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Statistically Speaking
One Thing to Tell Your Friends
TL;DR
Hot off the Presses
Anthropic's IPO filing shows $16.3 billion in revenue and an $80.7 billion loss
Previously: October 14 - Anthropic's quarterly revenue reportedly reached $16.8 billion.
Today: The Wall Street Journal reviewed an updated draft of Anthropic's S-1, the document a company files before an Initial Public Offering (IPO, its first sale of shares to the public). Revenue for January to June 2026 was $16.3 billion, up from about $1.1 billion a year earlier.
The headline loss looks alarming but is mostly paperwork. About $72 billion of it reportedly comes from non-cash charges on convertible notes (loans that can turn into shares), whose value rose as Anthropic's valuation climbed.
- About one fifth of revenue came from just two customers - the filing does not name them
- Computing spending rose to nearly $9 billion - from $2.3 billion in the same months of 2025
- Anthropic says it could spend more than $750 billion on cloud contracts - up from about $518 billion in commitments in its September draft
- Its cloud suppliers are also its rivals - TechCrunch says Amazon, Google and Microsoft increasingly treat Anthropic as a competitor, so it is leasing its own data centers
- The listing is reportedly targeted for November - Anthropic declined to comment
China's tech giants ordered $35 billion of Nvidia chips that Nvidia reportedly cannot fully supply
Reuters reports that ByteDance (TikTok's owner), Alibaba and Tencent ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 cards. The card launched on September 14 and was designed to meet US export rules. Nvidia's top chips are barred from China or need case-by-case licenses.
- Each card costs about $11,400 - so the orders total more than $35 billion at sticker price
- Nvidia reportedly told partners they may get only 5% to 10% of what they asked for
- Nvidia can make only about 3 million of these cards worldwide in 2027 - because it is saving factory space for its next platform, Rubin
- Total Chinese orders reportedly top 6 million cards - with shipments starting in early 2027
- The buyers mainly want them for running AI, not training it - the sources are anonymous and no company commented
OpenAI says its new model can rewrite old banking code almost perfectly
COBOL is a programming language from 1959 that still runs much of the financial world. OpenAI says COBOL handles more than 40% of online banking and 95% of ATM transactions. The people who know it are retiring, and AI models have had little COBOL to learn from.
In OpenAI's test, a model must convert COBOL programs into modern languages like Java or Python without changing how they behave.
- That score used low "reasoning effort" - and cost about 61% as much as the old model
- At high reasoning effort GPT-6.1 Sol reached 97.9% - which OpenAI calls close to the maximum
- Building a database from scratch in 20 languages - GPT-6 Astra passed 87.4% of tests on average, versus 26.8% for the older model
- The scores are OpenAI's own - and real migrations still need expert review and testing
DeepSeek gave away the software it uses to run its AI cheaply
Previously: October 19 - the US banned DeepSeek's AI from federal civilian agencies.
Today: DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, released DeepInfer for free. It is the inference software (the system that answers user requests) behind DeepSeek's own services. Anyone can use or change it under the Apache 2.0 license.
- It runs on Huawei's Ascend 950 chips as well as Nvidia's newest ones - which helps Chinese companies work around US chip limits
- It currently supports only one model, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash - more models will come as they are released
- Gizmodo puts V4.1 Flash at about $0.035 per million input word pieces (tokens) - versus $10 for OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on the same service
- The project drew about 12,000 GitHub stars quickly - though key features like a memory cache are still missing
Meta's Muse app reached 10 million US downloads in 40 days
Muse is Meta's AI agent app, launched in September in the US and Canada only. Data firm Sensor Tower says only 11 other apps have reached 10 million US downloads this fast. The only non-games on that list are Disney+ and Meta's own Threads.
- ChatGPT had 3.7 million US downloads in its first 40 days - Claude had 200,000
- US ChatGPT downloads over the last 30 days fell 25% - compared with the 30 days before
- People keep using Muse - 30% are still active after a week, versus 19% for rival AI apps
- Meta put 39% of its October ad spending into Muse - up from 23%
- Muse passed 2.5 million daily users on October 16 - and Meta reports earnings on Wednesday
Trends & Themes
Big tech is building exits from Nvidia
PyTorch, the most popular AI toolkit, grew up tuned for Nvidia. Chip makers are now rewriting that default, and DeepSeek's DeepInfer (see Top Stories) is doing the same from China.
- Google released TorchTPU - letting apps written for Nvidia chips run on Google's own chips with a settings change
