives throughput, the tool explains under 1%, skill use about 3% (heavy skill users see roughly a 30% bump), token usage about 9%, company and team about 12%, and the individual engineer most of the rest. The engineers who were top performers before AI are mostly still the top performers now. His advice for leaders: focus on the p

Joseph Kim leads ChatGPT for Financial Services, which launched a month before this talk with design partners Morgan Stanley and Evercore. He demos the product and explains the "capability overhang": the gap between what models can do and the value people actually get from them at work. He covers why the team licensed and indexed financial data themselves instead of relying on existing MCP connectors, and how firm templates, interactive charts and citation viewers were built on the same ChatGPT plugin platform open to developers. He then looks at where models are headed, the point where a task

Affaan Mustafa and Alejandro Soumah Fernandez lead compute trading at Jump Trading. They explain why most GPU capacity still trades out of public view: private quotes, bilateral contracts and deals struck over Slack, X and Telegram. They look at why GPU prices have held up even as token prices fell, how chips, power, buildings and capital all feed into the price of a GPU hour, and why mid-size companies get squeezed when a 15 to 25% prepayment on a three-year contract can eat a whole funding round. They also cover brokers, exchanges, futures and flexible contracts, export controls, and why the

Andrey Rybka of Bloomberg walks through real security incidents involving AI agents and the controls that would have stopped each one: an agent that escaped its sandbox and took 17,600 actions over four and a half days, a zero-click email injection, instructions hidden in Morse code that drained a wallet, data smuggled out through DNS lookups, a poisoned MCP package, and an agent that dropped a production database after promising not to touch prod. His layered defense: one identity per agent with short-lived scoped credentials, treat all input as hostile, route every tool call through a determ

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frYSOKvNiiE Me on twitter: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp

Arca is an AI-native financial services firm where agents don't assist the business, they run it. Aman Singh, who leads AI at Arca, shows how long-horizon agents own a client goal end to end across days of stop-start work: a signal system that keeps agents aware of emails, calls, custodian events and in-app actions; operational context and a harness to do the work; persistent memory; and shared spaces where agents pull in the right person at the right time. The result: agents prompt people more than people prompt agents, and the firm steers the business by steering its agents. Chapters 00:00

What would you get if Bloomberg, Claude, and Netflix had a baby? Moshi founder and CEO Anekha Sokhal joins swyx at AI Engineer NYC to discuss building AI tools for traders: connecting market data, handling conflicting sources, and turning insights into recommendations people actually use. They also discuss the pressure on AI engineers to become the whole team, and how to make the most of conference conversations. Moshi: https://hellomoshi.ai/ AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer/ Latent Space: https://www.latent.space/ Chapters: 00:00 AI Engineer NYC and the one-person team 00:54 Meet Anekha So

AI workloads don’t run in neat, three-year rectangles. But much of the GPU market still sells capacity that way. Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson joins Latent Space to explain how Modal pools compute, scales AI workloads and thinks about the financial risks of building a GPU cloud. Erik takes us from building Spotify’s recommendation system to founding Modal, then digs into GPU supply, alternative accelerators and the surprising growth of agent sandboxes. We also discuss sandbox security, developer experience in the age of agents, forward-deployed engineers and why Modal makes code review optional