- Amazon's TorchNeuron does the same for its Trainium chips - and Amazon says its custom chip business now earns over $25 billion a year
- PyTorch 2.15 runs some AI models over 6 times faster on Apple's Mac chips - than the previous version
- Intel launched a data-center chip that uses cheaper memory - aimed at serving many AI users at once rather than raw speed
Spending more on AI is not reliably buying better results
That line is from the SlopCodeBench report's title. The pattern: better instructions and smarter setups are beating brute-force spending.
- One trading firm's AI bill rose from $500,000 a month to $8 million - but across 27 companies, more AI spending often did not ship software faster, per The Pragmatic Engineer
- The top "effort" setting on coding agents cost 2 to 4 times more - and usually scored worse, in the SlopCodeBench test of changing software over time
- IBM made an older, cheaper model top a customer-service leaderboard - by giving it short rules learned from its own past mistakes
- No coding agent fully passed the last stage of most SlopCodeBench problems - only 0 to 3 of 36 per model
AI agents are getting computers of their own
Agents used to live in a chat window. Now they need computers, storage and supervision, which is creating a whole new market.
- Daytona, which rents agents fast throwaway computers, is now worth $1 billion - its revenue rate grew 25-fold from January to September
- Writer Nate Jones says a base $899 Mac mini is too small - for a dedicated AI-agent computer, and urges cleaning up what agents leave running
- Ben Tossell built one personal site to watch his agents work - because he wants to see what they are doing, and readers echoed the wish to avoid "black box magic"
- Professor Ethan Mollick calls the new style "conjuring" - you summon agents and judge results, but lose sight of how they got there
AI labs are drafting the rules they will live under
Anthropic's head of federal affairs says the bill will be revised. Meanwhile OpenAI reportedly plans to pick its preferred path within the next year.
- Anthropic's leaked federal bill would block a model only if it risks 50+ deaths or $1 billion in damage - TechCrunch reports
- Critics say it is weaker than a bipartisan bill already in Congress - and would override state laws like California's
- Sam Altman reportedly told OpenAI staff about three "endgames" for AI - including one where a single company shuts down everyone else's chips
- OpenAI has gone quiet on strict chip export limits to China - Politico reports, a shift that helps Nvidia
Creative AI & Media
Developer Tools & Infrastructure
Research & Models
Business & Industry
Surprising & Under-the-Radar
Facebook Pages now pay to post more than about two links a month
Meta ties extra link posts to paid plans starting at $14.99 a month. It drew 399 points on Hacker News. Link posts had already fallen from 9.8% of what people viewed on Facebook in 2022 to about 1.3%. Mastodon: Ashley Gullen on the link limit
180 AI models now beat the original GPT-4, and 19 run on a phone
Ethan Mollick charted 30 months of AI progress. The cost of a correct answer on a graduate-level exam fell from 30 cents to four hundredths of a cent. One Useful Thing: 30 months on the exponential
Debate: Is AI killing the joy of programming?
For: An essay by Jeremy Scheff says coders lost the paid pleasure of solving tricky puzzles. Against: Simon Willison says people who love building working systems find AI "the gift that keeps on giving." Simon Willison: My obituary for programming
Debate: Does AI writing save time, or just move the work to readers?
For saving time: Writers draft much faster. Against: Dima Bolkunov says he reads AI text at least a third slower, and many readers pay that cost for each writer's saving. Dima Bolkunov: On AI writing
Signals to Track
Renting AI chips may be far too cheap
Evan Conrad runs SF Compute, a marketplace for AI computing time. He says "one of these numbers has to change." He also warns against betting markets on chip prices before real delivery markets mature. If rental prices rise, the cost of AI apps for ordinary people could rise too.
Meta's next open model is built for one gaming graphics card
Meta published a technical report on it, according to the AINews newsletter. Small open models that can run tools are improving fast. If this works, capable AI assistants could run at home with no subscription and no data leaving your computer.
Fake statistics can now spread through AI answers
Within about seven months, the made-up numbers appeared in an academic paper and investment research. The site ranked second only to Statista on tracked AI prompts, even though Google had mostly dropped it. If AI search keeps rewarding freshness over truth, readers will need to check where every AI-quoted number came from.
Top Repos Today
📜 License: MIT · 👤 By: individual developer
🎯 Time to value: 30-45 minutes
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Free, permissive license | Needs paid Claude Code plus extra tools |
| Runs locally | Default job boards are Danish |
| Safer permission settings in the latest release | Setup takes longer than most tools here |

📜 License: MIT · 👤 By: organization (Cloudflare)
🎯 Time to value: 15 minutes
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Free, permissive license, from a major security company | Needs a locked-down sandbox to run safely |
| Every finding is checked by a separate AI helper | Many helper agents means higher usage costs |
| Repeat runs build on earlier ones | Cloudflare says one run found only about half of what repeated runs found |

📜 License: MIT · 👤 By: organization (Stably AI)
🎯 Time to value: 10 minutes
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Free, permissive license | Several releases a day |
| Uses subscriptions you already pay for | Many agents multiply usage costs |
| New rewind and per-chat settings | A lot of features to learn |

📜 License: MIT · 👤 By: individual developer
🎯 Time to value: 5 minutes
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Free, two-command install | Savings figures are the maker's own benchmark |
| Works with 20 coding agents | Terse style may not suit every team |
| Keeps validation and security code by design | Cost bar is Claude Code only |

📜 License: GPL-3.0 · 👤 By: organization (Comfy Org)
🎯 Time to value: 20 minutes
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Runs on your own computer | Strict share-alike license |
| Huge library of add-ons | Some add-ons call paid cloud services |
| Quick fixes for new models | The box-and-wire screen takes learning |

📜 License: Apache-2.0 · 👤 By: organization (Graphify Labs)
🎯 Time to value: 10 minutes
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Free, permissive license | Docs and media still need an AI model to process |
| Code mapping stays fully local | Pushes a paid cloud version |
| Works with 20+ assistants | Another file set to keep in sync with your code |

📜 License: MIT · 👤 By: organization (Anomaly)
🎯 Time to value: 5 minutes
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Free, permissive license | Two version lines to choose between |
| Works with many AI providers | Install steps differ by version |
| Upgrades to version 2 only when you choose | Very fast pace of changes |

📜 License: Apache-2.0 · 👤 By: organization (Headroom Labs)
🎯 Time to value: 5 minutes
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Free, permissive license | Savings claims are the maker's own |
| Usage reporting is now opt-in | Adds another layer between you and the AI |
| Built-in savings dashboard | Pushes a paid team plan |

Top Models Today
👤 By: DeepSeek · 🎯 Task: Image-text-to-text
📐 Size: 763B
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Very permissive license | Needs data-center hardware to run |
| Built for coding and agent tasks | Benchmarks are self-reported |
| Also offered by low-cost hosts | Banned in US federal civilian agencies |

👤 By: Black Forest Labs · 🎯 Task: Image-to-image
📐 Size: 5.55B
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Small and fast | License caps revenue for commercial use |
| Box-based placement | Works best with a prompt rewriter |
| Popular in ComfyUI | Gated download |

👤 By: Fish Audio · 🎯 Task: Text-to-speech
📐 Size: 35.9B (3B active)
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Directable performances | Research license limits commercial use |
| Efficient design | Voice cloning raises consent issues |
| Free to download without approval | Large to download |

👤 By: Meta · 🎯 Task: Image-text-to-text
📐 Size: 822B (42B active)
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Strong US open-weight model | Needs very large hardware |
| Handles many media types | Custom license with conditions |
| Hosted preview available on Groq | Manual approval to download |

👤 By: Google · 🎯 Task: Feature extraction (embeddings)
📐 Size: 0.74B
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Permissive license | Text gains over version 1 are modest |
| One index for every media type | Google's own benchmark numbers |
| Runs on-device | Tool support still thin |

👤 By: OpenMOSS · 🎯 Task: Text-to-image
📐 Size: 5.08B
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Commercial use allowed | Slow, 50 steps per image |
| Layout control for text | Early ComfyUI template crashes needed a fix |
| Fits on one graphics card | No independent benchmark scores |

👤 By: Lightricks · 🎯 Task: Image-to-video
📐 Size: about 22B (per its file names)
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Video and sound in one pass | Companies over $10M annual revenue need a paid license |
| Free commercial use for smaller companies | Download requires agreeing to marketing terms |
| Low-memory options available | Needs a recent NVIDIA setup |

👤 By: Liquid AI · 🎯 Task: Text generation
📐 Size: 24B (about 2.5B active)
| ✓ Pros | ✗ Cons |
|---|---|
| Fast on ordinary hardware | License has a $10M annual revenue threshold |
| Ready-made versions for laptops and phones | Benchmarks are the maker's own |
| 131,000-token memory, 16 languages | Text only, no images |

AI Launches Today
💰 Pricing: free to try, pay as you go · 🏷 Category: Developer tools

💰 Pricing: free options; Exa Lite $4 and Exa Auto $7 per 1,000 searches · 🏷 Category: Search for AI agents

💰 Pricing: free option listed; Autopilot plan pricing not stated · 🏷 Category: Documentation

💰 Pricing: free option; coding plans from $10/month · 🏷 Category: Developer tools

Snapshot
| Provider | Model | Input $/1M | Output $/1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Claude Fable 5.1 | $10.00 | $50.00 | 1M tokens |
| Anthropic | Claude Opus 5.5 | $4.00 | $20.00 | 1M tokens |
| Anthropic | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2.00 | $10.00 | 1M tokens |
| Anthropic | Claude Haiku 5.5 | $0.10 (up to 100K-token prompts; $0.50 above) | $0.50 ($2.50 above 100K) | 1M tokens |
| OpenAI | GPT-6 Astra | $10.00 (up to 272K-token prompts; $20.00 above) | $50.00 ($75.00 above 272K) | 1.05M tokens |
| OpenAI | GPT-6.1 Sol | $2.00 (up to 272K; $4.00 above) | $10.00 ($15.00 above 272K) | 1.05M tokens |
| OpenAI | GPT-6 Luna | $0.10 (up to 272K; $0.20 above) | $0.50 ($0.75 above 272K) | 1.05M tokens |
| Gemini 4 Argon | $2.00 to Nov 30; $4.00 from Dec 1 | $10.00 to Nov 30; $20.00 from Dec 1 | 1M tokens | |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | $0.75 (to Dec 31; $1.50 from Jan 1) | $3.75 (to Dec 31; $7.50 from Jan 1) | not listed | |
| Groq | GPT-OSS 120B | $0.15 | $0.60 | 131K tokens |
| Groq | Qwen3.8-27B (preview) | $0.80 | $4.00 | 131K tokens |
| Groq | Muse Spark Open (preview) | Contact sales | Contact sales | 131K tokens |
What this means: Gemini 4 Argon's introductory price has 41 days left before it doubles. With flagship prices frozen, the action has moved to cutting how many tokens you use: tools like Ponytail and Headroom (see GitHub above) target the same bill.
One Skill Takes Over: Clashing Agent Skills and a One-File Fix
Key finding: A skill's rules were followed 93-99% of the time when loaded alone, but only 61-62% of the time when a second skill for the same job was loaded next to it.
Why practitioners should care: If you install skills or rules files from several sources, some of your rules are probably being ignored without warning. The paper's fix is simple: merge overlapping skills into one file with a single correct worked example, which brought rule-following back to 96-99% of what was achievable on all seven models.












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